Anatomy of a process mapping workshop

Many tools are in use for representing and analyzing business processes, but little information is available on how these tools are used in practice by process design teams. This paper analyzes one process mapping workshop in detail. Over three days, two facilitators and five representatives of the organization and business functions redesigned the core auto insurance business at a mid-size Swiss insurance company. The mapping tool used during the session was IDEF0. The purpose of this paper is to share our experiences in using IDEF0 in the workshop setting. In addition to a narrative description of the workshop, we offer our observations on how such workshops can be conducted effectively and on the strengths and weaknesses of IDEF0 in this context. The final business process map did not emerge from a logical, linear development process. Rather, the workshop was characterized by constant refinement and development of an existing structure, punctuated by an occasional radical idea that forced the group to throw out the current process and start over. The hierarchical approach of IDEF0 proved critical in keeping the group focused on its task of abstracting the essence of the process itself from the details of current practice. The mapping tool proved to be less convenient for representing a sequence of events in time, multiple cases, and conditional flows of work. The setting Secura Insurance is a mid-size, all-lines Swiss insurance company, with annual premium income of $350 million, or approximately 1.6 per cent of the Swiss insurance market. Secura was started in 1959 by the MIGROS business empire. MIGROS, which was founded in 1925 by Gottlieb Duttweiler, is a unique Swiss institution. Originally begun as an effort to provide low-cost food staples to the rural population, it has grown over the years to dominate Swiss retail food sales with a market share around 25 per cent. It has also branched out into banking, insurance, general retailing, travel, communications, education, and other businesses. In 1993, Secura undertook an ambitious effort to redesign its business processes and to introduce workflow management technology (Blaser and Meiler, 1996). Pilot projects were carried out with two software integrators, IBM and UNISYS. The winning firm was UNISYS, which planned to use the Staffware workflow engine, also called Staffware, on this project. However, the software had to be converted to the OS/2 operating system for compatibility with Secura's existing systems infrastructure. The resulting system failed to perform adequately and was eventually abandoned. This failure was owing to a combination of technical problems (involving Smalltalk and OS/2) and conflicts between the two separate teams involved in the implementation, one The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com