Promapp’s business process mapping (BPM) is helping the Affinity Education Group to enable each staff member to make a positive difference to the care of its precious customers.
Promapp invited media and analysts to a briefing on its implementation into the Affinity Education Group (AEG) founded in 2013. AEG is a privately held provider of early childhood education, owning and operating more than 160 childcare centres in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia.
Prior to implementing Promapp, AEG had seen a period of rapid growth and a series of company acquisitions bringing many new staff into the business. This resulted in a disconnect across its centres, with process knowledge managed through a variety of manual methods including Visio, Word, shared drives, email, SharePoint and Dropbox.
Dr Feras Abou Moghdeb, Business Excellence Manager at Affinity Education Group, said, “Ultimately, there was a lack of visibility across the business. To correct the situation and bearing in mind that our child-care staff are not typically strong IT users, we concluded that we needed a solution which was simple to use yet effective and would empower every employee to review and update a process at their own moment of need, wherever they might be located. “
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“Ideally, what was required was a simple, standards-based business process management tool through which central management could clearly communicate policies and procedures to support staff in the field, and which would put content at the fingertips of the users.”
Following a comprehensive review, Promapp was deployed throughout AEG over the past 12 months. Moghdeb said that the initial brief to him (as a consultant) was to write “about” 25 processes. Clearly, the client was not aware of the interrelationships, for example, HR may cover onboarding. OH&S, different state awards and conditions.
“Today, more than 300 processes across 40 process groups are available to users and every aspect of the business has been documented, from food and hygiene, educational activities, marketing and sales, accounts and collections, staff management, risk and compliance to audit and finance,” he said.
AEG benefits from Promapp’s cloud-based business process mapping by ongoing process improvement, quality assurance, and risk management enabling it to create and manage business processes online. It replaces hard copy procedure manuals, it supports the important role process management and improvement play in driving innovation, staff engagement and competitive advantage.
Promapp now provides a baseline for proactive continuous improvement and knowledge that can be easily shared across the AEG business. Users can pull the content they need, when they need it, rather than relying on the organisation to push content to them. At the same time, it has created a positive impact on company culture enabling system users to gain skills and structure and providing staff with the opportunity to apply their own unique learning in the workplace, ultimately creating a positive attitude and improving their organisational contribution.
Moghdeb said, “Until processes are mapped, activities costed and volume identified, organisations really don’t realise the real cost of their day-to-day work. System simplicity in a solution such as Promapp with its estimation, data input and cost projection is key to minimising costs and ensuring a culture of continuous improvement. However, true process ownership and governance is key. Ultimately, we now have an organisation with a healthier organisational culture, better understanding between groups and stronger performance. Our departments act as one coherent body rather than multiple dysfunctional, disjointed organisations.”
“In the same way that we see endless possibilities for every child and act in a caring, nurturing way to unlock those possibilities, Promapp is enabling each and every staff member to make a positive difference to the business and its customers,” he said.
Postscript
iTWire has been watching the rapid ascent of Promapp – a small New Zealand based company that has taken on the “big boys” like IBM and ARIS downb to the dusty QA manuals littered with Visio flow charts, Word and Excel documents that are never read again.
Its cloud-based system has grown to such a scale that it runs Uber’s global complaint resolution department and more than 500 clients in Australia and New Zealand. It now has offices in London and US – the latter market is its focus for growth. Many of Australia’s local government use it and collectively share a best practice process cloud.
Co-founder Ivan Seselj has developed one of the best BPM software systems that I have ever seen – and I do know the difference between good and bad and ISO compliance, and writing useless Quality manuals.
Last year’s big announcement was the addition of a business process variance module that allows a base procedure to underpin variances due to location or almost any other factor.
“Our strength is that complexity is the enemy of process. We make it almost painless to input processes and keep them alive and useful. We know the pain points and we know when Word, Excel and Visio et al simply won’t scale. When you can’t afford to muck up process you come to us,” Seselj said.
He added, “Maybe it is the way we Kiwi’s do things – straightforward, uncomplicated. Promapp has at its roots to take processes that humans already do and make them easier and more consistent. All we ask is how our clients do stuff.”
