Business process management firm aids KBA-Giori to streamline processes, improve customer service
Cary, NC — October 24, 2005 — KBA-Giori, one of the world's largest press manufacturers, today said it has selected Ultimus' BPM Suite for its process automation needs.
KBA has a track record of over 30 years of continuous operation, however, to maintain its market share in the industry, KBA found it necessary to capitalize on more than the reliability of the printing machines. The company made a corporate-wide decision to trim its processes to be more responsive to customer demand and focus on superior customer service. In order to meet both of these corporate objectives, KBA decided to introduce BPM as a platform to model, automate, manage and optimize key processes.
KBA said it decided to use the Ultimus BPM Suite because it supports users in every phase of business process life cycles. The solution enables employees to take part in the process via the Internet, facilitating the design of processes, while at the same time meeting KBA's strict security requirements.
Additionally, the Ultimus BPM Suite is capable of integrating with KBA's existing IT environment, providing a number of out-of-the-box interfaces that enabled efficient integration into the existing IT infrastructure.
"Ultimus' various modules support our users in every phase of the business process life cycle; from discovery, modeling and optimization through development, integration and implementation to usage, management and measurement of business processes," said Andreas Sternecker, head of Product Center Security Machines from Modling. "We needed a solution that would tie our multiple locations together via a flexible Web interface. The Ultimus BPM Suite, with its interface for process modeling and end-user participation, process measurement and report generation, made the selection an obvious choice."
Carsten Melz, general manger, CentreCon, said that the first process recommended for automation was the KBA Inquiry, a spare part request process, due to it being a delicate and relevant process to customer satisfaction. Previously, the process began with an inquiry for parts, assembly or technical analysis to KBA Wurzburg by fax, Melz said. If the machine had not been produced in Wurzburg, the request was forwarded to KBA Modling. The respective production site would then provide a quote. Since any communication between the different sites had to go through KBA Wurzburg, routes often became complicated and bottlenecks were inevitable. At the same time, communication through fax was extremely time- and paper-consuming."
Now, with Ultimus, the cycle times of the processes have been reduced from a couple of weeks to hours. The process decides who will be the recipient of the next step. Besides defining the completion and extension time by choosing the priority of the request, all mandatory fields are identified as needing to be completed before submitting the process to the next step. All the important information is then automatically transferred to the host system.
The system also assists the process participants by pre-populating forms with information on customers, the machines and the prices for spare parts. Providing signature controls guarantee the legitimacy of quotations and approvals, Ultimus said.
"The benefits of process automation have been visible for KBA. Transparency has been immensely improved and quality has been upgraded, as human errors have been eliminated," said Karl Freiheit, general manager Ultimus, EMEA. "Above all, cycle times have been reduced. This allowed KBA to become very responsive and has extended its competitive advantage. Most importantly, customer service has been improved, as quotes now are with the customer in one day."
Due to the initial success KBA has experienced with Ultimus, the company plans to automate additional processes to realize higher efficiency and to speed up processes to further improve customer satisfaction. In teaming up with CentreCon, a German consultancy for workflow and lifecycle management, KBA will move their corporate processes to the electronic environment, integrating the platform into the corporate IT infrastructure.
