Coors Brewing Company started their BPM initiative with a top-down approach that supported the company’s strategic goals and vision. The goal is to institutionalize process excellence using a common BPM language and process models for the entire organization.
Debra Boykin is a Sr. Business Architect at Coors Brewing Company. She has over 25 years of experience specializing in the area of business architecture development. Boykin is involved with defining and coordinating the activities necessary to implement a full BPM implementation at Coors.
Coors began a BPM initiative in order to develop enterprise-wide integration while eliminating process overlaps and ineffectiveness within the organization. Management also wanted to redesign the roles, responsibilities and job descriptions of personnel and be able to describe process information in explicit terms using a common organizational vocabulary. Other incentives were to create reusable assets for impact analysis and decision making, increase ROI for IT implementations, take care of Sarbanes-Oxley, and facilitate a successful change management approach.
Coors chose IDS Scheer’s ARIS software for modeling and managing its business processes. It describes process information about the organization in terms of:
• “What” it does – (activity)
• “When” it is done– (timeframe)
• “Where” it is done – (location)
• “Who” does it – (person)
• “Which” information is generated or needed
• “How” depicts the process flow
Coors implemented business-modeling standards to promote a single, consistent, reusable process format using a common business-modeling language, BusinessGenetics xBML. Coors also created a business-modeling standards council to define and promote consistent business-modeling practices throughout Coors. A business process-modeling handbook was created to serve as a quick reference guide for the development of new models. Boykin related that there was resistance to these changes. She said it is most important to implement a top-down approach, with everyone speaking the same language using the same model.
Coors cataloged and integrated its business process models by developing a model that incorporates industry standards and best practices. All Coors process models can be lined through the enterprise model and stored in a single enterprise database. Analytics can be run on the data or by project and are published on the intranet for company-wide access. This has made it much easier for top management and process owners to see the processes within the organization.
Boykin related that she did not have a lot of support when she began this work. After the model was created, it was shopped to senior executives who bought into it because they could understand the big picture and see where everything fit.
Now Coors is enhancing the process performance capabilities by recording process patterns in the form of graphical process models. From these, the business processes can be analyzed, measured and evaluated for good or bad performance, PPM measures and analysis of business processes in terms of Business Activity Monitoring. (BAM)
When the processes became transparent, discoveries were made. It was thought that work orders were being closed in a timely way but after implementation Coors found that some work orders were taking up to sixteen days to close which was unacceptable. Process visibility has increased substantially for managers.
Coors’ vision is to become a process-centric organization where processes are central to the overall management of the company. Management is organized to assure that business processes run efficiently and consistently deliver value to customers. Processes are aligned with the corporate strategies and business objectives while the metrics are created to monitor performance. All of this will be accessible worldwide through the Internet with Six Sigma and other quality control programs being integrated to improve the efficiency and consistency of processes.
Boykin said that education in process modeling and language is important and ongoing at Coors as the new way of process thinking is incorporated within the organization. There have been many small problems which are addressed and solved as they arise.
