Business process mapping project – $5 billion in savings

It is easy to dismiss process mapping as something you do to try and understand the business. But then you get on with the real work – building stuff. We’ve been standing on our soapbox shouting for 20+ years about the power of process mapping as the enabler and guidance for change. Here is yet another example.

Disclaimer: They are not an Elements customer but this is what the Elements platform can deliver.

Tesco the grocer in the UK is embarking on a company-wide capture and digitisation of its business processes in a bid to find cost and time-saving opportunities. The work – which will take up to three years to complete – will allow the retailer to remove duplication of its processes, and excise unnecessary sign-offs and approvals.

They expect to see a 7% reduction in operating costs – that is over $5 billion

“It’s massive,” said Jason Dietz, head of global process architecture at Tesco. “A huge, huge journey. All documentation was analogue, or on people laptops, on share drives, sometimes just the expertise of the people executing the process,” said Dietz. “We had to bring it all together and bring it to life.

Functions within the business will increasingly be able to “see their entire business laid out, from high level to granular detail” and identify opportunities for improvement. The visibility is also giving Tesco’s leadership team more “confidence” in their decision-making.

“When you can really see what you’re doing and understand what you do at a granular level, it’s that confidence you’ve got control,” said Dietz. “When you’re working with massive business areas, with diverse teams in different regions, it allows you to be bolder in what you do.”

The resulting process maps would be used at executive level to view high level business models and by management to see their function’s ways of working.  “When you have a really good understanding of the processes end to end you start to ask different questions,” said Dietz. “And from those different questions there’s new solutions we can look at.”

Process maps in the form of procedure guides and workplace instructions will take the form of a ‘store portal’, which will give colleagues in stores access in user-friendly ways, with no skillset or training, all intuitive, on a handheld device. It will be used when they “need to get the answer quickly and effectively in a busy store with customers around” Dietz explained. “That’s one of our really big value adds we’re looking for in this,” he added.

 

Source: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/technology-and-supply-chain/tesco-undertaking-massive-process-mapping-project/653578.article