Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Business Process Analysis Tool Increases Revenues and Reduces Stock Depreciation
Overview
Country: Israel
Industry: Consumer Electronics
Customer Profile
M-Systems, founded in 1989, is headquartered in Kfar Saba, near Tel-Aviv, Israel. In 1995, the company introduced the concept of rewritable solid-state disk technology using flash memory.
Business Situation
To accelerate its response to market demand, M-Systems needed to increase project efficiency, improve collaboration with supply chain partners, and reduce product time to market.
Solution
M-Systems implemented Virtual Process Base, a business process analysis add-in for Microsoft® Office Visio 2003. The solution helps M-Systems create business cycles that encompass all its activities into one global operation.
Benefits
n Cost effective business process analysis
n Greater project efficiency
n Optimised business processes
n Improved business management
n Enhanced process documentation
n Improved performance and quality
n More detailed and accurate reporting / “Through improved forecasting and management of stock inventories, we have saved millions of dollars in stock depreciation. We are also achieving considerably faster time to market for new products….”
Udi Weinstein, Chief Information Officer, M-Systems
M-Systems has implemented a new business process analysis solution to speed up the definition and documentation of complex business processes. The Virtual Process Base (VPB) solution supports efficient end-to-end business cycles that encompass all activities, including those of supply chain partners. It is an add-in for Microsoft® Office Visio 2003 that uses Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 or Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) at the enterprise level. VPB, developed by Microsoft Certified Partner Matan and Omnisys, is available as a free download from the Microsoft Office Web site. As a result of using VPB, M-Systems has reduced the process analysis and implementation cycle to two months compared to more than six months in equivalent processes, saved millions of U.S. dollars in stock depreciation, reduced costs, increased revenues through improved business management, and improved the quality of service to customers.
Situation
Founded in 1989 with headquarters in Kfar Saba, near Tel-Aviv, Israel, M-Systems is a global organisation with more than 800 employees worldwide. In 1995, the company introduced the concept of rewritable solid-state disk technology developed using flash memory. In 1997, Microsoft adopted the company’s TrueFFS flash file system for its Windows® operating system. The solution ensures operating systems can handle solid-state disks as any other disk drive.
Such success is not without its own challenges as Udi Weinstein, Chief Information Officer at M-Systems, explains: “To meet demand, M-Systems has to continually produce a greater variety of product types, in greater quantities, and in less time.”
However, these are not the only challenges. The company also has to collaborate ever more closely with increasing numbers of people throughout the supply chain, including customers, suppliers, contract manufacturers, and joint venture partners. In addition, there is a need to ensure the highest quality standards, while achieving the flexibility to meet the changing demands of customers.
To date, the company has successfully met all these requirements—completing the task within a highly competitive marketplace that demands continual cost reductions. Its success is proven by a growth rate in excess of 100 per cent a year and revenues of more than U.S$500 million.
These results reflect M-Systems’s success at finding a way to improve the efficiency of its business processes. Weinstein says: “We needed to find a business process analysis (BPA) solution that would facilitate the definition and agreement of standard working processes. It had to integrate easily with our current IT systems, be quick to implement, and simple to learn to use.”
Solution
To capitalise on its existing investment in Microsoft® Office solutions, M-Systems was keen to use the Microsoft Office Visio® 2003 drawing and diagramming software. M-Systems uses Visio 2003 to create business and technical diagrams that document and organise its complex concepts, processes, and systems. Weinstein comments: “Although the diagrams created in Visio mean we can visualise and communicate business process information in ways that other documentation cannot, we also needed to improve our BPA capabilities.”
After conducting extensive research into available solutions, M-Systems decided to purchase Matan’s BPA solution, Virtual Process Base (VPB). Matan is a Microsoft Certified Partner working with enterprise organisations in Israel to help them implement project management best practices using Microsoft tools.
Yuval Stern, Vice President for Marketing and Business Development at Matan, says: “VPB was developed as the result of a joint initiative between Matan and Microsoft to build an add-in for Visio that would provide a more advanced way of analysing business processes. By using Visio as the environment and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 or the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) for the back-end, the VPB tool supports modelling, analysis, and documentation. It also provides a common BPA standard and facilitates easy cooperation between business process analysts working in an organisation.”
In particular, Matan provided the BPA expertise and methodologies that lie at the heart of the extended capabilities that VPB delivers to the Visio environment. Matan also conducted the development testing and produced the user documentation. Omnisys, its Israel-based independent software vendor (ISV) partner, performed the coding.
As Weinstein says: “VPB is fast to implement and its integration into Visio is seamless to users. Its BPA capabilities immediately improved our ability to conduct expert analysis of our business processes without any need for further assistance.”
VPB is built around a virtual central database of Visio drawings and documentation. Stern comments: “Using the VPB menu in Visio, analysts can share common information about business processes and organisational structures to create a network of business processes. Starting with the core processes, analysts can break these down into their constituent activities, which, in turn, can be broken down further, to create a hierarchical view of increasing granularity.”
Weinstein is delighted with the outcome: “With VPB our analysts find it easy to analyse and optimise our individual business processes. They can share the results of each other’s work, which means it is simple for them to integrate one process with another to create a seamless and efficient business operation. They can also gain agreement more easily from all the parties who will participate in the processes.”
He adds: “VPB allows us to create end-to-end business cycles that encompass all our activities, and those of our supply chain partners, into a global operation. It also ensures we have the flexibility, agility, and scalability to do so while we continue our exponential growth.”
Benefits
Cost Effective Business Process Analysis
The seamless integration between VPB and Visio ensured fast take-up by M-Systems’s analysts and quickly led to improved productivity. Weinstein says: “Users familiar with Visio can be productive on VPB within an hour.”
Once in use, the solution made an equally fast impact on the business. Weinstein comments: “The business analysis efficiencies VPB has introduced means M-Systems can achieve significant reductions in the time it takes to implement new processes. We have seen the time taken from the start of the analysis to full implementation reduced to just two months compared to more than six months in equivalent processes.”
Greater Project Efficiency, Optimised Processes
Before M-Systems started using VPB, individual analysts tended to work in isolation because they could not see how their work connected with others. By providing a clear view of the whole, VPB helps individuals put their roles into an overall business context. This not only helps employees gain a better understanding of their positions, it also improves motivation by clarifying the importance of each role within the overall business.
Weinstein is delighted with the improvement: “From concept to product release, our projects are now founded upon efficient processes that dovetail into a seamless business continuum that has the approval of all parties and in which all participants can cooperate to achieve every milestone without delays or disputes. The key factor to any solution, beyond getting the right processes, is gaining agreement about them. VBP makes it straightforward to achieve this.”
Improved Business Management—Reduced Costs, Increased Revenues
A further benefit is M-Systems’s improved ability to manage its business. Weinstein says: “By enabling us to optimise our processes, VBP is helping us identify problems more easily—for example, where resources are a problem, or time is being wasted. Previously, individuals could only improve their own piece of the business. By providing the big picture, VPB makes it possible for everyone to contribute to the optimisation of the global business.”
The efficiency improvements in the execution of processes are delivering dramatic benefits. Weinstein adds: “Through improved forecasting and management of stock inventories, we have saved millions of dollars in stock depreciation. We are also achieving considerably faster time to market for new products and the sales force now feels comfortable enough to offer new designs to the customers, knowing the operation will support the design within the timeframe.”
Enhanced Process Documentation
By helping users store and link documents to individual business processes, VPB ensures M-Systems creates a valuable knowledge management centre about all processes. This is providing added value as a source of help to employees as they perform their work.
Weinstein says: “VPB’s ability to associate documents with processes makes it easy for us to help users’ access documentation to support their work. Now, simply by clicking on a process, they can obtain information about operational procedures.”
Dependable Standards and Improved Quality
The ability to achieve and maintain best practices and the highest levels of service is essential in any organisation’s bid for success and market domination. VPB encapsulates the proven methodologies and considerable expertise of Matan’s business process analysts and places this experience in the hands of M-Systems’s own analysts.
Weinstein comments: “By using Matan’s VPB solution, M-Systems can deploy robust business processes that reinforce the company’s crusade for efficiency and reliability.”
A further benefit, in this respect, is VPB’s support for business process templates. Weinstein says: “By creating a repository of standards-compliant business process templates, an organisation can be confident in adhering to industry specific standards when conducting business. The use of templates saves time to improve productivity, and, by ensuring a consistent approach, avoids errors to raise the quality of work.”
These improvements are manifest in the increased confidence with which M-Systems’s salespeople can discuss new products with customers, knowing that the company will deliver on time. Weinstein comments: “VPB is enabling our business by giving us the efficiency we need to respond confidently to our customers’ needs.”
Improved Business Reporting
In addition to ensuring that M-Systems analysts conform to industry standards in their analysis, VPB also ensures they use a common language when relating process activity to the company’s individual business units. This has meant M-Systems can achieve more accurate and meaningful reporting.
Weinstein says: “The granularity of information and the ability to associate activity within processes with specific business units means that M-Systems can now generate more detailed and accurate reports about who does what and for how long. The outcome is a clearer view of utilisation and productivity, and greater control of the business and its costs.”
Microsoft Office System
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