Leading Medical Technology Firm: Business Process Management-Lifecycle

Business process management helped this medical technology firm to make the difficult switch from product selling to solution selling.

Accenture Business Process Management-Lifecycle helped this medical technology firm lay the foundation for future growth by moving from selling products to solutions, optimizing its business processes and so preparing the ground for a planned SAP implementation.

The client is a leading provider of medical image and information products and technologies used to acquire, process, present, manage and store diagnostic images.

The shift from selling products to selling solutions is a difficult one, but is often pivotal to a company’s growth strategy. However, making this important shift requires major and often challenging changes to the ways in which a company operates.

The company’s sales and customer engagement process comprised many interrelated sub-processes, all of which would need to evolve to support the shift to solution selling. Furthermore, the company was planning a large SAP implementation, and wanted to ensure that it first had optimized business processes that this new system would support.

As such, the company sought an experienced Business Process Management-Lifecycle (BPM-L) provider with a thorough understanding of SAP technology to help it bring its most critical processes into alignment with its new customer engagement model and planned SAP implementation. Ultimately, the company chose Accenture for this critical role based on the substantial improvements Accenture had been able to deliver in other parts of the business, as well as Accenture’s BPM-L experience and solutions, and our market-leading SAP capabilities.

Accenture was indeed well equipped to help the company rapidly adapt its sales-related processes to the solutions model, prepare for a more successful SAP implementation, and lay the groundwork for a durable BPM-L capability that the company could nurture and grow on its own for years to come. In addition, Accenture not only could help the company put optimized business processes in place, but also could provide the tools and training it would need for long-term success.

The first step was to help the company bring its key business processes into alignment with its new focus on solution selling. Accenture used a highly structured approach to achieve this prioritization. The Accenture team also engaged with process owners and subject matter experts to identify the business processes that supported that operating model, spanning such areas as R&D, sales, operations, and customer service—in short, the functional areas that would support the company’s new customer engagement model.

Accenture’s High Performance Business Process (HPBP) cross-industry process model library was critical to this aspect of the project. This library includes more than 20,000 models covering 71 industry segments, providing a wealth of performance improvement references. This was especially valuable given the company’s unique goals and challenges.

One way Accenture helped the company achieve such a “process of process management” was by working with it to create a business process repository using IDS Scheer’s ARIS platform. This repository allows the company to store and manage access to their improved business processes.

Accenture’s deployment of ARIS also would play a key role in the company’s planned SAP implementation. ARIS bridges the gap between business and IT, ensuring that the business remains involved in the full lifecycle of an SAP rollout, which ultimately results in a higher-quality solution.

For the company’s new business process repository to deliver full value, however, it would need to be the focus of ongoing, long-term management and attention. Thus, Accenture helped the company create an internal BPM-L Center of Excellence (CoE) with clear responsibility for maintaining the repository. Together, Accenture and the company identified and trained dedicated staff for this important role, and put into place detailed training and coaching plans to position the CoE for sustainable success.

While this project is still under way, Accenture’s approach to BPM-L already has had a major and lasting impact. The Accenture team helped the company identify and prioritize more than 60 specific, concrete process improvement opportunities, many of which the company is currently implementing.

With their basis in leading practices from across industries and functions, these process revisions have the potential to improve the company’s performance while they pave the way to adopting the solutions model. By greatly reducing the time involved in its quote-to-order process, the company will increase the levels of customer satisfaction. In addition, the shorter time taken in reimbursing employees’ expenses has helped decrease the unnecessary costs involved in the system of express mail and employee advances. This project has also laid the groundwork for a smoother and more successful SAP implementation, which will help maximize the company’s return on its technology investment.

Perhaps most importantly, the company has gained the methodologies, frameworks and skills it needs to put BPM-L at the heart of its operations and decision making for years to come. Identifying core business processes, defining clear business objectives for them, designing process improvements, establishing stakeholder buy-in and developing a road map will further contribute to the success of the company. Such a focus on process excellence can help the company boost its efficiency, agility and responsiveness to change, thus making significant headway on its journey toward high performance.