An entire life cycle sounds like a lot to work on. But isn’t that too ambitious and challenging for us? And how is “life” related to IT? As one of the students of Hochschule Harz University of Applied Sciences in Wernigerode, Germany, I sit staring at “our” Business Process Life Cycle ...
GBI goes substainable
Students studying tourism management at the university of applied science Harz participate in the project Online Process Management as well. They are responsible for the Change Management and try to prepare the staff of GBI for a change process. The Change process was caused by the idea of the company GBI to become more sustainable.
What does Change Management actually mean?
Change Management has many approaches for identifying where to improve performance and for managing solution designs for processes, systems, tools, job roles or organization structures. Change management is the approach for supporting individuals through the changes required in how they do their jobs.
http://www.change-management.com/tutorial-definition-2010.htm
Regarding to the GBI the change process concentrates mainly on different processes. These processes are Check Purchase Requisition (EPC, BPMN), Check Goods Receipt (EPC, BPMN), Check Incoming Invoice (EPC, BPMN) and are supposed to be of a better quality, faster and of a better usability.
We took a bearing on the Model of Kurt Lewin. As a Change Manager we have several tasks for instance to lead, support the transition from a recent structure to a new structure.
http://ic-pod.typepad.com/design_at_the_edge/images/2007/06/27/change_modellewin.jpg
According to the Levin’s Change Model there are 3 stages: the Unfreezing, Changing/ Moving and Refreezing. Now we would like to give an overview of the different stages referring to the GBI.
Unfreezing:
The first step to do is to “unfreeze” the old structure and try to prepare, analyze and plan the whole process. It is important not to underestimate the expenditure of time for that. Our task was to attract attention and therefore to make it easier to motivate our employees.
Our staff should be more aware of sustainable processes that mean less paper use, practice recycling in everyday- work life etc.
Changing/ Moving:
At this stage we are going to be more active. It is time to realize our plans and implement the new processes into the system. Furthermore it is about to improve the Workflow (refer to Blog 3) and that is the main task of our application managers (refer to Blog 2).
Refreezing:
Last but not least our third stage, which is very important as well. Here we try to stabilize the new structure. Moreover we want the new structure to establish and integrate into the whole system.
Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategy performance management tool (refer to Blog 1) - a semi-standard structured report, supported by design methods and automation tools , like SAP ERP or ARIS Business Designer, that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions.
Please click on Tina's and Cristin's BSC.
Here we can see our BSC for the purchasing department. Obviously it is divided into 3 parts/ strands with the companies’ aims. On the left the sustainable one, in the middle our economic one and on the right side the social strand. All in all our highest objective is to improve our main processes, which we have already mentioned above. To accomplish this mission we have certain key figures, which show us the accomplishment.
These key figures can be exported and imported by an Excel table (through SAP ERP) and we can change them externalmanualy for demopurpose.
In this colorful image of our BSC we can see if we fulfilled or not fulfilled our aims.
Have the different colors certain meanings?
Red is usually associated with danger, so it is a symbol of that we have to do something to meet requirements and we do not have the appropriate key figure yet.
On the other hand Green means that we have met our expectations and we should try to maintain this strategy. In general it starts from bottom-up to get green and we can see how it affects the different strands. In addition here we can recognize a well-developed cause and effect concept. It is also called a leading indicator, which shows the impact on the aims of the company.
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