BPM in Manufacturing: Accelerating BPM Adoption to Generate Business Results

What does it take to truly drive the adoption of business process management throughout your business? Starting small, delivering value and leveraging data science are key to making BPM stick, says Fausto Artico, Global R&D Tech Head and Director of Innovation and Data Science at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). In this interview, Fausto shares his thoughts on how Business Process Management (BPM) can help your organization and the ways in which Data Science can greatly accelerate BPM adoption, development and integration to generate substantial business benefits.

Bio: As a Physicist, Mathematician, Engineer, Computer Scientist, and High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Data Science expert, Fausto has worked on key projects at European and American government institutions and with key individuals, like Nobel Prize winner Michael J. Prather. After his time at NVIDIA corporation in Silicon Valley, Fausto worked at the IBM T J Watson Center in New York on Exascale Supercomputing Systems for the US government (e.g., Livermore and Oak Ridge Labs).

He has a double PhD (Information Technology and Computer Science), earning his second master’s and PhD at the University of California – Irvine. Fausto also holds multiple certifications from MIT. He has worked in multi-disciplinary teams and has over 20 years of experience in academia and industry. During the past few years, he and his teams at GSK have optimized very complex and complicated processes for several products as well as for manufacturing sites in the US, UK, EU and Asia.

Diana Davis, IX Network: How do you define Business Process Management (BPM)?

Fausto Artico: I feel comfortable using Gartner’s definition to set the stage: “BPM is a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy.” It is generic enough to allow us to talk about a range of disciplines yet broad enough to allow us to discuss several important ideas and principles.

Diana Davis, IX Network: Which disciplines do you think are the most useful for BPM and why?

Fausto Artico: Several disciplines like Industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT), Agile, DevOps, Hyper-Automation (HA), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Blockchain are all useful to accelerate BPM adoption, development and deployment. We can briefly discuss the benefits that each one could generate for your organization for BPM:

- Industry 4.0 with IoT allows you to integrate the enormous number of sensors and end-to-end processes (e.g., multiple manufacturing sites) in your organization so that all the most important equipment is connected even if dispersed over large geographical areas (e.g., multiple continents);

- Agile and DevOps allow you to continuously develop and integrate new software capabilities into your ecosystems and to do so in ways that generate incremental benefits for your organization throughout the whole lifecycle execution of your projects and not only after their deployment, as would be the case using Waterfall methodologies;

- HA and IaC enable organizations to highly automate processes leveraging Robotics and Data Science (DS) while standardizing the ways of deploying software infrastructure so that more reliable, quick and effective trouble shooting and root cause analysis procedures can be executed;

- Blockchain generates the possibility of using Smart Contracts to create business deals between companies and seamlessly enables actions across different departments and organizations as well as provides a fully transparent and immutable capability for the tracking, logging and monitoring of any activity and so of the whole supply chain.

However, of all the possible disciplines that could help you to accelerate BPM, one is especially important and that is Data Science (DS). DS is fundamental considering that we live in the digital age and many organizations want to become more data driven because they understand the importance of leveraging their data. In fact, the disciplines composing Data Science (e.g., Data Mapping, Data Engineering, Exploratory Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Visualization) are all data driven and allow you to leverage data in ways that make it possible to optimize processes to greatly reduce costs (e.g., reducing waste) and/or create new products and services (therefore increasing revenue).

Diana Davis, IX Network: What do you see as the business value of process automation in manufacturing?

Fausto Artico: I can think of two main business benefits that could be derived through automation in manufacturing. These are cost reduction and the creation of new capabilities.

Cost reduction is possible thanks to process optimization, especially if you leverage DS capabilities. With DS, you can create software systems that enable equipment to adapt to changing conditions. This can be accomplished integrating automatic capabilities in their process controls, or manually by humans thanks to the help of some DS recommendation systems. Equipment will become able to stop operations if some anomalous behaviors are detected (e.g., multiple non-linear drifts could combine in non-beneficial ways even if each one of the single sensors shows its parameter moving inside existing and approved operating equipment ranges). Settings will also be continuously modified to extend equipment uptime even if wear and tear will progressively take its toll. This is necessary to ensure that: production will not stop; quality may start to deteriorate but will be high enough to pass the tests related to batch release; and new pieces of equipment will be able to be ordered to be ready in inventory for when the DS solutions predict the equipment will fail, independently of how setting modifications may attempt to compensate.

Furthermore, considering the huge availability of data and its integration, the creation of ground-breaking solutions never before tried can be tackled and can possibly generate new capabilities that would be difficult to replicate by other companies. This would allow your teams to generate competitive, sustainable and long-term advantage for your organization.

However, while cost reduction can be achieved focusing initially on bottlenecks in the supply chain or equipment and therefore be executed and industrialized in less than 9 months, ground-breaking solutions require more end-to-end data integration and could require longer time-frames (e.g., from 1 to 2 years). This is especially true if the solution is not about a new product or service but needs to fix a critical, long-term, complex problem afflicting your organization and the problem is characterized by possibly multiple, unknown root causes related to each other in non-linear ways.

Diana Davis, IX Network: How can better BPM aid decision-making?

Fausto Artico: Better BPM facilitates decision-making and reduces human error because the more data gets integrated end-to-end and processes get automated, the faster people can agree with each other thanks to the sharing and use of a common infrastructure for analysis. Furthermore, when decisions need to be taken and/or hypotheses generated and verified, everybody will be able to use the same holistic data view produced by data mapping and data engineering activities.

Thanks to BPM, the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loops become much faster and more reliable, increasing the probability of success of projects and therefore your ability to create business benefits. Faster OODA loops, supported by Agile, DevOps and HA practices, will not only accelerate decision-making but will also allow you and your organization to quickly integrate and/or modify your processes in hours or days instead of months or weeks. This is especially true if your decisions create even more DS and HA capabilities that get integrated into your ecosystems because the integration generates additional synergetic accelerating effects. If integration is not straight-forward because of regulations and/or equipment manufacturers’ reasons (e.g., the manufacturers do not provide open-source code or are not willing to let you modify the process controls of their equipment), you can implement and automate standalone recommendation systems to support human decision-making activities.

Diana Davis, IX Network: Where do you see companies often going wrong when they try to move to a more data driven approach to accelerate BPM?

Fausto Artico: I notice that often companies initiate very big and risky projects. This can be for different reasons but both, big and risky, create some challenges that can be difficult to overcome in later stages of the projects if the people involved are not aware and do not address them from the start.

A big project requires a lot of thought because it is usually characterized by many components and has many dependencies. I would prefer to start small, design solutions that are performant, flexible, reliable and portable, and next continue to build and extend them, organically generating larger and larger systems. However, if that is not possible for your organization and you need to go full blast from day one, then what I advise is to plan in ways that allow you and your teams to build highly modular and easy to integrate sub-systems. In doing so, if something fails, you can hopefully at least deliver some sub-systems and next integrate them as much as possible with existing ones to provide new capabilities. This would generate some business benefits, even if partial ones. Keep in mind that, while these partial benefits may not compare with what could have been achieved with the successful delivery of a whole project, they can nevertheless be huge.

A risky project is a project that tries to accomplish something that somebody never tried before. When you know that some other organization has successfully delivered a project, you at least know that it is technically feasible and you can therefore check if internally you think you have the right processes and infrastructures to achieve the same kind of feat before taking a go/not go decision for the project. But if you are really the first, you will have to explore a fair amount of new territory and the risk associated with such types of activities is very different from the one associated with leveraging and integrating multiple existing products or technologies. If your organization needs to create something ground-breaking and never before tried, I advise you to create the project with multiple outcomes and plans in ways that make possible quick pivots and opportunistic developments. In this way, you can potentially achieve multiple end goals (e.g., generate multiple products or services), and if some of them fail, at least have one or more of them succeed in ways that are still highly beneficial and generate a huge positive present net value for the organization.

Diana Davis, IX Network: How do you instill an organizational culture that puts data driven decision-making at its heart?

Fausto Artico: Start small and grow from there. If your organization is not used to being a data driven organization, you need to discover some low-hanging fruits that are easy to pick and on which it would be quick to work on in ways that produce significant business benefits. After your initial successes, the enthusiasm inside your organization will start to soar. This will make it possible to release additional rounds of funds for you and your teams so that you will be able to tackle more complex and long-term DS initiatives.

Create strategies that allow you and your teams to de-risk project discovery and execution. Create plans that minimize downside risks but have potentially big upsides from the business point of view. As the number of your bigger successes increases and the number of failures remains low or only required a small amount of wasted resources, more people will see you and your teams as leaders and will want to collaborate. Furthermore, leveraging the disciplines described, you will demonstrate to the whole organization how a synergy can be formed between them to facilitate and accelerate data driven decision-making in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago.

A full copy of this interview is available for download here.

Disclaimer

Views expressed are purely personal and do not reflect the views or thoughts of any organization the speaker may be affiliated or associated with. Furthermore, although Use Cases and discussions are not directly related to any specific company, are derived from the speaker’s experience and explore topics in abstract ways broadly applicable across industry domains, some hypothetical or real examples may be used to better communicate the main points in a succinct and practical way.

Interested in Learning More?

Join Fausto and other global business experts December 1-2, 2021 at our online BPM in Manufacturing. In this highly engaging case study driven event, you will learn from the best in the business how – when it’s done well and at the right scale – BPM can accelerate operational processes, reduce process costs, increase margins, optimize asset performance, and improve the customer experience.

This is a unique opportunity where you will be free to ask all the questions you wish while fully immersed in a lively community of people who are exploring ways of doing new things with new technologies or automating old activities in new ways. Sign up for free at www.ixnetwork.com.