Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Whitepaper
Building a Digital Process
Center of Excellence
Discover the power of an efficient process factory
to accelerate your digital transformation journey.
Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Executive summary

Every enterprise is built on processes. The digitization and automation of

those processes is a fundamental element of digital transformation. As a
result, today’s business and technology leaders are tasked with designing
and executing powerful process change – essential in making operating
models more efficient and responsive to compete in the digital economy.

This paper demonstrates how businesses can accelerate the

transformation journey by building a Center of Excellence (COE) – what
Gartner refers to as a 'Business Process Competency Center’ (BPCC). This
structured business unit is responsible for delivering enterprise-wide
process digitalization and ongoing optimization.

Why is all this important? In a survey of enterprise architects and IT

decision makers Forrester found that 67% of those reporting that process
automation significantly exceeded their goals had a COE. This paper
explains the key attributes of a COE and will guide you through the four
essential steps in building yours. All this is discussed through the
experience of an organization already enjoying the rewards.

What you’ll find inside

What exactly is a COE?

What kind of organization should invest in a COE?
Four steps for building a Center of Excellence
Prepare the way for process success
Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Create the perfect COE team

Build your process factory
Work with the right tools
What can you do next?
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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Introduction
What exactly is a COE?

A COE refers to a team, shared facility or entity that provides leadership,

governance, research and support for a specific area – in this case, the ability
to deliver process automation and digital transformation.

Why create a digital process COE?

Gain new efficiencies

Create a more consistent customer experience

Implement process consistency across the organization

Provide better business insights by offering guidance on process analysis,

continuous improvement methodologies and change management

What does a COE do?

Determines the vision, goals and strategy for the overall process initiative

Identifies KPIs and measures success

Promotes awareness, education and advocacy

Ensures best practice is followed to maximize results

Creates an inventory of processes that will be valuable to the enterprise

Manages funding, resource allocation and enablement

Expands the project footprint beyond its initial introduction to the business

Key responsibilities

Strategy
Defining business goals
Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

and setting the course

for process initiatives
across the entire
business enterprise

Delivery
Realizing the vision
defined by the COE by
implementing a steady
stream of successful
Infrastructure
Design the scalable
platform that will
support user adoption
of initial applications
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projects and later expansion

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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Important best practices

Consolidate individual Assign key areas of

process projects into responsibility to
a complete program multiple units

Create a model Embed a

for the rapid company-wide,
throughput of shared
processes to understanding
producion of automation

COE
Support Require
continuous investment and
improvement commitment

A one-off Something created

exercise by a single
department

What kind of organization should invest in a COE?

Organizations that will gain the most benefit from building a Center of Excellence are typically
functioning at a high level of process maturity, with complex operations encompassing many
operational units. Tatweer Petroleum is just one of the many businesses enjoying the benefits
of digital transformation through a digital process COE.

The Story of Tatweer Petroleum’s Process Success

Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

This Bizagi customer is a global business (120+ companies with a shared service centre) operating
over multiple languages and time zones. Processes at Tatweer had built up over time, some of
which had become inefficient and/or manual. Tatweer embarked on a company-wide business
transformation aimed at removing ambiguity, manual tasks and bottlenecks from core processes to
increase operational efficiency, lower costs and reduce turnaround times.

Tatweer created a small Center of Excellence, staffed by enthusiastic graduates. To ensure clarity of
purpose, the group were set performance goals that added up to the delivery of 50 processes in one
year (2015), or ’50 in 15’. This team followed a smart and thorough approach to process selection
and rapid delivery – strategically building support across the organization and creating a culture of
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process improvement and ownership. The system is now used by 700+ people at Tatweer and the
team hit their ambitious goal of delivering 50 processes in the first year.

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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Four Steps for Building a Center of Excellence

These are the practical steps that Tatweer Petroleum followed in building a
Center of Excellence. The same four steps could help your organization to
accelerate the process automation in your digital transformation journey.

Step 1: Prepare the way for process success

Create a dedicated COE team

With a group of people who are responsible As part of this team it is vital that the process
and accountable for continuous process automation leader is empowered by confidence
improvement you will have made the best in the commitment of senior stakeholders and
possible start on the road to ROI. decision makers.

Build a foundation of knowledge

Staff are often new to process automation, and
this was the case for Tatweer Petroleum. The
key is to help them gain the knowledge they
need for success and to keep building on it.
Tatweer deployed an intensive two-week
training process in order to quickly skill up the
team for the project ahead and maintained
that knowledge through exposure to BPM best
practices from across industry. Along with a
deep understanding of process management
it is essential that your team either has or
can gain a broad understanding of your
existing systems.

Motivate and incentivize the team

Tatweer brought in a five strong team of
University of Bahrain graduates to take on the
project. The group had plenty of enthusiasm,
but the masterstroke was in matching their
individual KPIs with the successful delivery of
processes. As a group they were given a joint
goal of delivering 50 processes during 2015 – or
“50 in 15”. It worked exactly as Tatweer hoped.
The team reached their goal, demonstrating
the strategy to have been a clear success
internally, thereby securing further investment
in the program.
Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

The platform has become the

lifeblood of our daily operations
and has transformed the business
into a process-oriented organization
focused on continuous improvement.
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Maqsood Qazi, Head of IT, Tatweer Petroleum

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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Step 2: Create the perfect COE team

Success starts with the right people

A COE should consist of a dedicated group working closely together to collaborate and share best
practices. A strong team will be multi-skilled (comprising process and technology employees),
dedicated (could be a mix of full-time or part-time employees) and motivated (KPIs of individual
success tied to the delivery of process projects).

A Center of Excellence may include

the following elements and business roles:

h ip
tions Centr
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Busi Manag

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R eac
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CO

pr goi r a e

Ha olu ting

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th
Ac

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Unit ral
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Main rity of

Supp
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integ tion
the s
provid al

COE
n

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d
Single

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Inter

share

ort te
servic

olu

he

am

Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Single Central Unit

An internal provider of shared services for all companies / subsidiaries. Covering
key organizational functions such as IT, HR, finance, estate management,
facilities and purchasing.

COE Project Manager

Acts as the pilot for all ongoing projects, assigning work packages to the units
within the structure. For best results, select (or hire) a person with a broad
understanding of different technologies.

· Pilots the project, ensuring it is delivered on time, on budget

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· Evaluates whether the proposed process solution is fit for purpose

· Leads business acceptance tests and collating user feedback

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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Business Relationship Manager

A representative from each business unit, whose job is to gather demands for
new projects. This person is a generalist, with a wide (but not deep) knowledge of
all functional processes. They also have a working knowledge of all the systems
used within the unit (e.g. BPMS, ERP).

Central Design Team

A group responsible for the design and delivery of new solutions and projects,
composed of the following sub-units:

Solutions: The guardians of the corporate standards, the Solutions team are
process experts. Grouped vertically by process area or business function e.g.
customer services, HR, finance, etc.

· Aligning new process requests with the overall business strategy

· Exploring reuse of existing assets (data model, forms, UI, etc.)
· Selecting the technology to support the process request
· Collaborating with the Construction team on necessary technical inputs.

Construction: The guardians of the tech standards, the Construction team turns
the spec into a real, working application. It is grouped horizontally, per technology
platform.

· Aligning new process requests with corporate technology strategy

· Reusing as many existing assets as possible
· Creating and validating cost estimates
· Providing detailed specs for new processes
· Building the process, demo and providing bug fixes for QA

Quality Assurance (QA)

This team is technology agnostic, handling testing centrally.

· Testing solutions prior to production

· Validating the solution against the design spec
· Documenting the solution from a technical viewpoint (design & support
manuals) as well as the business perspective (user guides)
· Verifying the solution against change management checklists

Support team
Separate from QA and all other areas within the structure, the Support team is
organized by technology platform e.g. iPad, ERP. Their job is to maintain the
integrity of the solution by handling any issues. Tatweer’s Support unit also
provides early input at the design stage, which reduces reworks in the later stages.
Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence
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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Step 3: Build your process factory

Choose the right first process

As part of gaining buy-in for process
transformation, Tatweer Petroleum
strategically chose their first process to be a
simple one that touched as many users as
possible. Through this they were able to
introduce the platform to a large number of
users and the organization quickly became
comfortable with how it worked. This
approach provided the ideal launch pad for
the COE team to begin the chase for their
target of 50 processes in the first year.

Establish a robust workflow

As businesses look to transform their
operations digitally, one of the most
important questions is how to manage that
change effectively and without impacting
day-to-day operations. It requires a strict
workflow for requests, testing and approval.
By following a well-defined process your
organization can minimize extra costs,
while maintaining efficiency and enabling
business agility.
The right agile development workflow
ensures that consensus can be found and
processes delivered quickly. For Tatweer
Petroleum this was given a strong focus with
their COE team absolutely committed to a
weekly release schedule that drove them to
success throughout 2015.

Follow best practices for agile development

Develop larger changes in a sandbox

1 Only move to the Dev environment once you are fully happy that the concept
meets the spec.

Initiate the majority of changes in the Dev environment

22 Capture change early and consistently to avoid rework later.

Create a ‘firefighting’ environment

3 This should be used occasionally, allowing critical production issues to skip the
regular Dev-Test-Preproduction cycle.

Collect end user feedback at 80% complete

4 Our customer found this the optimum time to move the solution from the Dev to
Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Demo environment.

Implement a ‘train the trainer’ approach

5 Sharing knowledge while the solution is within the Dev/Demo/Dev cycle will build
familiarity fast.

Create standardized testing procedures

6 Testing often gets the least attention, especially from time-pressed business
users. Working to predefined parameters will help smooth the way.
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Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Step 4: Work with the right tools

Supp
ort te
m a
What to look for in a process automation platform
If you are committed to long-term continuous improvement, working with the right partner is key.
This is true not only because the technology needs to work for you, but also because the right
solution provider will share a wealth of experience from years of successful enterprise digital
process automation initiatives.

As discussed throughout this paper, ultimate digital process success is achieved through
commitment. It is vital that your commitment returns the rewards that you are looking for. That’s
why the important steps that we have recommended here stem from our maniacal focus on ROI.

Adopt the right methodology

With the foundations of your COE in place, the right methodology will help you to reduce risk
and enable your new team to deliver results quickly, igniting your digital transformation journey.
For example, Bizagi’s Spark methodology is built around a three-step framework:

1. Energize
Kick off the program with an important and visible early success (within 7 weeks). It demonstrates
the value of change, helping you to gain buy-in across the business.

2. Empower
Once the program is up and running it really pays to follow a robust workflow, adhere to best
practice and leverage proven agile methodologies in order to maintain your momentum.

3. Expand
Create a culture of continuous process improvement, this way the COE becomes more valuable to
the organization and the full potential of all of your efforts can be maximized well into the future.

Learn more in our ’Introduction to Bizagi Spark’

Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence

Speak to a Bizagi expert today about what these

four steps would look like for your organization.
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www.bizagi.com/contact-us

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For more information, please visit the Bizagi
corporate website at www.bizagi.com
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E: marketing@bizagi.com

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