The process of constant change in the company - how it is automated
Now I’ll tell you why this is necessary on the example of one large industrial holding, who suddenly realized that several million rubles can be lost just like that. And because of the banal insanity, chaos and mistakes of the bureaucracy. And all this against the background of global refactoring of processes.
So, in a large industrial holding there are many companies united in one group. In 2011 and 2012, they showed a high profit, under which you can forget about optimization and just draw as quickly as possible further until it turns out. “What is there to think, it’s necessary to shake” is the optimal business strategy based on such rates of return. In 2013, due to the general economic situation, it became clear that profits would decline. Accordingly, the first thing that began to make great leadership is to figure out where and how exactly the money is spent in order to find something that can be safely optimized or simply removed.
A large company can think as much as they like that they can go through all the processes and overcome chaos in 3-4 months. In practice, in the outside world, something is constantly changing, and every day begins with a new feature that needs to be urgently implemented. And it turns out that you need to pay for it again, or overload your IT department again.
')
I am committed to introducing strange and incomprehensible to many things - BRMS-systems. In fact, the repositories of the decision rules in the company, from where the rest of the IT-systems take data.
Here they were in for a surprise in the workflow system. Speaking of strict scientific language, she resembled spontaneous cross-pollination. Well, or a p2p-network. Imagine that you are an employee of one of the holding companies. You need to agree and sign the contract. The procedure provides for many decisions, of which the main ones are the definition of your limits, the ability to sign an agreement within the framework of authority, production need, plus coordination with a dozen people from financial director to lawyer and heads of technical departments, depending on what the document is. Translating into Russian - there is a quest for 20 subtasks, which each time changes depending on the contract. The most fun - no one knows exactly how this document should be processed, and all the subtasks of our quest are drawn along the way. The head of the department responsible for the implementation of the technical part, for example, can send you to three more people who supply him with raw materials for production - and each of them also to his own lawyers and financiers.
To heaps, everyone in the chain feels responsible for making decisions worth several million dollars, and seeks to be safe, which adds complexity to the agreements.
In general, hell habitual for our large business.
This was solved in a very original way - by the system of coordinators. There were specially trained people who knew how, where and why to carry some kind of paper. One person could supervise about 20 contracts. It was these people who represented the document management system as is. In this case, again, each relied on their experience, and not some kind of scheme. And for two different people the same document could travel around the company in different routes.
At this point, management discovers that in addition to this story, it often happens that companies within a holding company agree on shipment without approval (because it takes a long time, and the work is worth it). Ivanovitch and Petrovich agreed on the fingers, Petrovich went to ship, and instead of the contract, a guarantee, at best. Each such case is a pair of raw materials wagons that are very difficult to find later.
And the decision is made to introduce total control at all points of decision making.
Here are my colleagues who make them an electronic document management system. They come to these special people working with documents, put them in negotiations and ask how the process is going. They scratch their heads and say that everything is simple. At first, a beautiful scheme of “three streets” was obtained. We tried to take the documents and carry on it - it turned out that no, not everything is as we would like. Real situations began to be imposed on this scheme, and many nuances were discovered for each type of contract. The scheme began to resemble a subway map. It ended with the appearance of huge matrices on A3, according to which it was possible to somehow understand how decisions were made.
In this process of "tightening the screws" formalization of business processes has become a very difficult task. First of all, a lot of things were just hard to get out of specialists, but they managed to do it. Secondly, as it turned out, two more surprises appeared. The first is urgent, super-important documents for which you can break the rules. We have made a special system of corridors and priorities. The second is that the system is never static. The legislation is changing, the company is structurally reorganized, the requirements of managers and standards are also not fixed, new moments appear based on experience - in general, this is an attempt to copy a database without blocking, to which something is constantly being written.
Then in a few months it became clear that some documents require exceptions in the approval procedure. And these rare documents - about 60%.
When my colleagues uttered the phrase “constancy of change”, my team appeared on the scene. The persistence of change is exactly what the BRMS does best.
BRMS is a business rule repository. For example, if you are an insurance company and a client comes to you, fills out a questionnaire, plus you collect a bunch of data about it, you need to understand how much the insurance will cost. A fixed system (in varying degrees, ERP, CRM, BPM) makes it possible in this case to easily and easily calculate this automatically. No problem. Difficulties begin when marketing decides to change tariffs. There are two tasks:
And here comes the BRMS system. This is the place where all the rules of the company are collected and superimposed on other systems. In the case of an insurance company - BRMS knows who, what and how to count. For telecom - allows you to build profit forecasts for current subscribers with known profiles in case of tariff changes. For a bank, to know exactly who will issue a loan and under what conditions, and to whom it will not. What is very important - it is not managed by the IT department, but by those who make decisions. That is, directly by financiers, marketing and so on.
The implementation is not fast and cheap. But after that, the financier can say “in such a case, do this” and drive it through a simple interface (reminiscent of a diagrammer) to the system of rules. Himself. Check for possible consequences and click on “apply”. Then all the IT systems of the company will simply take away the new rule and change the processes.
Before BRMS, this would mean an obligatory trip to the IT department for a new feature. Here is a simple case: the new telecom tariff. The business is to go to the IT department and ask them to change the coefficients. But no, you still need to keep the old tariff for compatibility. And he has five crutches there for compatibility with other crutches. If done with a guarantee of reliability (without errors in business logic and technical part), the process begins to resemble an archaeological expedition. If you do quickly - there is no guarantee that everything will be considered correct.
Therefore, BRMS is implemented by those who need to make changes very quickly. Insurance in a favorable market, banks at the moment of raising the credit market, retail while increasing the level of competition (for retail, the rate of change is life), as well as various large companies, when their processes change.
BRMS example
As a result, we deployed BRMS in a rather unusual form - as an architectural element of the electronic document management system. Two very important tasks were solved: the calculation of the contract route and the establishment of limits.
With the route is such a story. Regular electronic document management purely architecturally considers the route once at the beginning, and then controls it. You can add 2-3-5-10 nodes along the road for conversion points, but the number of these nodes should be determined at or near the architectural level. In our case, each coordination node became the point of recalculation of the contract route: “And here they incorrectly agreed, with another list of signers.” Logically, the paper needs to be pulled into the beginning of the chain and started again, but then the business will lose at least another couple of weeks.
Therefore, the route was considered precisely using the rules of the repository at each point.
The second point is a complex system of powers of attorney, limits on budget and terms, and so on. Here it was important to check, according to the huge code of rules (the very matrices on A3), whether everything is in order with the document, whether it can be dragged further and so on. To put all this into a document flow - to doom the system to a kind of fractal of crutches in 3-4 years. Also brought to BRMS.
From that moment on everything went somehow easier. When a manager has full control over his part of the system, this is happiness. And his senior manager, in turn, can see what and how it was exactly with all the documents. It turns out such a transparent report.
In general, everyone is happy. Work there is still going on, but you can see their end. The management of the holding received control and transparency (for themselves), and employees - the ability to sign documents without a tambourine and a shaman.
The second notable case of BRMS was in the insurance . They gave their offices a huge .xls file, where there were a bunch of linked cells and macros, customer data. Then it was all considered and gave the result. A normal solution for a small business, in general, a sound one for an average, but the company managed to grow to the level of a large one. Very large.
Fully understand what and how in this XLS file not every employee could. And when a difficult question arose and changes to the rules were required, problems arose.
When we saw all these forms, macros, statistical tables in a huge file, we came to superstitious horror. Probably, we would feel something similar if we saw a modern i5-level processor on the lamps.
All this was updated by sending a document to the units (each office) by mail or FTP.
In general, it was a classic case of BRMS implementation, when a client could no longer tolerate such processes, and wanted to unload the IT department. It turned out, the benefit with the typing of these problems was not: everything was ready, sorted and checked. Just needed a modern tool. Always so.
Now the rate of change of the tariff - a few days, not months. The rules are changed by business users, IT specialists only accompany. Now the customer has a single source of rules. Plus, a very quick calculation of complex schemes - about 10,000 calculations of insurance rates per minute.
We in KROK have about two and a half thousand projects a year (of which more than 200 with a budget of more than $ 1 million), 2500 employees.
We always implement everything that is most up-to-date, the BRMS system was not an exception, but it was really very necessary. The main question was financial - it was necessary to consider the cost and profitability of projects and do what-if analysis.
Previously, the cost of large complex projects was considered by hands. For example, in order to calculate the cost of labor for a project, it was necessary to take into account about 14 parameters (such as position, department, staff rate, etc.) Now this is done in just a couple of minutes, plus the cost can be considered more clearly and in detail. Since everything is done now in the system, we have complicated the formulas, taken into account more parameters - now there are about 170. Under the jurisdiction of our financiers, a kind of management matrix has appeared, they can distribute taxes and overhead costs on complex projects, manage coefficients, and even sales. For example, they can easily find out what will happen to financial indicators, if suddenly the rates of employees increase by 10%, or the tax changes, or something else changes. Happiness as it is.
An example of the calculation of labor costs on the project
For sales directors, this also resulted in a convenient tool - a financial project calculator. Thanks to the rules repository, they can independently - “without the participation of financiers” - calculate the cost of the project depending on its parameters, such as the number and positions of the employees involved, the amount of man-hours, the direction of work, etc.
BRMS turned out to be especially indispensable on those projects where reality is changing. Alas, the situation that the TK is one thing, but by the end of the project we need something completely different, not only in small business. And when the previous feature has not yet been implemented, and there is already a request for a new iteration, too. Now it is possible to change and expand the method of cost accounting for a project without complications.
The BRMS system is connected to our integration platform, so we can use customized rules as services and call them, if necessary, from any of our internal business processes.
BRMS are often used in Europe and the USA in mergers and acquisitions of companies. For example, there was one bank that absorbed something and became, in fact, two structures under one sign. "And in this department we can not do so, go across to another." Different staff, different rules, different ABS. If there is no plan to move to one platform (and this is a kind of subtle form of suicide), there is only one logical way out. All this is relatively painless (as far as it is possible at merging-absorption) is connected through BRMS-systems.
BRMS:
But the previous post about BRMS on the example of the first pre-computer automation systems with the king .
If you have any questions, I will slowly answer in the comments or, for particularly specific ones, by mail to splaunov@croc.ru . The only thing is that all data will be from abstract companies; according to the NDA, I cannot even show a screenshot of the result without clearing all numbers and letters from it.
So, in a large industrial holding there are many companies united in one group. In 2011 and 2012, they showed a high profit, under which you can forget about optimization and just draw as quickly as possible further until it turns out. “What is there to think, it’s necessary to shake” is the optimal business strategy based on such rates of return. In 2013, due to the general economic situation, it became clear that profits would decline. Accordingly, the first thing that began to make great leadership is to figure out where and how exactly the money is spent in order to find something that can be safely optimized or simply removed.
What am I doing
A large company can think as much as they like that they can go through all the processes and overcome chaos in 3-4 months. In practice, in the outside world, something is constantly changing, and every day begins with a new feature that needs to be urgently implemented. And it turns out that you need to pay for it again, or overload your IT department again.
')
I am committed to introducing strange and incomprehensible to many things - BRMS-systems. In fact, the repositories of the decision rules in the company, from where the rest of the IT-systems take data.
The management of the holding decided to figure out where the money goes ...
Here they were in for a surprise in the workflow system. Speaking of strict scientific language, she resembled spontaneous cross-pollination. Well, or a p2p-network. Imagine that you are an employee of one of the holding companies. You need to agree and sign the contract. The procedure provides for many decisions, of which the main ones are the definition of your limits, the ability to sign an agreement within the framework of authority, production need, plus coordination with a dozen people from financial director to lawyer and heads of technical departments, depending on what the document is. Translating into Russian - there is a quest for 20 subtasks, which each time changes depending on the contract. The most fun - no one knows exactly how this document should be processed, and all the subtasks of our quest are drawn along the way. The head of the department responsible for the implementation of the technical part, for example, can send you to three more people who supply him with raw materials for production - and each of them also to his own lawyers and financiers.
To heaps, everyone in the chain feels responsible for making decisions worth several million dollars, and seeks to be safe, which adds complexity to the agreements.
In general, hell habitual for our large business.
This was solved in a very original way - by the system of coordinators. There were specially trained people who knew how, where and why to carry some kind of paper. One person could supervise about 20 contracts. It was these people who represented the document management system as is. In this case, again, each relied on their experience, and not some kind of scheme. And for two different people the same document could travel around the company in different routes.
At this point, management discovers that in addition to this story, it often happens that companies within a holding company agree on shipment without approval (because it takes a long time, and the work is worth it). Ivanovitch and Petrovich agreed on the fingers, Petrovich went to ship, and instead of the contract, a guarantee, at best. Each such case is a pair of raw materials wagons that are very difficult to find later.
And the decision is made to introduce total control at all points of decision making.
Here are my colleagues who make them an electronic document management system. They come to these special people working with documents, put them in negotiations and ask how the process is going. They scratch their heads and say that everything is simple. At first, a beautiful scheme of “three streets” was obtained. We tried to take the documents and carry on it - it turned out that no, not everything is as we would like. Real situations began to be imposed on this scheme, and many nuances were discovered for each type of contract. The scheme began to resemble a subway map. It ended with the appearance of huge matrices on A3, according to which it was possible to somehow understand how decisions were made.
In this process of "tightening the screws" formalization of business processes has become a very difficult task. First of all, a lot of things were just hard to get out of specialists, but they managed to do it. Secondly, as it turned out, two more surprises appeared. The first is urgent, super-important documents for which you can break the rules. We have made a special system of corridors and priorities. The second is that the system is never static. The legislation is changing, the company is structurally reorganized, the requirements of managers and standards are also not fixed, new moments appear based on experience - in general, this is an attempt to copy a database without blocking, to which something is constantly being written.
Then in a few months it became clear that some documents require exceptions in the approval procedure. And these rare documents - about 60%.
When my colleagues uttered the phrase “constancy of change”, my team appeared on the scene. The persistence of change is exactly what the BRMS does best.
Why do you need BRMS in this case?
BRMS is a business rule repository. For example, if you are an insurance company and a client comes to you, fills out a questionnaire, plus you collect a bunch of data about it, you need to understand how much the insurance will cost. A fixed system (in varying degrees, ERP, CRM, BPM) makes it possible in this case to easily and easily calculate this automatically. No problem. Difficulties begin when marketing decides to change tariffs. There are two tasks:
- For every sneeze you need to go to the IT department and ask for changes in the processing logic.
- It is not always possible to assume in advance what will happen - the rules of calculation may mutually exclude each other, drop out of account due to errors, displacement of one of the coefficients by 0.5% may cause a sharp jump in profits down - all this must be known in advance.
And here comes the BRMS system. This is the place where all the rules of the company are collected and superimposed on other systems. In the case of an insurance company - BRMS knows who, what and how to count. For telecom - allows you to build profit forecasts for current subscribers with known profiles in case of tariff changes. For a bank, to know exactly who will issue a loan and under what conditions, and to whom it will not. What is very important - it is not managed by the IT department, but by those who make decisions. That is, directly by financiers, marketing and so on.
The implementation is not fast and cheap. But after that, the financier can say “in such a case, do this” and drive it through a simple interface (reminiscent of a diagrammer) to the system of rules. Himself. Check for possible consequences and click on “apply”. Then all the IT systems of the company will simply take away the new rule and change the processes.
Before BRMS, this would mean an obligatory trip to the IT department for a new feature. Here is a simple case: the new telecom tariff. The business is to go to the IT department and ask them to change the coefficients. But no, you still need to keep the old tariff for compatibility. And he has five crutches there for compatibility with other crutches. If done with a guarantee of reliability (without errors in business logic and technical part), the process begins to resemble an archaeological expedition. If you do quickly - there is no guarantee that everything will be considered correct.
Therefore, BRMS is implemented by those who need to make changes very quickly. Insurance in a favorable market, banks at the moment of raising the credit market, retail while increasing the level of competition (for retail, the rate of change is life), as well as various large companies, when their processes change.
BRMS example
What we did
As a result, we deployed BRMS in a rather unusual form - as an architectural element of the electronic document management system. Two very important tasks were solved: the calculation of the contract route and the establishment of limits.
With the route is such a story. Regular electronic document management purely architecturally considers the route once at the beginning, and then controls it. You can add 2-3-5-10 nodes along the road for conversion points, but the number of these nodes should be determined at or near the architectural level. In our case, each coordination node became the point of recalculation of the contract route: “And here they incorrectly agreed, with another list of signers.” Logically, the paper needs to be pulled into the beginning of the chain and started again, but then the business will lose at least another couple of weeks.
Therefore, the route was considered precisely using the rules of the repository at each point.
The second point is a complex system of powers of attorney, limits on budget and terms, and so on. Here it was important to check, according to the huge code of rules (the very matrices on A3), whether everything is in order with the document, whether it can be dragged further and so on. To put all this into a document flow - to doom the system to a kind of fractal of crutches in 3-4 years. Also brought to BRMS.
From that moment on everything went somehow easier. When a manager has full control over his part of the system, this is happiness. And his senior manager, in turn, can see what and how it was exactly with all the documents. It turns out such a transparent report.
In general, everyone is happy. Work there is still going on, but you can see their end. The management of the holding received control and transparency (for themselves), and employees - the ability to sign documents without a tambourine and a shaman.
Insurance
The second notable case of BRMS was in the insurance . They gave their offices a huge .xls file, where there were a bunch of linked cells and macros, customer data. Then it was all considered and gave the result. A normal solution for a small business, in general, a sound one for an average, but the company managed to grow to the level of a large one. Very large.
Fully understand what and how in this XLS file not every employee could. And when a difficult question arose and changes to the rules were required, problems arose.
When we saw all these forms, macros, statistical tables in a huge file, we came to superstitious horror. Probably, we would feel something similar if we saw a modern i5-level processor on the lamps.
All this was updated by sending a document to the units (each office) by mail or FTP.
In general, it was a classic case of BRMS implementation, when a client could no longer tolerate such processes, and wanted to unload the IT department. It turned out, the benefit with the typing of these problems was not: everything was ready, sorted and checked. Just needed a modern tool. Always so.
Now the rate of change of the tariff - a few days, not months. The rules are changed by business users, IT specialists only accompany. Now the customer has a single source of rules. Plus, a very quick calculation of complex schemes - about 10,000 calculations of insurance rates per minute.
We have
We in KROK have about two and a half thousand projects a year (of which more than 200 with a budget of more than $ 1 million), 2500 employees.
We always implement everything that is most up-to-date, the BRMS system was not an exception, but it was really very necessary. The main question was financial - it was necessary to consider the cost and profitability of projects and do what-if analysis.
Previously, the cost of large complex projects was considered by hands. For example, in order to calculate the cost of labor for a project, it was necessary to take into account about 14 parameters (such as position, department, staff rate, etc.) Now this is done in just a couple of minutes, plus the cost can be considered more clearly and in detail. Since everything is done now in the system, we have complicated the formulas, taken into account more parameters - now there are about 170. Under the jurisdiction of our financiers, a kind of management matrix has appeared, they can distribute taxes and overhead costs on complex projects, manage coefficients, and even sales. For example, they can easily find out what will happen to financial indicators, if suddenly the rates of employees increase by 10%, or the tax changes, or something else changes. Happiness as it is.
An example of the calculation of labor costs on the project
For sales directors, this also resulted in a convenient tool - a financial project calculator. Thanks to the rules repository, they can independently - “without the participation of financiers” - calculate the cost of the project depending on its parameters, such as the number and positions of the employees involved, the amount of man-hours, the direction of work, etc.
BRMS turned out to be especially indispensable on those projects where reality is changing. Alas, the situation that the TK is one thing, but by the end of the project we need something completely different, not only in small business. And when the previous feature has not yet been implemented, and there is already a request for a new iteration, too. Now it is possible to change and expand the method of cost accounting for a project without complications.
The BRMS system is connected to our integration platform, so we can use customized rules as services and call them, if necessary, from any of our internal business processes.
Mergers and Acquisitions
BRMS are often used in Europe and the USA in mergers and acquisitions of companies. For example, there was one bank that absorbed something and became, in fact, two structures under one sign. "And in this department we can not do so, go across to another." Different staff, different rules, different ABS. If there is no plan to move to one platform (and this is a kind of subtle form of suicide), there is only one logical way out. All this is relatively painless (as far as it is possible at merging-absorption) is connected through BRMS-systems.
Again
BRMS:
- Rapid change of rules (i.e., it is possible to promptly make changes to the business operation)
- Instant recalculation and modeling of complex business rules
- Saving the entire history of the creation of business rules algorithms
- Always use a single version of the rules for all systems.
- Monitoring Mandatory Compliance
- High performance computing: thousands of rules per second
- Analysis of "What If" (What if ...)
- All this - without going to the IT-department. And in combination with the integration platform - access to the rules from any process and application.
But the previous post about BRMS on the example of the first pre-computer automation systems with the king .
If you have any questions, I will slowly answer in the comments or, for particularly specific ones, by mail to splaunov@croc.ru . The only thing is that all data will be from abstract companies; according to the NDA, I cannot even show a screenshot of the result without clearing all numbers and letters from it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/242851/
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