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BPM Fuels Power Companies

Efforts to continuously improve operational efficiencies consistently across an organization isn’t limited by industry. Power companies responsible for generating large amounts of electricity need an effective means with which to organize, manage, and distribute company-wide policies, processes and procedures. Like with any business, a Power Company’s business evolves rapidly, and the ability to design and deploy business processes is key to obtaining important efficiencies in the business and achieving necessary knowledge transfer. It’s so imperative that documentation be easily accessible and understood, as employees are trained on and expected to adhere to these policies, processes and procedures in the performance of their day-to-day work and periodic plant activities. Additionally, process documentation in this day and age, needs to be available to a large amount of employees on their mobile devices or a web browser.

Often times, documentation is developed in word processing program and diagramming tool formats and deployed to the intranet through a web viewing program. This documentation forum is found to be very limited in its abilities, hard to locate, and not easily understood by employees. As a result, processes are often not followed, resulting in extended outages, unplanned maintenance, and longer processing times. A Business Process Management (BPM) solution is needed to not only improve the user’s experience of the created materials, but to allow them to streamline content development and management, and to improve their analytic capabilities regarding its processes. Lastly, the ability to effectively communicate process changes to various stakeholders, process owners, or the user community is needed.

Example Scenario:

Power Company has 1,500 process maps created in a diagramming tool that need to be migrated, and there are 2,000 policy and procedures documents that need to be referenced. Those documents typically are stored primarily on a web viewing platform with related documents potentially stored on legacy systems. By importing all those documents into the BPM solution repository, they now had the ability to link all their documents into their referencing processes. With all documentation imported into a comprehensive solution, the Power Company is also now able to ensure that proper ownership and governance is provided for each document. As processes or other documentation is updated, or new processes and documentation are created, they have the ability to utilize the cycle management capabilities within a BPM solution to ensure appropriate approvals are obtained and tracked, and that all impacted personnel are notified.  If procedural documentation could not be migrated from legacy systems, the BPM solution allows them to link to that documentation as well for reference, providing continued visibility into the documentation necessary to support their processes.

The next part of the project was to define a set of web-based landing pages to assist the user in absorbing the appropriate processes and procedures. Using the BPM solution, the Power Company’s process consumers now had an easy way to navigate the web-portal. This portal was accessible via any system or mobile device so documentation along with its relevant property data and linked procedures and policies could be accessed when and where it was needed most. Taking it one step further, The Power Company also enabled a role based viewing capability. This allowed all individuals to view or navigate based on documentation for which they were identified in the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) path. As a result, all individuals were able to more efficiently locate any process or document where their role was identified.

Lastly, the Sr. Management and Executives of the Power Company needed real time statistics of how their processes were performing against defined performance indicators. While the actual Goals, Measures, and Performance Indicators were created in the BPM solution, and related to the processes that impacted them, the day-to-day actuals were being captured in a variety of disparate systems throughout the organization. They needed a single location for Process Owners, Managers, and Executives to view the current status, and the ability to notify them if those indicators started trending toward, or were outside of defined acceptable ranges.

Using the BPM solution, with the Role Based view, the data from those various systems could be clearly viewed from a single source.

Result:

By implementing a BPM solution, Power Companies are able to ensure that any and all process, procedures, and policy documentation are accessible at each level of the organization. As a result, understanding and adoption of new and modified documentation is expedited and process approval times are greatly reduced. With the process documentation now easily accessible, the duration of system related incidents are also greatly reduced resulting in large cost savings.

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