T-Mobile had been using Software AG's Aris to align its business processes for over a decade, but when news broke of a merger with Orange, the company had to review whether the platform was still the best fit for the job.
EE's head of process brilliance, Lacey Barnfather, had been working at T-Mobile before the merger. She told Computing the selection process involved five different vendors, but would not be drawn on the names of the vendors.
"Orange had been using Aris as well as other software for process mapping so we went into a review about two years ago. We came back with Aris as the right product going forward," she said.
"We spoke to different vendors without going into a tender process, but none of the other providers was as good, and there wasn't a business case to do it. We already had Software AG and Aris through our links with Deutsche Telekom, so it is actually procured from that side - so it is nice that all the upgrades come through our parent company, so it made sense for us from a cost perspective," she added.
"Infrastructure mergers are very difficult; we hoped getting cross-site access would be very easy but actually we had about 500 systems that we needed to integrate between the two organisations and Aris was one of those. It took about 18 months because of the sheer volume of systems to get the cross-site access, and in the meantime we had to use VPN access - so Orange guys had to log into the T-Mobile log-in to be able to go through the VPN to use the T-Mobile Aris system," she added.
This was not the only challenge that EE had to consider, according to Barnfather.
"I led the process team for the merger, so when it happened there were 20 to 30 people from each organisation that went to the solicitors and had to work out what the new enterprise model would look like for EE and how everything would work. Process was right at the forefront of that, in terms of which departments are undertaking activities and where roles and responsibilities lie," she said.
This covered areas of working between departments to avoid duplication and Barnfather suggested that in hindsight, the teams should have focused more on optimising existing processes that were good rather than just fixing issues with processes overall.
The idea of ‘process management' was also an obstacle to begin with.
"Orange weren't particularly process minded. There has been some poor management and implementation [decisions] in the past [at both T-Mobile and Orange] and people had felt that the word ‘process' was a dirty word. So we didn't use the word because it didn't fit into the culture of the organisation at the time. But a couple of months into the project, we said let's embrace what it is - if you're delivering what the end user needs and you've solved the business problems, nobody can quibble," she said.
The Aris suite, Barnfather explained, is used to tie its process work and customer experience together. It is also used in EE's knowledge base.
"This is the information our frontline staff use in terms of training materials and work instructions that are linked with the call centre agent. So with the information they have in front of them, they can actually scroll back up into the processes that we have within the system to see exactly what they should follow, and as we get more self-served we will ensure that the correct information is there for the customer [to access themselves]," she explained.
What EE's head of process brilliance said completed a "full circle" view was the use of Aris MashZones - which enable users to create apps to evaluate and visualise a range of data.
"This enables us to look at process performance in real-time customer experience. So we're looking at transactional times, MPS scores, customer satisfaction scores and tying that all back into the process. It means we can start to get real customer ownership that informs actions because we've got the data and information about what the processes are actually doing. Previously, we looked at operational performance but less so based on the process itself," she said.
EE's management team can use Mashzones on iPads as well but EE has yet to decide if the data that is available is real-time or delayed by a week or so.
"It means the senior management teams can inform action from that data quite quickly and tie it back to where it has gone wrong in the process - or whether a certain process is working well," Barnfather stated.
The implementation was carried out with the help of Software AG and systems integrator T-Systems, and has already yielded benefits, claimed EE.
"The feedback from the people that we've trained up on our one day courses has been really positive in terms of usability. People had previously found it cumbersome and difficult to use by they are finding it far easier," she said.
Aris also links into SAP processes, which was a big benefit, said Barnfather.
"So we're able to pull up organisational objects which were very useful in terms of merger activities, understanding various business projects, tying it back into the systems that we're using, and linking it back to enterprise architecture," she said.
"One of the key elements was being able to link it back to the enterprise architecture and the library of systems we had so we could quickly see which systems were affecting our business processes and if we're rationalising systems - that's a paramount piece in terms of impact analysis," she added.
Barnfather concluded by stating that EE gives ongoing feedback to Software AG, and that the vendor has taken into account many of EE's proposed changes.
