Process Automation is a critical way for organizations to take control of their business by aligning projects, automating tasks and increasing efficiency. By using process automation across an organization, it can not only help to unite the Business and IT units, but also deliver solutions faster thanks to agile development methodologies which drive continuous improvement. That’s what this post is all about – taking an agile approach to digital transformation.
ManpowerGroup is one of the largest staffing firms in the world, placing 600,000 people into new jobs every day. Following rapid expansion at ManpowerGroup Portugal, they replaced their patchwork IT infrastructure with a DPA system that automated processes and reduced administration effort by 90%.
As businesses grow and expand, it’s only expected that internal complexities will develop. Complexities between employees and departments, and hardware and software are common. It can be tempting to take a rip and replace approach, implementing a new system to erase the problems.
But installing a whole new system is an expensive and extensive project. Instead, you can select a wraparound solution, that brings together your patchwork IT systems and processes. From there you can document business process and even start to bring in automation like RPA and intelligent systems, such as AI.
A myriad of legacy applications in your IT infrastructure is a common problem for growing businesses, particularly those who acquire other businesses and have to absorb additional IT applications. This was the case for ManpowerGroup, who acquired four businesses in 5 years, more than tripling the company’s size.
As a result, they had lots of different IT systems and processes, such as administration, payroll, and paperwork, that needed to be merged and managed if they wanted to continue business growth and help their employees to be efficient.
ManpowerGroup selected to work with Bizagi in an effort to extract maximum value from legacy systems. “We took the option a few years ago of not investing so much in ERP, CRMs, and applicant tracking system. Instead, we put all our business processes inside Bizagi,” said Head of Finance and Administration, Rui Dinis.
“WE HAVE TECHNOLOGICALLY TRANSFORMED THE COMPANY IN TERMS OF APPLICATIONS, WITH DPA OR THE BIZAGI PLATFORM BEING THE HEART OF THE ENTIRE BUSINESS PROCESS OPTIMIZATION.”
In doing so, Rui and his team united silos and legacy systems and put business processes in place to better support their clients in Portugal, which is part of the wider ManpowerGroup network of 400,000 clients across 80 countries.
By applying digital process automation, process times were significantly reduced, with some being up to five times quicker. For example, contract production for associates was reduced from 4 days to just half a day. This also freed up employee time so that non-value tasks were automated, and their time could be better spent on value-add tasks while balancing their workload and helping customers. Within ManpowerGroup, employees’ email and Excel workload was reduced up to 90% in some departments.
Taking a DPA approach to their digital transformation, ManpowerGroup has been able to develop continuous improvements to their processes with agile experimentation when building and automating processes in a ‘plan, do, act, check’ approach.
Based on the Bizagi Spark methodology, ManpowerGroup operated on a philosophy that quick and small wins trump slow and big fails. Taking the big bang approach and trying to boil the ocean is a very common mistake that organizations make when trying to transform. The agile experimentation approach adopted by ManpowerGroup meant that Dinis and his team could work in short, iterative cycles, delivering meaningful results quickly, then iterating processes quickly, as and when required.
The name Bizagi stands for ‘Business Agility’ and the platform itself is all about supporting exactly that way of working. By using BPMN as a common language, the business and IT units at ManpowerGroup developed a mutual understanding and worked together using business processes and workflows to achieve their outcome.
Within the first two years of deploying Bizagi, ManpowerGroup automated 3 new processes every 2 months and optimized processes to reduce time and increase efficiency. Some processes were up to five times quicker, reduced from 16 hours to just three hours to complete. The processes were all mapped and documented, which also put effective performance indicators in place for the business.
If you would like to hear Dinis share more details about how he used Bizagi to enable agile digital transformation at ManpowerGroup, you can watch his presentation given at Bizagi Catalyst – our annual global community conference:
