A huge dairy cooperative in the US, which supplies the
likes ofWal-Mart, Safeway and Costco, has
taken hold ofWeb 2.0 technologyin order to
reengineer its whole business.
In particular, the organisation's usage of wiki-style online
collaboration tools has helped to streamline all of its business
processes, from distribution and logistics through to support and
services.
Tillamook County Creamery Association is a 100 year-old
cooperative made up of more than 150 farmer-owned dairies, and
employing over 600 people in total.
The business produces high-end dairy products, including more
than a dozen cheeses, butter, yoghurts and smoothies. It does this
at two manufacturing plants in Oregon, at Tillamook and
Boardman.
In late 2007, Steve Burge, the firm's IT director since 2001,
was appointed head of the newly created Business Process Management
Office, set up specifically to overhaul the organisation's business
processes.
Up until January 2008, the firm lacked proper IT systems and
infrastructure, said Burge. It used more than 30 different legacy
systems with customised interfaces. It relied on "paper based
business intelligence, plus spreadsheets or Word documents" but
also "napkins, or any method of getting information back and forth
between the business units", said Burge.
The business had built up a lot of "tribal knowledge", with
silos of information about the way business procedures were
operated.
"Smoke clouds were going backwards and forwards between business
units, and we did not really understand what the processes were, as
they had been handed down over the generations."
Change came with the arrival of a new chief executive officer,
who identified that IT could bring massive efficiencies to
Tillamook in the form of business process management (BPM).
He gave Burge and his IT team his backing to investigate Web 2.0
technology, to see how it could be used to identify, capture and
optimise the firm's "tribal knowledge", and drive down inaccurate
information.
Tillamook examined several applications, including diagramming
tool Microsoft Visio - which the firm found too complicated for its
needs - but eventually chose Lombardi Blueprint.
Blueprint is a browser-based, collaborative, process-planning
tool, designed for non-technical as well as technical users. The
application itself is Java-based, built using the Google web
toolkit.
In Tillamook's case, it is hosted and managed by Lombardi
through Mosso, a cloud computing service provider owned by hosting
giant Rackspace.
Burge said the business wanted a tool that was simple to use and
visual, but also powerful enough to help identify and document the
firm's business processes, so they could be re-architected.
During the first half of 2008, Blueprint helped Tillamook to
identify key process problems, and analyse their potential impact
on the strategic goals of the business.
By July, Tillamook had created a master document, in Microsoft
Excel, from the information Blueprint had unearthed. This included
a prioritised list of improvement projects, detailing the value
proposition of each one.
Work covered every area of the business, including high level
strategy, distribution, inventory and logistics, manufacturing the
products, support and services, and managing customer
relationships.
Tillamook initially trained 21 members of the IT team to use
Blueprint, and they formed the "business process improvement team".
They worked online with other people from the business on their
particular business processes.
The browser-based, wiki-like interface enabled users to work
from any location, and collaborate over large distances. In total,
there were 150 Blueprint users.
Each team member used the online tool to create business process
maps and workflows. Blueprint uses outlining - similar to outlining
in Powerpoint - to quickly create a document process. It also has
flexible layouts and automatic diagram generation, plus an online
chat feature.
The process creators shared their online process documents with
the other "stakeholders" in the business, to ensure all the
processes were detailed and correct.
Steve Burge said users struggled to start with as they had never
done anything like this before. But he added that they quickly took
to the interface.
In addition, users could export processes to Microsoft
Powerpoint, which meant that half of the Blueprint users did not
have to be trained extensively. Instead, they could look at the
workflows, and get a print out of just the "discovery map", for
example.
The result of using wiki-style software to communicate and
collaborate across the organisation has been transformational for
Tillamook County Creamery Association, said Burge.
The BPM exercise has meant that it has been able to revisit all
of its processes, measure their effectiveness, and perform root
cause analysis on problem activities.
It has also meant the firm could drastically reduce process
duplication, inaccurate data, and its usage of older IT
platforms.
But more profoundly, said Burge, it has allowed the business to
consciously move away from the traditional hierarchical view of
management, with the corporate team and chief executive officer at
the top, to a structure which is much more horizontal.