Choosing MEGA

Christel Loitron was convinced that a unique vendor would be needed to manage the tool, the method and the support. The pilot project describing processes within the information system revealed that MEGA was able to elicit constructive and organizational ideas through modelling. “We don’t improvise,” notes Christel Loitron, who doesn’t want to limit herself to the processes. “We use methodological tools. We must use the tool to perpetuate the initiative and to keep it viable.”

Implementation

A project was launched to expand the information system. It began in 2005 and started with a process-based approach. The project involved aligning the information system based on the development of a chequer board strategy. Christel Loitron took charge of this strategy and applied it inside the company to model the operation. “We then defined the value creation fields as well as the processes involved in creating value.” MEGA entered the picture at that stage. From 2005 to 2007, Christel Loitron continued managing this initiative. She applied it to the business processes and to all IT processes. She created a dedicated business process team within the IS department in order to streamline and strengthen the business needs within the IT project team. In terms of resources, they needed a full-time person for a few months in order to implement the methodology.

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MARAD Manages Diverse Maritime Issues

The Maritime Administration (MARAD) improves and strengthens the marine transportation system to meet the country’s economic and security needs. It focuses on port development, intermodal water and land transportation, environmental activities, maritime security, and support of the shipbuilding industry. MARAD operates the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy to educate young men and women for service in the American merchant marine, the U.S. armed forces, and in the nation’s marine transportation system, and provides financial assistance to six state maritime academies. MARAD’s diverse activities range from deepwater port licensing to inland waterways research to cargo handling programs, and more.

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MEGA International is Choice for MARAD’s Enterprise Architecture Solution

The agency quickly established the criteria for the EA solution: data repository, secure model (many users, access), modeling tools, simulation, flexibility, and multiple and flexible access to data in the repository. MARAD evaluated potential solutions from various vendors.

“MEGA International was selected because it comprehensively addressed MARAD’s needs and provided the best value,” noted Jason Kruse, Stanley Associates, who supported MARAD’s IT management on this project.

The MEGA Modeling Suite, the industry’s leading and most comprehensive EA software, helps organizations analyze and plan their business so they can react to changes quickly and anticipate trends in their markets. The software modules provide a complete view of the processes of the organization, and the technology that supports it. It helps companies understand the effects of change before implementation, and reduces unknowns, delays, and costs.

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Agency Solves Challenges in Agriculture, the Environment, and Health

CSREES is an important agency within the USDA, the leading federal bureau on food, agriculture, and natural resources issues. CSREES advances knowledge for agriculture, the environment, human health, and communities by supporting research and education through a grants program of $1.2 billion each year. These grants go to thousands of recipients for research and education in some 60 program areas.

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Need to Understand and Manage Processes and Information

Because CSREES administers such a large grants program, it became more essential to fully document the entire process, which is quite complex. However, CSREES had a very basic enterprise architecture that did not provide a comprehensive picture of the agency’s efforts and most records were still on paper.

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EA Solution to Meet Stringent Criteria

With well-defined criteria, CSREES conducted an evaluation of EA software products from the major providers to federal government agencies. After the review, CSREES selected the MEGA Modeling Suite as its EA solution, to help the agency align its technical infrastructure and support systems with the functions and services provided to constituents. CSREES uses five of the modules from the MEGA Modeling Suite: MEGA Process, MEGA Architecture, MEGA Designer, MEGA Publisher, and MEGA Exchange.

CSREES selected MEGA International because of the company's ability to meet the defined criteria and provide a complete, cost-effective solution of software, training, and consulting, and the full breadth of EA modeling, reporting, and impact analysis.

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"In order to begin implementation during the specification phase, one of the crucial steps was to proceed immediately in the right direction, because this phase was only six months long,” notes Jean-Luc Peisner.

To handle these structuring choices, the Malakoff Group decided to rely on the modeling tool and MEGA’s expertise for establishing methodological guidelines at the start of the project.

There were three Preliminary Steps:

• Develop a modeling guide,
• Create teams,
• Organize workshops by type of procedure.
  
  

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Health Plans Converge with Differing Systems

Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield is part of a $4 billion family of companies that finances and delivers health care services across upstate New York, including the major cities of Syracuse, Elmira, Rochester, Utica, and Buffalo. As New York state’s largest nonprofit health plan, the organization provides health insurance to more than 2 million people, and employs more than 6,000 New Yorkers.

It is the result of a merger of several health organizations serving upstate New York. Following the merger, Excellus found that there were few enterprise architecture (EA) standards embraced by all of the previously independent entities. The company formed a group within the IT department to focus on EA as it consolidated business and IT systems and reduced the amount of technical diversity within the organization. With multiple platforms and environments, it was extremely challenging to create smoothly running, cohesive business procedures, without a clear understanding of what processes and systems were serving each organization. Many of these legacy systems, some in place for 30+ years, didn’t have adequate documentation, so there were parts of the systems that were completely unknown.

“Before making sweeping policy or platform decisions, we recognized the importance of identifying all company functions and the processes used to implement them,” explained Eric Stephens, enterprise architect, Enterprise Architecture and Integration Team at Excellus. “This was the first step in our effort to reduce duplicate processes that were a normal result of the merger. We had to develop single systems for claims processing, provider contracting, member registration, and more, but could not do that until we fully understood and mapped the existing processes".

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Complex High-Technology Company Requires Enterprise Architecture Modeling

GeoEye specializes in advanced geospatial imagery processing capabilities, and maintains a robust image archive covering some 160 million square miles, and an international network of regional ground stations. With three earth imaging satellites, it gathers map-accurate imagery for national security, mapping, local government planning, and natural resources and environmental monitoring. Customers include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), foreign governments who use imagery for their own national and economic security, resellers, and even Microsoft, and Yahoo!, who purchase satellite imagery for online mapping services.

The acquisition of Colorado-based Space Imaging in early 2006, coupled with the new compliance regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley, made it increasingly important to document company processes and how people, functions, and departments interact. GeoEye did not want to rely on manual means and recollections of employees, or duplicate records and processes. While some functions were being performed at GeoEye, none were documented and there was no formal internal auditing. However, the acquisition of another company, with duplicate roles and responsibilities, and the evidence required by Sarbanes-Oxley, made it necessary to quickly develop a structure to support these efforts.

This became an opportunity to develop a corporate-wide enterprise architecture (EA), tailored to meet the needs of Sarbanes-Oxley and ISO compliance, and create a foundation to document other, future processes to increase the efficiency of company operations.

“We needed a solution that would allow us to represent roles and responsibilities, document operations, and portray risks, policy and operational controls, and control objectives,” explained Hugh Klipp, director of business process management. “We wanted to relate all of these together in a way that would address the unique portions of each and every process.”

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MEGA helps the Pierburg Group create value by optimizing its business processes. The German car parts manufacturer Pierburg selected MEGA to design and implement a common process management system for all its factories (the DRIVE project).

Pierburg is part of Kolbenschmidt Pierburg AG the automotive unit of the Rheinmetall Group. With annual sales exceeding 900 million euros, Pierburg is one of the leading suppliers of components for automotive industry. Its factories and customers are found on every continent, from Asia to North and South America and Europe. "Each car manufacturer has different business processes. It is not easy to work with and integrate all these entities", says Dr. Karl Wübbeke, Business Unit Director at Pierburg.We are able to manage complex systems. To be sucessful,it is however important to know how to manage complex processes."

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Eurofactor, the Crédit Agricole group's factoring subsidiary, has successfully brought off its merger with Transfact, one of the results of Crédit Agricole's takeover of Crédit Lyonnais. The company, a member of the IFG (International Factors Group), is now the leading factoring firm in France (23% market share) and one of the largest in Europe. It offers some twenty different packages built around three modular B2B services: invoice factoring, bad debt protection, and customer account management.

Against a backdrop of steady growth, different business cultures and practices, and an ever-changing business environment, Eurofactor is aiming to procure the keys for rapid response with a minimal outlay – as well as keeping ahead of the competition. "One of the levers for reaching this goal is to speak the same business language, and that means process convergence," said Josephine Munte, Eurofactor's Organization Director.

Three-stage project
For this process-based approach, Eurofactor called on MEGA's tools, especially MEGA Process, which enabled it to analyze, identify, model and document the firm's processes and organization. Process convergence began in 2002 and involved three main stages:
1. The "Process Management" project: getting to know the processes.
2. Starting in November 2004, the "Leader Together" project: deploying the target organization.
3. The "Netsys" project, launched in 2006: redesigning the processes to support growth and establish a new information system across the group.

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The approach that the group selected involved working on its infrastructure and processes early into the project before implementing the MEGA tool. “The MEGA tool was consistent with our vision of the world”, explains the mapping project manager. “The tool is indispensable, especially because it allows for the mapping of business processes and the alignment of the process perspective with IT systems.” This initial formalization stage took place on three levels: (1) at the process level, it consisted of validating target business processes; (2) at the application level, it consisted of defining the data collection elements, collecting the data, entering it into the MEGA tool; (3) at the infrastructure level, it consisted of defining specific concepts.

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The project lasted 6 months and assembled, under the supervision of the Project Manager, a team comprised of a MEGA consultant, several process managers,and the Delegate Project Manager who has an overall perspective of both project requirements and GRTgaz; this is the role of Denis Roy.

MEGA Process is valuable as a tool for rigorous modeling of the enterprise, its flexibility of use, the ease with which it can be shared within a team and its capacity for saving time (a half day of work to reconfiguring two processes with MEGA, instead of several months of discussion).

As for the MEGA team, Denis Roy recognizes -in addition to its understanding of the MEGA Process tool-, “a proven modeling method that applies to numerous situations, offering a consistent approach that forces people to ask good questions, and a rapid immersion into customer problem solving”.

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Application mapping and implementation of a process repository in the retirement funds sector

Over the past few years, we have observed a large-scale movement to federate social welfare groups and converge retirement information systems, whereby the objective is to simplify the monitoring and payment of retirement benefits. The “Usine Retraite” project is part of this movement. This project is designed to create a single, shared administrative management application for these various systems. The organizations participating in the project have formed different Economic Interest Groups (EIGs), each of which responsible for developing one or more components or “bricks” of the future software.

The overall architecture of the future unified system is based on a divided into consistent functional units, reusing the services offered by the different EIGs and their interoperability. In addition, this architecture simplifies application maintenance and allows for a high level of reactivity to changes in regulations.

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GIE Cent chose MEGA to support the process of modeling the DN brick

The “DN Brick” project really started at the end of 2005 with a requirements identification phase. At the same time, the GIE Cent conducted a study on the implementation of a structure and chose MEGA to support the process of modeling the DN brick IT application.

The project started with the launch of a pilot study at the beginning of 2006 designed to validate the diagrams and create a methodological guide for the process.
In February 2006, the specification phase began, using a top-down approach, starting with the functional urbanization plan, corresponding to the highest level, involving the “neighborhood” concept (first-level urbanization zone), business processes and sub-processes, and ending with the unit services. This division into business processes provides a customer-oriented view, which is essential for encouraging internal communication and allowing the system to evolve.

A process is described through its implementation diagram, representing how the process occurs through a sequence of procedures performed by structure-type internal players.
The process for each procedure is represented by a flowchart (total of 15 flowcharts). The flowchart describes the sequence of operations initiated following the receipt of one or more messages and performed by players according to their positions (profile or information systems).

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The result is a new organizational model for the management of internal standards according to a process-dependent approach providing end-users with continuously available upgraded information and the instructions needed for guidance in business decision-making. Full support is given to the operational capabilities of the subsidiaries, with support from standardized procedures.

The result is substantial returns in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, improving not only CRM but the induction of new staff.

BPVN maps the processes by matching to regulatory standard requirements

“The new Organization Module for Management of Regulatory Standards,” according to Vittorio Corsano, Project Manager, Process Integration and Organization for the BPVN Group, “developed a project at year-end 2004 that built on the process mapping begun at group headquarters in 2002 and that achieved a number of strategic objectives, “developed a project at year-end 2004 that built on the process mapping begun at group headquarters in 2002 and that achieved a number of strategic objectives. Among these were the merger between Banco Popolare di Novara and Banca Popolare di Verona, and the attainment of the Basel 2 requirements in operating risks. Focusing a new project on internal standards, and even more so on the specific scope of the management and structuring of business-critical knowledge, was a factor determining our commitment to an IS that supported the day-to-day operations of the subsidiaries and staff, hence improving our customer service.”

Mario Togni, Organisational Manager, Gruppo dell’Istituto Veronese, adds:

“The standards and obligations laid down by Basel 2 have an important impact on group processes, and thereby directly affect its operational capability, because they require the identification and monitoring of the internal processes used to control operating risk. Other obligations arise from the standards envisaged for the internal control system by the Institute of Vigilance as required under D.Lgs. 231/01, the Code of Self-discipline for the banks in the Group. It was necessary to identify an efficient management mode for this extensive corpus of standards and place them in the context of the business processes involved, while also taking into account the need for continuous updating. All this had to be transformed into a standardized operational instrument for the subsidiaries, accessible to all.”

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No one will ever forget the catastrophes experienced by Enron in the United States, Bhopal in India, Perrier worldwide, Parmalat in Italy or AZF in Toulouse. Each of these cases had a significant macroeconomic impact on stock prices, oil prices, high-risk insurers, consumer confidence and all of the major international balances. Companies try to manage these types of catastrophes by implementing their own “Disaster Recovery Plan”, while countries create legislature to minimize the impact of the macroeconomic and political risks created by these disasters. With this in mind, Gartner cited more than eighty European laws related to risk management, such as Basel II, Solvency II as well as Financial Security Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). But just identifying the risks is not enough. “To manage operational risks, we must manage the processes,” explained François Tabourot, Managing Director of MEGA.

This is the approach used by Crédit Lyonnais. “We agreed to work on our processes, and for more than a year now, the bank has been organized by type of process,” explained Michel Raquin, a process organization manager appointed by the LCL General Management. “All production of products and services is based on a process”. It can be described as a chain of activities that works to provide «end-to-end» customer service, from the moment the customer’s need is stated until that need is met. This chain of activities extends through multiple business lines and business units of the company (branches, decision-making centers, middle office, back office, etc.).


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