Silo Busting

Let’s face it: Every major transformation initiative (digitalization, customer experience, etc.) and every core value chain (e.g. order-to-cash) requires cross-functional collaboration. Unfortunately, most organizations have evolved such that management practices and structures undermine synergy between departments. Breaking through functional silos is the best way to assure your investment in new strategies and/or new technologies yields long-term competitive advantage.

Look to Orion to help you:

• Identify, document and align core business processes
• Establish cross-functional process governance, including the introduction of Process Owners and Process Managers
• Realign resources to maximize efficiency and customer impact
• Establish a customer-focused, collaborative work culture

We don’t have a silver bullet. Orion’s experts will work with your leaders to craft the right combination of governance, metrics and strategic focus to meet the unique needs of your organization. Services include:

Enterprise Process Blueprint

Your organization is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands, of processes. Many are interdependent when it comes to delivering value for your stakeholders. An enterprise process blueprint identifies an organization’s core process flows and demonstrates how the different types of processes (value-creating, support, asset-creating, management) fit together. It is the first step in establishing organization-wide business process governance. Orion will work with your executives and operational leaders to develop a model that is unique to your enterprise.

Click here for more information on Orion’s approach to enterprise process design.

Organization Design and Core Process Governance

There is no one-size-fits-all structure for process-focused organizations. Every organization has unique functional strengths and process requirements that are essential to customer satisfaction. Finding the right balance of authority, accountability, structure and performance metrics is as much art as science. Orion has helped public-and private-sector organizations develop process-based organization designs since the late 1990s.

BPM Organizational Assessment

Sustainable operational excellence requires much more than innovative workflows and cutting-edge information technology. Long-term business success also depends upon effective strategy, leadership, skills, performance metrics and corporate culture. Orion’s unique approach to assessing BPM readiness is multifaceted and based on more than two decades of experience facilitating BPM transformations.

Click here for more information on Orion’s BPM assessment methodology.

Business Process Redesign

Whether you call it reengineering, transformation or creative destruction, optimizing enterprise-wide performance requires the rethinking and redesign of the value-creating processes that cross your organizational silos. Automation efforts that introduce change on a function-by-function basis sub-optimize efficiency and value creation. Orion has long been recognized as a leader in process documentation, assessment, streamlining and innovation. More than just technical experts, our consultants utilize a facilitative approach that not only delivers innovative process designs but also yields internal business process expertise. Indeed, the in-house experts we train enable BPM self-sufficiency and often become the future leaders of your organization. Partnering with Orion can positively impact your organization for decades.

Continuous Improvement Culture

Culture eats strategy, methodology, and technology for breakfast. In order for your organization to deliver outstanding experiences to customers and other stakeholders, team members throughout your organization must be engaged, motivated and have a clear sense of how their job impacts business outcomes. Orion will work with your leaders and Human Resources department to rethink the entire employee lifecycle and management practices that impact attitudes and behaviors.

Knowledge Retention/Management

Every major process requires “process wisdom”: Nuances, exceptions and subtleties that enable experienced team members to avoid mistakes and/or deliver service that is above and beyond customer expectations. This wisdom is generally learned on the job and rarely passed on from generation to generation. Orion can help you make business process wisdom a sustainable asset that assures higher levels of performance, less disruption from turnover, and a culture of knowledge-sharing.

Click here for more information on Orion’s approach to knowledge retention and management.

Enterprise Process Management

Creating and Sustaining Cross-Functional Excellence

Business Process Management Boot Camp

Five-day critical skills program that supports ABPMP certifications

Essentials of Business Process Management (Webinar)

Leveraging Operational Excellence for Strategic Advantage

Managing Organizational Change

How to Gain Organization-Wide Ownership for New Solutions

These skills can also be delivered as customized training to a group of your process management leaders and process improvement experts. For more information, email Orion.

Orion is a Registered Training Provider with the Association of Business Process Professionals. Our seminars provide professional development credit necessary to retain status as a Certified Business Process Professional (CBPP).

In order to help your organization chart a course to sustainable excellence, Orion’s BPM Organizational Assessment will evaluate current culture and operations from five interrelated perspectives across the “Four Waves” of your process management journey. The rich results of this holistic assessment can be used to multiply the benefits of Lean, Six Sigma, etc. and create a roadmap to greater business process maturity, sustainable operational excellence and more effective development and execution of corporate strategy.

The heat map provides a visual representation of your organization’s strengths and weakness.  There is no “perfect score.” The goals is to improve BPM structures, methods and culture within the unique context of organizational strategy.

Click here to learn more about the assessment elements and results.

An abbreviated BPM Self-Assessment is also available online.

• • Four Waves of Process Management by Paul King
  • Leveraging Process for Strategic Advantage by Ralph Smith
  • Process Ownership by Andrew Spanyi
  • Putting Process at the Centre of Business Management by Roger Tregear
  • You Only Thought You Were The Customer by Paul King
  • Silo Busting: How to Execute on the Promise of Customer Focus by Ranjay Gulati (HBR)
  • Digital Innovation Benchmarking Report by OCI
  • Turning the Virtuous Circles by Roger Tregear

Key to Performance Excellence

Holistic Solutions = Sustainable Excellence

Cross-Functional Costing

The Job of Management

Michigan Office of Retirement Services (ORS)

At the turn-of-the-century, this state agency was saddled with 1970s information technology that was making effective customer (member) service nearly impossible. Rather than simply buy a new IT solution, ORS’ leadership launched a broad transformation that revamped the strategic plan, enterprise process blueprint, organizational structures, and all end-to-end business processes. Their holistic investment paid dramatic dividends. Prior to implementing new technology, ORS was able to increase capacity by 30%. Organizational improvement continued to improve steadily. ORS went from poor performer to best-in-class performer in terms of administrative cost member, members served per FTE and the cost of paying pensions (it’s core purpose). For more than 17 years, ORS’ success has been attributed to its process governance approach.

Click here to learn more about this amazing success story.

Ameritech

In the 1990s, this Baby Bell was struggling with high levels of customer dissatisfaction and inconsistent levels of efficiency. The organization had 35,000 employees and several functional silos that fragmented both service delivery and cost accounting. Orion designed a process governance structure that managed five major core process flows. Service levels, cost metrics and profitability improved dramatically.

Air Products and Chemicals

This industrial corporation was touted by Harvard Business Review and reengineering guru Michael Hammer as one of the great process-oriented management success stories of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Orion provided training and coaching to the internal resources at Air Products who developed their successful model and later spread process management methodologies to facilities worldwide.

Aventis Pasteur

Orion consulted with the senior management team regarding a proposed process-oriented organization structure and the cultural barriers to the adoption of that structure. Removing the identified barriers enabled a successful implementation.

Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (Ohio PERS)

Like the Michigan ORS, Ohio PERS needed to redesign its end-to-end business processes ahead of a major technology upgrade. Unlike ORS, Ohio PERS was starting from a position of strong performance. Their redesign delivered similar results (e.g. 40% increase in capacity) but required a less dramatic shift in organization design. Ohio PERS created the role of Process Officer and a team that evaluates all cross-functional process or technology improvement opportunities.[/learn_more]