SIngapore and PEX Asia Heads up for February 2014

Dear Colleague,

I am delighted to be working with PEX Asia on their 2014 summit.
The event is designed for process management professionals who want to be at the forefront of change, champion excellence in their organisation and collaborate on creating the next generation of process transformation strategies.

Process Excellence is being redefined in this digital age, transforming organisations and revolutionising how business is conducted globally. To be competitive your company needs to continually evolve and move beyond just Lean Six Sigma.

Process Excellence today draws on a raft of evolving methodologies including Lean, Six Sigma, Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture, Total Quality Management and Statistical Process Controls to enable organisations to improve the way they operate and deliver. Notable organisations such as the Singapore Exchange, ANZ, Shell, Nokia and the BP Group will be sharing the different ways they have blended and harmonised approaches within their ranks to enable their teams to connect more swiftly to relevant information, improve workflow automation and meet the ever changing consumer and market needs.


Excitingly, as part of this year's event we have provided delegates with an exclusive opportunity to undertake our certification training programme.

This is designed as two in-depth workshops which will give you the essential skills to take on process change and lead with excellence.

Completing the course will also qualify you as a Certified Process Professional (CPP Levels 1 & 2).

The process professionals we researched with during production of PEX Asia identified their core challenges as how to core challenges as how to:

1. Differentiate their organisation by continually meeting and exceeding process quality and customer service
2. Capture, synthesise and align their client and business needs
3. Continuously improve workflow automation and project turnaround times
4. Swiftly adapt, evolve and improve global supply chain management in ever changing markets
5. Better manage multiple PEX projects

All within reduced timeframes and budgets and still meeting the expected outcomes from reporting executives and boards!

At the PEX ASIA 2014 you will find presenters, delegates, information and ideas which pose solutions to resolving these exact challenges. Using PEX to drive business growth, increase profitability and competitive advantage is more critical than ever.

This is your chance to revitalise, strengthen and accelerate your process strategies.
We hope that you will be able to join us in Singapore at our PEX Asia 2014

Please do take a moment to look through the brochure or go to our PEX Asia website for more details. I look forward to meeting you in February in Singapore!

Steve Towers
Lead Coach and Co-Founder
BP GROUP, UK

Proactive Outside-In companies (James Dodkins)

Part of the Process Miracle course
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http://www.processmiracle.com/ -
FREE BPM course featuring the Secret Sauce <

I also want to touch on the hurdles these companies using OI as their route to customer-centricity faced or are facing. While achieving customer-centricity is a noble goal‹ even a necessity for many companies‹it's not easy. It requires transformational change.
On the flip side, sticking to incremental change doesn't get you there. Not even close.

Amazon.com may have achieved Jeff Bezos's dream of becoming the world's most
customer-centric company. And Amazon had the advantage of starting from
scratch with nothing preexisting in the way, except for a pervasive business
culture that believes companies went broke by trying to be too nice to
customers and became successful by rigorous cost control and a laser-like
focus. But Bezos understood the comfort level customers would feel with
Amazon sourcing whatever they need to buy (almost) instead of dealing with
scores of online merchants, including some not trustworthy. He also
understood that the best way to keep customers is by continually finding new
ways to offer them value. These were hardly popular concepts when he started
Amazon. And for straying from conventional "wisdom," Bezos and Amazon took a
pounding from pundits and analysts before proving them wrong.

Best Buy senior execs banked on their understanding of how customers really
wanted to buy electronics.

Best Buy made a major shift from a "cash and carry" electronics discounter
to a combined product/service provider that supports every facet of
customers enjoying high-tech electronics, with some appliances thrown in for
good measure. To get there, Best Buy had to re-staff the stores with better
trained, higher paid employees; bring in substantial new management
expertise, redesign stores from the ground up, go to store plans that flexed
with local demographics and take a huge financial risk on a then untested
concept of "higher touch" electronics retailing. Best Buy senior execs
banked on their understanding of how customers really wanted to buy
electronics. Customers rewarded them by leaving competitors in droves, until
the two primary U.S. competitors collapsed.

Fed-X has been an Outside-In company from the day the first Dassault Falcon
flew off from Memphis back in 1971, and it has reaped the rewards. But in
1998 Fed-X chose to break its own air courier business model by acquiring
the parent of both Roadway trucking and RPS (Roadway Parcel Express, formed
to compete against UPS). The customer problem the acquisition solved was
visible every day at hundreds of thousands of shipping docks­one pile of
small parcels for priority air shipping by Fed-X; a 2nd pile of small
parcels for routine ground shipping by UPS; and a 3rd pile of larger
shipments, including single packages over 60lbs., to be picked up by various
LTL (less-than-truckload) carriers that serviced varying city pairs.

For logistics managers this meant: multiple types of waybills and manifests
to complete; multiple tracking systems (or no tracking); angst and errors
from trying to price shipments to attach shipping charges to invoices; and
three different pick-up vans, often jockeying for space at a single loading
dock at the same time. But once Fed-X melded the three service into one,
logistics could have just one pile of shipments for ground and air,
including packages up to 150lbs.

UPS, a totally inside-out company at the time, never saw the opportunity,
despite seeing the three piles every day, because they were seeing the piles
from their point of view, not the customer's.

All these cases represent achieving customer-centricity through
transformational change from inside-out business practices­plus, overcoming
inertia and defying yet more conventional "wisdom." In the CRM space,
there's a pejorative term, "boiling the ocean," to describe asking companies
to change too much. Supposedly, attempting "excessive" change leads to
certain failure and death by firing squad. Yet any company striving to
achieve customer-centricity has to switch from the inside-out perspective to
Outside-In. And that takes "boiling the ocean."

Feeling the urgency for change will help some companies clear the hurdles.
Not feeling the urgency for change will cause others to take face plants on
the track‹or wither away at the starting blocks.

Reactive cases

UPS was forced Outside-In (or else it would have gone upside down) by
Fed-X's ground transportation acquisition. For an extraordinarily routinized
and standardized company, that meant adopting a new business model requiring
disruptive process change.

More recently, Sprint was on the slippery slope, put there by inside-out
thinking, including deplorable customer service. Its new CEO is taking an
Outside-In view of the business to try to dig out of the hole. Too late?
Maybe, maybe not. Forgiveness doesn't always come easy. Sometimes it doesn't
come at all.

And speaking of forgiveness, General Motors is struggling for life after
bankruptcy‹and trying to overcome an almost impermeable inside-out culture.
Getting to Outside-In is a prerequisite for winning back customer trust. So
far, reports coming out of GM have been mixed.

What are you waiting for?

Sure Outside-In takes work. But don't wait for an industry competitor to go
there first. Forced change is so much harder than proactive change. And
don't wait until it's too late and suffer the ultimate change. The
Outside-In train is leaving the station, likely populated by a competitor or
two or four. It's time you hopped on board for the journey to Outside-In.

CPP Masters in San Francisco.

It was a great pleasure visiting San Francisco for the 4th time this year and hosting the CPP Masters session at the Waterfront. We had a terrific time consolidating Outside In.

From l>r: Grace, Angela, Mark, Steve, Kandice, Jamie, Moosa, Nivesh

This was one of those sessions that transcends what we did in a few days. Moosa and Nivesh will return to Qatar, Jamie to Phoenix, Kandice to Denver (yay!), Steve to Singapore, Mark to the world of education,  Angela here in the Bay, and Grace to Washington DC.

Breakpoints 2013 - make every internal interaction a successful one

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Reduce Complexity and win the Triple Crown

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The Breakpoints Tool Kit provides the means to tackle internal bureaucracy and reduce/eliminate all those hand-offs that cause all that work.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3a4zb3aqrntkc9p/BPGBP_2013.docx

Business Rules 2013 - Get those decision points under control

Rules should guide and help

The purpose of the Business Rules Tool Kit is to give you an actionable approach to identifying and optimizing the process-based behavior in your organization, thereby Increasing Revenues and Enhancing Customer service.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m4e09hbdnp16oir/BPGBR_2013.docx

Moments of Truth 2013 - Make every customer interaction a profitable one

Now in version 15. A set of guidance and templates to discover, develop and control Moments of Truth. https://www.dropbox.com/s/2v6ezd6ign36k9f/BPGMOT_2013.docx

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (from James Dodkins)

James Dodkins, CCO BP Group

In 1996, Gilead introduced a "next phase" AIDS medication patients could
take in a single daily dose. The new drug, Atripla, vastly improved patient
quality of life. It vastly improved compliance. And it has given Gilead an
80% market share of medication prescribed to newly identified AIDS and HIV
positive patients, despite introduction of directly competing, single dose
products from larger competitors.

Atripla has dramatically grown Gilead's revenue, along with producing near
40% profit margins. Plus, manufacturing one medication is far less expensive
than making 17, matching revenue gains with cost reduction. But Gilead was
not finished. Since 2006, Gilead has introduced single dosage treatment for
hepatitis-B patients, who had to follow a similarly complex medication
schedule, and has initiated development of a similar medication for
hepatitis-C.

Achieving Customer-Centricity

Through Outside-In, Gilead has become a customer-centric company
specializing in quality of life and compliance as well as quality
efficacious treatments. However, a common first reaction might be, "How
obvious." And a second might be, "Nothing much to it."

Gilead did experience a blinding flash of the obvious. But untold numbers of
"obvious" solutions to major customer problems go unnoticed because
companies can't see through customer eyes­ or are afraid to do so.
Outside-In forces the issue by starting with the customer­ not the product or the
company or sales goals or profits.

"Nothing much to it?" Au contraire, there was a whole lot to it. Having
helped many a company through this type of transformative change, I can reel
off a list of likely barriers Gilead faced: reorganizing R&D to focus on
drug delivery, a very different discipline than traditional pharmaceutical
research; changing support staff roles; laying off manufacturing staff and
management; repositioning the company; and that's just for starters. What
Gilead achieved required transformational change, which stresses
organizations and often tests their resiliency? No surprise that so many
organizations limit themselves to incremental change.

What's new here?

As you've almost certainly recognized, some organizations have employed
Outside-In thinking since their inception, as has U.S. department store
chain Nordstrom's, or at least for many years. But two things have changed.

First, Outside-In today extends far beyond identifying opportunities. While
full scale OI starts by aligning strategy with customers,it continues by
next aligning process with strategies and then technology with process. In
that order. More specifically, following opportunity identification OI
determines "what" work has to be done by "who" in order to turn opportunity
into reality. This strategic step defines organizational change as well as
changes to workflow and information flow. Then OI defines "how" the work
should be done and the technology enablement required, the tactical side.
Not only does Outside-In expand the scope of customer-centric thinking to
include implementation; but it also stretches traditional boundaries of
process to include the "what" and the "who" plus technology support ­beyond
just addressing the "how." And that's why we call it "Outside-In Process."

The second change is the volume of Outside-In occurring. A number of
organizations have already completed the migration from "inside-out"
(company-centric) to Outside-In (customer-centric). Others are
opportunistically starting to migrate. And some laggards within their own
industries have moved or are moving defensively, to avoid the fate of
Circuit City, CompUSA, WAMU (Washington Mutual Bank), General Motors and
Northwest Airlines ­all notoriously inside-out companies insensitive to
customer needs.

More next week...

PEX Awards Florida January 2014

Entries will be accepted until Friday 8 November - there is still time to enter!

Due to unprecedented demand the deadline has been extended to 8 November.

Demonstrate how you used the power of process to transform your business and enter. The winners will be announced at PEX Week USA in Orlando, Florida on Tuesday 21 January 2014.
______________________________________________
>> Download your application kit

Enter each category for $100. Recognize your process excellence efforts and enter. All shortlisted finalists will be announced mid-December.

If you have any questions ahead of entering please don't hesitate to contact us on awards@iqpc.co.uk .


Celebrate your project and program excellence with PEX.

All the best,
The PEX Network Awards Team

P.S. Don't miss out. Enter before 8 November!

Links for those hungry for Outside-In and advanced business process transformation

http://www.successfulcustomeroutcomes.net - 283 articles on Advanced BPM

http://bpcommunity.blogspot.co.uk/ - 200+ articles on business process transformation

https://www.youtube.com/user/snoozers69 - Over 50 videos on the theme

http://www.slideshare.net/stowers/ - More than 70 presentations (downloadable)

http://www.bpgroup.org/ - 80+ courses leading to the Certified Process Professional qualification (CPP) all over the globe through 2013/14

http://www.oibpm.com/ - for all things and links Outside In

http://www.certifiedprocessprofessional.com/ - Professional qualifications since 1992

http://www.processmiracle.com/ - FREE course featuring the Secret Sauce

http://www.bpgroup.org/their-opinion.html  - Testimonials about us

http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup - 11,000 members networking with ideas

CEMMethod update (new version pending)

In January we updated the CEMMethod (it is now on its fifth version since 2006). Before year end we will introducing several new concepts and tools. If you would like that information please subscribe to the blog and I will include you in the previews.

CEMMethod_Jan2013 from Steve Towers

Six customer imperatives for everyone

Many decades ago, as a trainee industrial engineer I was introduced to the works of Rudyard Kipling[1].

In the context of the Customer Age his sage wisdom lives on.

A renowned English writer (born in Mumbai) he influenced my life from that get go and here I pay homage to his life changing verse Six Honest Serving Men

1. Why What Who Where When How

Why do you want to measure your customer experience?  We want to understand the current state of our experience and see how it impacts the bottom line, revenue growth and shareholder value.

Why is that important?  We know that a great customer experiences leads to significantly enhanced customer lifetime value. Customers buy more, stay longer and become a part of your Awareness for future customers.

Why do you need a measurement for this? We need to get scientific about the customer experience. We need to understand where we should focus to profitably improve experiences, and to measure the ongoing evolution of Customer Experience Management.

Why is this important? Existing measures of Customer Experience are subjective and prone to bias, whether that is sample size, emotional influence or even the time of day. It is not realistic to base our future growth on a set of flaccid anecdotal measures.

2. Why What Who Where When How

What is the first step? We need get factual. What are the real measures? The hard noised objective and accessible metrics that move beyond the soft and fluffy emotional feedback.

What system do we need in place? Something that is repeatable and predictable. Certainly not the latest anecdotes from the customer service

What is the priority? To coin a phrase – where the rubber hits the road. In a very direct sense it is where the customer interactions are taking place and where the reality of the service and product offering happens. We need to measure the real interaction, less so the feelings created.

3. Why What Who Where When How

Who is the most important person in your organization? Who is the ultimate cause of all the work? The answer is the same – yes, the customer of course.

Who should lead the change to understand and develop the Customer Experience? Well that isn’t a bunch of guys doing strategy in their glass ivory towers remote to the business. Guess what. It is everyone of us, as ultimately we all walk in the customer shoes.

Who engages the organization for success? Vision is essential. Moving beyond the industrialized function specialist silos’ to the sunny uplands of customer awareness requires fortitude and leadership. It is certainly not for the feint of heart.

4. Why What Who Where When How

It is not top down, strategy driven. It isn’t even bottom up frontline informed. Where have those ideas come from? Yes the industrialized world of the 1700’s.  Wind forward to now. We are a bunch of able and skilled individuals aligned to successful customer outcomes (or we should be)

5. Why What Who Where When How
When? What are you waiting for? You do not really want to go down the road of Kodak, Nokia and Blackberry? Surely. The customers have changed. Have you? Or is the management team doing the same old same old? Light the fire. Make a noise. If you don’t you know all to well what will be next.

6. Why What Who Where When How

It is not top down, strategy driven. This is the easiest of all. It starts with you. The messages you relate. The language you use. The people you influence. Every conversation and internal exchange is an opportunity to win hearts and minds. Is it tough? Yes of course it is, however was anything ever worth doing easy? The choice is yours.

---

[1] http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_serving.htm

SCO's a quick update

Successful Customer Outcomes 2013 from Steve Towers

Globe trotting - certification and customer experience

Catch me if you can at:

Edmonton, Canada – w/c 7 October

Cape Town – w/c 14 October

Hong Kong – w/c 21 October

San Francisco – w/c 4 November

Singapore – w/c 11 November

A terrific mix of in-house accreditation and audit, consultancy and good plain old training. Government, Financial Services, Aerospace, Retail and Pharma.

Review the 2013 and 2014 Open sessions at: http://www.bpgroup.org/certification-by-city.html

Or drop me a line at the office (37,000 feet).

Happy Hunting

Steve

Steve Towers, Founder & CEO
steve.towers@bpgroup.org        www.bpgroup.org
Cell:+44 7415 063868       Office:+44 203 3030 894        Fax:+44 20 7691 7664

Link with Steve: www.linkedin.com/in/stevetowers /

LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/joinbpgroup Twitter: http://twitter.com/stowers

BP Group, New Bond House, 124 New Bond Street, London W1S 1DX

Coaching & Professional qualifications since 1992





































 

Customer Interactions aka Moments of Truth (Part One) - develop, control, measure and manage

Customer Interactions (CI's) are taking place all the time. Are your CI's under control? Can you quantify them? and are they aligned to the Successful Customer Outcome? Some folks might think this is a mountain to climb and don't even bother to pay attention to those critical moments.

   Customer Interactions - (Click photo for full size)

High Performance Organizations on the other hand know that engineering the CI's, designing them Outside-In and keeping them owned and controlled determines every aspect of the Customer Experience.

So let's take a journey together and start with the basics. If we look at healthcare and hospitals especially we all know the smallest things make the biggest difference. Hygiene for instance.


So what are the smallest things in your business that make that massive difference?

The Process Excellence Network annual US gathering

One for your diaries - Orlando, January 2014. The Annual get together for everyone process, performance and customer orientation.

Bringing together leading practitioners, solution providers and the latest exclusive case studies.

If there is one major event in your process, lean, sigma, bpm, customer, outside in diaries for 2014 get along to this one.