Session Information:

System Migrations: 3 Ways Process Excellence Can Make an Impact

Abstract:

System Migrations are more than just mundane IT projects. Driven as an enterprise-wide initiative, they can foster operational excellence across departments and make a real impact on the business. By cutting through the complexity and bringing processes to the forefront of these transformations, process excellence leaders can not only drive project success, but also set their processes  up for continuous improvement well after go-live. 

Key Takeaways:

• How to gain a real-time understanding of process improvement opportunities before, during, and after migration
• Data-driven strategies for change management and process adoption
• How industry leaders are using Celonis to control migration cost and scope, reduce risk, and accelerate value realization

Session Transcript:

Now, our next guest is a real treat. We have a nice, are all global product marketing manager for Salon is with us today. And then, this is going to talk about System Migrations, and three Ways Process Excellence can Make an impact. So, it's a thank you for being with you with, with us today. For those of you in the audience, an isa is a Global Product Marketing Manager at ..., where she works to align the evolution of the course, aloneness Solutions with customer needs and challenges. Her focus areas include sell only solution for system migration, along with ... automation, artificial Intelligence engine, and Action Engine capabilities. Excited to have you with us, and these are very much looking forward to your presentation.

Thank you so much, and I'm looking forward to speaking. So, let me share my screen for a second, OK, yeah, so, as Jose mentioned, my name is an Isa. I'm a Global Product Marketing Manager here at Salinas and, today, I'm going to be talking a bit about system migrations, and some of the ways that we've seen across Settlings people really make an impact and some of the considerations. You all should know, maybe as you embark on one of these really exciting, but complex and daunting projects. So before I dive into the main content, I just wanted to give a little bit of background on slowness to kind of level set about who we are, and what we do, and how we have companies more broadly before we talk specifics about system migration.

Rosie, who are not familiar with ..., we are a high growth tech company. And we have about one thousand employees, and we're headquartered in New York and Munich, Germany, but we have a presence around the world and your customers, and in every corner of the globe. And we started out many years ago as a process mining company, really focus on that process, Transparency, so helping companies get the X ray vision of their processes. And our customer saw, and obviously still see, immense value in this type of technology, is visibility into their processes. But we started to realize is that we could actually help them do more. We can actually help them improve those processes, not just, you know, get insight into them, are getting visibility into them. So, we started adding things like next best action recommendations automations into our platform. And now we offer this complete operational solution with applications that are really purpose built to help each role in the company. Actually no sense and act on their ...

... to drive overall better execution. And actually improve the results of the organization at large. So, we've actually helps with the world's leading organizations, some of their logos, or are on the screen right now, achieved some really remarkable business impacts, and we'll get to a few examples later. This access customers, you know, around the world really led to widespread recognition that as well from the analyst community, so are widely considered the leader in the market. But really at the core of what we do and what we care about is, you know, our product and how we actually help companies achieve these, how we actually help customers be successful? So how do we actually do that and what is slowness actually do? So as I mentioned, we provide enterprise software platform and associated applications to help companies actually execute their operations more intelligently and drive an overall better outcomes. So slowness actually puts AI to work in your operations on a day-to-day basis.

So in every little and every little process. And it works in three really simple steps, I think, are really easy for everyone to understand. So the first, that's let us helps you actually know your process. So, we collect data from all of your enterprise source systems, be it your ERP, your CRM, whatever it might be.

And we reconstruct the true as, is state of those processes. So, we can see every single step of every last process in the organization, and know exactly where things are working, and where things are going wrong.

Second, we're able to actually sense, specific friction points in those processes that are preventing you from actually achieving your desired goal. So, we use AI and knowledge from over 2000 implementations of our technology to identify exactly what the root causes are. They're preventing your organization for cheating, a desired outcome. So, maybe it's on time delivery, working capital, customer satisfaction, whatever it might be. You can find those root causes Sense, exactly when things are going wrong, and then actually help you do something about it. So the last step is act. So, someone is actually helps you remove those friction points from your processes.

Either by automatically taking, you know, intelligent actions directly in your source system. So we have a full automation capability that can actually act based on these insights. Or by recommending next best actions to employees. So helping them direct those manual efforts to the right problems, to the right issues. To the right items of work. So, if something can't be automated, we can still help kind of direct the organization towards better results. And Salon is actually comes, there were 400 pre-built applications. So based on those implementations, So you can really put us to work really quickly when Whatever process that you're focused on. But today, the topic of the day is actually system migrations. So, let's just start by talking about, you know, what they are, and, you know, why, why they matter. So as you may all be familiar, a system migration is kind of a initiative where you're transforming the system landscape at the company and the associated processes with that system.

So there are a lot of reasons why this happens. A lot of people ended up migrating due to a vendor requirements. So maybe if you're an sap customer, you're about to switch to S four hana. maybe there's some kind of M&A implication that is the reason why a migration has been kicked off. So sometimes we have customers have, you know, they acquired a company, and now they have, you know, three different instances of Salesforce. They need to figure out how they're going to get to a global instance. Or maybe you're switching providers here, replatforming, or switching your vendor relationships. And now you have to move to a new technology.

Or I think the most exciting one is, I would say that, you know, you're just trying to transform your business, You're trying to make sure that the technology you're using every day, is, you know, really supporting and driving forward the processes and the business models that you need for the future. And I think, you know, what I really want to impress on everyone today is that you may think of these as IT projects, as, you know, things that it's just IT moving, moving things from one system to another.

But actually, it's this huge opportunity to actually change process and improved process and I think it's very underestimated the impact that they can actually have on, on, on your business and on your overall processes. So, why is this? Well, sister migrations, as maybe some of you know, are rarely what we would call frictionless, you know, they, they tend to have a lot of issues, and in fact, Gartner estimates that 60% of ERP migrations are perceived as having failed because they compromise the business in some way. So, they don't actually support the needs of the processes, or the users and the company. Which is obviously, you know, a huge problem, and I think really stems from this Outlook that this migration is just about the technology, It's not about the process, is not about the user's. Opens up a huge opportunity for those people, who are more process focus to really have an impact. But, secondly, even if, you know, you and your IT folks are actually able to design something that isn't a perfect fit for your processes on paper, adoption can still be a huge hurdle for a lot of companies. And, in fact, poor, a poorly managed rollout can actually delay time to value back to 70%.

What this is all really culminating in. The implementation costs are rising. So, as these, as these projects get more in, demand that become longer, they become more complicated. The cost continue to rise. Because more people are doing them and, you know, there are more complicated and demanding. And because a lot of companies kind of plan for the migration to be frictionless, they plan for it to be this.

I love a linear process where, now we're going to do these phases, and we're going to do this check, these boxes get to go live, gets a hypercar. It's gonna be great. But actually, inevitably friction usually creeps in. So things go wrong And, you know, these friction points may delay or prevent actual value realization. It's actually achieving the value that you set out to achieve in investing in this tool and the first place. So maybe it's like, you start your process, and you realize that all your processes are very non-standard across teams, across regions. And so you're a delayed, trying to figure out a harmonized everything. Or maybe you're iterating more on your process models, then you thought you would have to you, Or maybe users are discovering gaps during Go, Live, and Hypercard that you didn't expect. Or maybe they're just very slow to adopt new changes. And they're using workarounds. That's Craig, the ways there are lots of things that can go wrong.

But, one thing that we've really found amongst our customers is that a lot of these friction points that are during these transformation projects are really the result of legacy methods that are commonly used in these types of projects. So, for example, things like workshops, time studies, surveys, interviews, site visits. And obviously, these are really important tools in any transformation toolkit, but they're also very subjective. So, you know, when you're interviewing someone, you're really relying on, you know, their opinions, their memory, the politics, the organization. Maybe what they had for breakfast is influencing how they respond, and how they self report, and a top of that, they're also very costly. So, a lot of times, you know, you're paying a lot for consultants to lead on these types of activities.

You're also taking a lot of time out of your subject matter experts day to, you know, sit and workshops to participate in all of this. And at the end of that, after all that, you know, expenditure, after all that effort, you really only have this one time understanding of your process. What's going on? I think we can all, We can all agree that documentation can become out of date so quickly, and especially in a really dynamic project, wake up to migration. It's really important to, everybody know what's going on and have good information.

So, let us actually helps companies do this in a more effective and data driven way. So, we allow you to actually leverage user data coming directly from your IT systems. So, that the information you have about your process is objective. And, based on facts, not based on people's ideas about what's going on, or the opinions. And, you know, once you're using limits, you can actually quickly answer new questions about your process map, new variants understand, different aspects of what's going on. So it can really work for lots of different parts of the migration.

And, you know, since all this data is kind of coming from a live connection to your operational systems, you always have that up to date information. And you're kind of continuously optimize Azure, migration evolves as things progress. And these capabilities that I've been talking about, really help us address those streaming friction points that I highlighted at the, at the top of the presentation. So, let's talk a little bit about each one of those. So, the first thing that I like a lot of people are very, very concerned about when it comes to major migrations is the cost and scope. They're really worried that, you know, it's going to building out of control the project that never ends and gets a lot of people in trouble because of it. So, you know, these projects, sometimes they, they have budgets of hundreds of millions, if not more, so, it's really important to stick to budget and make sure that, you know, you're doing everything you can to keep everything in line.

And there are many, many reasons why projects, cost, and scope can go get out of control. But one reason that we see a lot, and one thing that you know, I think, is particularly low hanging fruit for anyone who is kind of undergoing this type of project, is an extension of this Business Process Mapping phase. I kind of alluded to it earlier, but, you know, almost every migration or transformation project starts with, you know, trying to understand the status, quo map. All of the variants in the organization, Trying to figure out what's going on. And, you know, Depending on the size of your company, this could take a year to take more and involving them millions of dollars in consulting spend weeks of productivity from your SMEs, your managers, but with long as you're actually able to reduce his face significantly.

So, we allow you to actually mine at documentation very, very quickly from user data.

And, then, you can actually export or, store those as you, please. And, this not only kind of saves you a lot of time, but also helps you ensure, quantitatively the coverage of your documentation. So, you're not just guessing that, you know, you've completed documentation that, you know, everything is counted for you. Actually know for sure, and you're able to say you know whether you want to document every single permutation of your process. Or maybe just a certain subset if you're looking to really capture those best practices. Or maybe the most common ways people use your tool, maybe you're looking to find areas to improve. So, what are the low performing variants, and what, what do we need to do differently And better, I mean, our new system. And another really important note here is that, you know, if you're planning to do more of a greenfield approach to your migration. So sort of implementing net, new, trying to have more of a clean slate in your new tool, it's still really important to understand the status quo.

So, a lot of times, maybe people wouldn't bother as much for this type of phase, because it is so costly, but I think you know, because ... lowers their lowers the cost them all the time, so much. It's so critical to actually capture any existing value in your current processes and make sure you're co-operating any learnings into your new design. So it really enables you to accurately gather requirements and make improvements to your process during such a critical time.

So, the second thing that people are quite worried about that I also mentioned at the beginning is that no issues with the designed implementation won't actually work for users, so that the technology won't actually support what the process needs and what people need.

And I think, you know, after spending years on a migration or spending millions of dollars, I think the last thing you want is for the software not to work for the business. I mean, that's, that's, that's truly crushing, crushing stuff.

So, you know, from a process perspective, if the software isn't working correctly, isn't designed correctly, there's no way you're going to be able to improve the processes, Right, Because you're gonna be stuck just trying to kind of maintain the basics, or get get to the basics of proper execution. So the traditional way this happens, right, is that, you know, all of the solution is basically designed off of that process documentation you just talked about which we know is incomplete, subjective. It's not super solid foundation to be designing off of. And then new iterations are kind of tested in a series of workshops, though, sometimes there's a big gap workshops.

So you're using the opinions and the eyes of your SMEs to actually identify issues and validate solutions to those issues. And while, obviously, having user feedback is super important for any project that they provide so much, you know, qualitative value, they can't be the only source of information. Because, you know, when they are, the only source of information is very easy to miss things. And if you miss something in this space, might not notice it until rollout until it's extremely expensive to fix it until it's actually already impacting your results. Impacting user satisfaction impacting, but lots of things that you don't want it to impact. So with slowness, you can actually go in a more systematic direction.

You're able to actually upload best practice models, or models that you've created, proposed models into the platform and actually measure how well this model fits. How your users are working. So, maybe your vendor or partners providing you with some kind of best practice that you are trying to implement, or maybe you have just designed something from scratch. Either way, you can upload it and actually see what's going on. To what extent does is actually fit how we work today and really drill down on exactly what those differences are. What are the violations, one of the deviations, and what's different from, you know, what the, how we currently work.

And this also makes it really easy to iterate, so you can you make adjustments, then re measure this exact same KPI or other KPIs, and kind of see how these changes the model, actually impact, you know, what your, what your business is doing. So, this process, which, you know, normally would take months, and, you know, the quite subjective cannot be done much shorter period of time. With a lot. Lot more thought, more accuracy, and a lot more data driven decision making that can really help guarantee that that solution is going to fit, and that you'll be able to really hit the ground running in improving processes in your new, your new world.

So, the last thing I want to talk about is user adoption. So, I think a lot of people may embark on any kind of initiative, There are always worried about change management, about users, and people in the organization are going to be very resistant to change. And all these lovely enhancements we've made, the process we've made to the solution that we've made to our business, are going to be for naught. Because people are gonna want to stick to their old ways. They're going to want to use workarounds, invent new ways to work inefficiently. And, you know, typically the way this might be handled is that users were given some training, maybe sent some sense, some firm e-mails about what they're supposed to be doing, and not supposed to be doing. And then there, and I'd love to do their jobs left to adopt. And maybe the IT team is measuring adoption in terms of, kind of system adoption, so our users active or certain processes happening in one system versus another system versus outside of the system.

But this doesn't really capture how people are using the system, and doesn't really capture how they're actually operating from a process perspective. So, are the executing the processes as they are intended to be? Are they doing things that are really putting? You know, different goals at risk. And one thing that, and, you know, this can really be problematic because if your business value isn't achieved down the road, might be hard to know why. It's like, you know, we designed for saying perfectly, people are using the new system, like, where's the, well, what's going wrong?

And one thing that someone is really helps you do is actually measure adoption. Not just of systems, but also of processes. So you can actually understand how people are actually executing on a daily basis with the process that's designed. And also you can sense when people are veering off course. So you can understand where the problematic behaviors are coming in from the user's perspective. And not only are you able to actually drill in on what's wrong, but you're actually, you can actually do something about it. And I mentioned this kind of, act, act area of our kind of methodology, and this is exactly where that comes in. And, you can actually implement these intelligent Alerts, tasks and automations help course, correct User behavior to help them, you know, really focus on you know, doing the right thing in the system. Taking the right steps. Focusing on the Right, Right, Work items. So. That they're following the process, they're using the system.

they're doing everything as correctly as as possible. And again, this is all about helping you understand the process, itself, so not just the system, but also process.

I think, you know, another really important thing to add on about this is that this kind of opens up a whole new world of opportunities for process improvement, sort of beyond Go Live. So, this kind of allows you to kick off this sort of cycle of continuous improvement where you always know the status of your process kind of in real time, and you can be constantly implementing changes, measuring how they're doing. and you know, seeing these enhancements were they have an impact on KPIs. And this is, you know, not just in the run-up to go live or right after go live, but you know ongoing, you know these a lot of these migration projects. They're very long, very costly. They're very big lift and a value realization isn't just, you know, a few months. It's it's really about setting yourself up for a whole new way of working for a whole new way of operating your business, and making sure that you have the tools to actually do that as accurately as possible.

Great. So there are a lot of customers that we have that are, you know, leveraging Salinas for sister migrations. But one really great example is a customer Schlumberger. They are a leading oil and gas company, if you're not familiar. And a few years ago, they executed and immensely complex S AP migration. I think, at the time, it was the largest asset integration on records are quite a big lift for their entire team. And they had a few really, really awesome and interesting ways and using Salon us during their migration to help them be. Are they successful? The first has to do with the first thing. I talk Jo's, controlling those migration, cost and scope. And what are the way they did this? was actually trying to improve their processes before the migration to enable smoother and faster bull Act.

So we like, we have, it's really fun analogy we like to use here. It's let us that, you know, migrating your systems is like, you know, moving houses, and, you know, you wouldn't just pack up all the garbage in your attic and ship it over to you. And you have to always go through this process before you move of going through all your belongings, you know, sending things to charity, selling things, throwing things out. Making sure that you are only taking the things you actually use, that, you know, you want to take the clothing that actually fits, because you don't want to pay a mover to move it over. You don't want to take up space and you have to pay for something to store it. And I think it's kind of similar where the system migration, right. You don't. You don't want to take anything that you don't need. And anything extra might cause problems in the migration. And, you know, streamlining things ahead of time is, you know, a huge help to actually ensuring success.

Second thing I want to talk about in this example is on the user adoption side. So, sometimes also using slowness, kind of in the hyper cafes to actually monitor adoption, like I mentioned, kind of process based adoption. So understanding how user behaviors we're conforming to the intended process flows and really getting that granular, look at how things were going, not just from the system level, but also from the process level. one really interesting thing that they did was actually kind of distributing this data to end users, so they really wanted it not just be about, you know, this is a tool that IT and processes that are using to monitor you. It's really about empowering all the employees, to understand how they're contributing to the overall goal, popping them, kind of self regulate and stay motivated.

And during this long, long process of implementing a new, a new set of systems, this is really impactful for them. And the third thing, what is ongoing optimization? So, they were also using it, kind of on an ongoing basis, to monitor their new system and really get into this mode of continuous improvement in the post deployment phase. Not only continuing to enhance stability, but also delivering value.

So, they have a whole bunch of, kind of line of business use cases where they're looking at their different processes and trying to improve the core outcomes of those different line of business processes in their new system to ensure they're getting as much value as possible and overall dispersed over the impact of them. So, they were able to save about $40 million in migration costs. And cut several months off their migration timeline, which, you know, is, is really huge for any company undergoing one of these really daunting and complex projects. And with that, I am going to pass it over to the Q&A. I'm excited to share your questions.

Very, very good, and he said, well done, good, good overview and examples of, uh, of, uh, of large migrations and issues and opportunities. So I'm going to ask you to stop sharing your presentation momentarily.

I am, I'm bringing my camera back on, and second, here.

And the first question that we have, actually, there are a number of different questions, and though I will summarize the theme is, that has to do with, let's say, an ERP implementation or ERP, some sort of migration. I mean, that's a gigantic. The type of effort, and you did a good job, comparing kind of the old, and new styles, but how, how, how. For example, when it comes to process documentation, just to start there, there are questions about, how do you actually mine, the process documentation that exists as, is a specific formats that has brought the documentation needs to exist on. And, and how do you go about mining process documentation, and to get a better understanding of the process.

Yeah, this is a really good question. I think it's this part of the process, kind of, an application, of the kind of fundamental process mining concept, Right? So, it's not about giving us your documentation in a certain format. It's us, a kind of connecting directly to your source systems, and doing it for you automatically. So being able to gather the exact right data from a wide variety of source systems. So whether that be just one ERP if you're, if you're really lucky. But, you know, a lot of our customers have a range of systems, They use their their system landscape for the patchwork. Maybe they have multiple versions of the same technology existing in different in different places.

As kind of bringing all that together in this sort of one view of your process with a unifying that data. And from there, we can actually create different visualizations and export it in different document forms. Or we actually have our, our own repository for organizing these types of processes that you can use natively. That's that's your that's your jam.

OK, so, so let's say, you know, we have PDF files, you have, dot, Word documents, all sorts of things, that, the formats that we can have process documentation, how does the system make sense out of all of that stuff, not only the different formats, but of course the content itself. Is there a level of intelligence that's built onto this or, Or these are people behind the scenes are helping the system make sense out of the process. Documentation? Tell us a little bit more about how that works.

Yeah, so, I guess the documentation itself, if that's what you're talking about, I think there are two sides to this. There's the first is the kind of automated process documentation or things. What I'm talking about, which is actually getting all the process data from your systems and making something out of it, a process mining at essentially, and then exporting it to whatever format is, now it makes sense for you. And then also storing. So, For example, you mentioned PDFs. So, if you have documentation that you want to keep in PDFs, you can also store that insulin us with our, kind of like live models or BPM models and other kind of metadata about your processes to answer the question. Yeah, I think, and I think you just mentioned. And I think the gist of it, there was a, when you talk about documentation, some people interpreted that as process documentation, not an automated process documentation, but a real key business process documentation.

And, and I think that you just made the point there that clarifies a bit. You're looking at the automated portion of the, of the documentation of the system.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, and, but this also includes this could also include, you know, getting information about how users are using kind of non traditional source system, so like Excel browsers, that kind of thing. We can incorporate that data as well. So it's, it's quite comprehensive. But yes, it is automated. And that's that's one of the big value points that you don't have to sit there and map, every little, every little activity that's happening in your organization, which is an imposter. It seems like an impossible task. This is much faster and more reliable.

That's right. That's right. And that we, you know, as you know, a large system implementations and migrations, one of the one of the biggest challenges is there, you have so many critical business processes. There are not clearly defined. There are there are somewhat undefined or they are not standardized, and there are different Trump rotations about what's going on. And you alluded to that a bit back. To us a little bit more about how process mining can help in environments like that, where there is not really a standardized process. There are different opinions about how the process is actually run, and so, if you can unpack a bit more on how, how, having you know, a process mining engine, for lack of a better word, helps with, with, with that.

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that is actually the perfect scenario to actually be using a tool like this. You know, if you had, if you, if you had low complexity and no, no, open questions, maybe it's a, It's, you know, you don't need this, but I think, for most companies, it's like, It's exactly what you said. It's like, there's so many different variations are so many different intersecting business processes. Everyone has their own opinion, I think I've talked to some of our customers, who refer to it as like their urban legends and myths about how different things work. And if you ask, one person, they say, one thing, you asked another person, say Another thing? Or, There's regional variations, and I think this does Exactly, That it gives you some kind of firm foundation source of truth about what's actually going on, objectively, to, you know, at least, start you off.

Like, it's not to say that people's, you know, opinions aren't valid or that's not good information to have, that, You know, maybe that kind of qualitative data. But it's, I think it's really important to start with that foundation of what's really going on in the system. How are people actually using it? How people actually operating before you start. And you start using your imagination about what's going on?

Very good, so do, Because that brings the point that so many things happen in the system When it comes to business processes, and there's a whole lot of things that never have, there are not in any system, they happen outside of the systems, if you will. Communication flows, decision making, that takes place. That is not in the system. So that's a bit of a catch 22 there, but.

How do you deal with situations like that? You just do the best you can with the system information that you have, and you, and you, and you, kind of focus your process money on that? And then you do other types of interactions to capture this non system information or flows. Just curious about what best practices are for dealing with business processes that may be partially in the system. But, often, are not, you know, are not fully in a single system, or multiple systems.

Yeah. So, I think there are a couple of things to you, to your question. Obviously, there are some activities that are just totally system most, whatever discussions or, you know, some kinds of decision making. But I think, you know, we try and have as much coverage as you can, of anything that is digitized. We're trying to be able to capture it. So I think one good example of this is, you know, we're not just looking at system data, So that kind of classic process mining connect to your assistance and grabbed the events, but also, we can incorporate user interaction data. So this is a replatforming task mining. And actually, helps you gather things like, if there's a step in the process where someone has to send an e-mail to someone else that could be included, and, you know, other sort of, not maybe not traditional system or desktop activities can be included.

Then the other thing I would say is that there are things that are totally not digitized, and it can't be represented at all you So we'll kind of see see their impact in the process. So, if there's maybe a big gap where something takes long time, it's like, well, well, that's because, you, know, it's just a long decision process. or something. And, that's still a place where you can kind of zero, and, I'd be, like, well, how do we make that, let me make that part of the process better? How do we digitize it? How do we do something different to make the overall process more effective?

Very good, very good. We have a question here from William Fuller who asks about your experience with the rates of successful implementations based upon the initiative's leadership origins is quite unique question. So, he says, you know, some people come for operations, others from IT and finance backgrounds, and the any, you know, you see these implementations across cross functionally. I'm curious about the, that if you see better or worse rates of employee of successful implementations across the different functions and maybe across different leadership, functional backgrounds.

So I'm assuming he means, like, system migration implementations.

Not, not ceylon as implementations. Right.

Right, yes. So I think, I mean, it's a little bit hard to say because, you know, obviously, these, these projects are, quite, quite hefty. So to say exactly, what is success and what is not success, think is one of the major problems that people struggle with. I think usually, though, we see it as a very cross functional efforts, and that's one of the things that makes, that makes the difference. I think it's not about, like, who do you choose to leave this. It's like, how do you get everyone to actually collaborate correctly. I think that's one of the things also, that, you know, I've been talking about throughout my presentation, is, like, you need need to not just think about this as an IT project, or is it processed project, or is something your business users are doing differently. It's, it's all the above, and, it's about how to get those tools, and those insights that, Everyone can kind of talk about this thing that everyone sees so, differently.

You know, if you're a business user, you see this, whatever order to cash process is being very different than if you're a process excellence person, and you, you really have that mind for changing and designing it, or if you're an IT person, you really see it from a technology perspective. And, I think, you know, one of the strengths of a tool or process, my tool, and especially of slowness, is being able to kind of unite those views and be, like, this has a very user centric perspective. But, it's also, you know, looking at the entire process, and, you know, It's really telling you something about the system at the same time.

Very good. Very good. So, I'm going to share something with you.

I've been part of a very large ERP implementation in a very large oil and gas company, and yeah, painful, even though I'm actually 15 years old, but I look like, this is the result. But.

But, he's What's interesting about it. Is that the hundreds of millions of dollars literally on that and multi-year, right? And the ideal concept, of course, is that we have all the engineers using spreadsheets to do all sorts of things. And we're going to have and we have ERP systems and fragments of it, and then we're going to have this one system that's going to eliminate all the spreadsheets. And all the things that we had before you fast forward that hundreds of millions later, We have this really sophisticated AI, power ERP system.

And we have a whole bunch of Excel spreadsheets, because people need to make sense out of that system now. So, I don't know.

So, the question is, there are different ways you can measure success and failure are curious about where we are today in the state of technology today. If you're going to do a large ERP system, implementation on migration, unpack to us. And you and you did this in your presentation, but just give me, again, just as a reminder, what are the major milestones based on the technology that's available today of process mining, and all the technologists. What is what is, what are the major milestones for accelerating that implementation of a new ERP system, but also, of course, having greater success and success will be shorter cycle times, better quality of information available for decision making in the business, right. And, of course, cost is a big part of that as well. So, so instead of the old style that you mentioned in your presentation, where I get with the people, and I tried to understand what the key business processes are, And I try, and I have those discussions on whether or not the business processes fit the tool, or that tool fits the business processes.

So how do you do this better with process mining capabilities, and the other tools that you have described to us?

Yeah. So I think we think about it as they're being kind of value of both pre implementation or pre migration during the migration, and after the migration. So I think I mentioned this in the Schlumberger use case. But one thing we see very, very commonly is people want to onboard slowness and use it before their implementation of their migration to prepare their processes to repair their systems for the migrations that you're setting yourself up for success as much as possible by not having loads of garbage in your systems and making sure things are as streamlined as possible. And then we have a whole bunch of use cases that kind of span the actual migration phases. So, I talked about, obviously, process mapping, that gap.

You could maybe use it during testing and hyper Karen change management. So, kind of doing the things I mentioned, with making sure you're always using objective data, that you're iterating your understanding, your users at every point, and then also post migration. So, we also, we also see a lot of people using it at the end or after their migration, to help measure stability, to help them improve. On an ongoing basis, you know what their, what, their system is delivering to them. Because, like, ultimately, right, it's, it's, it's going to take longer than just just a little bit to get value out of whatever, however many hundreds of millions of dollars you spent on this migration. It's, it's about really setting yourself up, this whole new way of working and that's, that's not just a one-off thing. That's a kind of constant mode of improving and understanding what's going on and understanding where you can have an impact, both from a system perspective and a process perspective.

So, so share a bit more on the pre migration as an example. You know, the traditional approach of trying to understand business requirements and key business processes, and then trying to start mapping those, How, how is it different with with the with this new approach?

Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that we see fairly often is people will do some kind of like harmonization or consolidation before migrating. So I think the ability to A understand object with what's going on in different parts of the system or different systems, compare them. Understand what's performing well so that you can actually Decide, you know, what, what's what's most effective so you know, I think if you have Yeah? If you have like multiple Regions who are using maybe your ERP or CRM in different ways, you can kind of start to understand. What are the high performing kind of? Segments in your organization? Now? can we get other people to adopt those high performing Processes or have ways of working?

Prior to this migration. So, if I, if I may ask, this understanding that you're talking about, is it by deploying the process mining engineer, if you will, and trying to really get the actual performance data? Is that where you're referring to about the understanding of the process?

Yes. Yes, it will be implementing approximately two important things, aloneness. And then, I'm looking at all these things. I think the also, the other thing that I would mention is, people often are trying to figure out what people aren't using. So, it's not just about what people are doing, but it's also, what are people not doing? We have tons of applications, tons of custom built things, that no one's using. Do we have, you know, like a custom transactions that. no one's using years where people use half a percent of the time. And trying to really zero in on what are the things that are unnecessary. And you know, what's, what's the best, what's, what's right for sunsetting basically.

That's right, that's right. Another example that I've lived through, his work in the engineering company that has 5000 applications and several of them will disappear, would not be used, but we still pay for them. And every 3 to 5 years, we'll have a great improvement project to go find out, which are the applications were paying for it, if we don't even use, but very good, very good.

Listen, what do you suggest? people who are on this call here? Organizational leaders.

People who have Laura Enlarge organizations and some who are in smaller companies. If they're going to do a system migration. I mean, short of, you know, gets along this to come help you. What, how, How do they get ready for that? And what is? What is the, what are some of the suggestions that you have for them to get started on this process? Right? And make sure they do things right and their implementation. That migration is successful if you pick like key criteria for success early on. What should they do?

Yeah, I, so besides, obviously, buying slowness course.

Shameless plug, I think, I think that, overall, maybe planning is something that is really important to invest in. So I'm not shortchanging having a really detailed plan, having A plan B, making sure that you have that really well documented, and everyone knows what's happening and when it's supposed to happen. The other thing that I think is great to invest more time in if, you know, if you're not starting quite yet, is that business case, is, like, what? What? What are you actually looking to improve? I think one of the reasons why it's difficult for people to understand exactly what success means once they're finished his Because they really need to define set success upfront and then you're kind of, you know, the design, the test, and then design something that that solves. The test sort of speaks like what what What is the objective. And how can we actually measure that objective. And what do we need to actually measure that objective? That's probably what I would recommend.

Farewell.

This a, thank you so much for sharing your expertise your, you know, breadth of coverage with many organizations with us and very thankful to have you with us and and really teaching us all how to leverage technology to do better migrations going forward. We appreciate your time and we appreciate her insights. Thank you so much for having me. And best of luck to anyone who is embarking on one of these projects is marking, as you say that, that I can tell, it's quite a journey. You know, I, I, we all understand that these technologies make it easier. Right. There's distill. Migrations are always very challenging endeavors and the, and we appreciate you being open and honest about that. And the, and the goal here is to increase the success rate, right. Historically, has not be very good.

It's, yeah, it's all, for me, it's all about having empathy with, with what everyone is going through, and just doing the best we can to to help to help wherever we can.

Very good. And this process mining technologists are just wonderful tools to help us along that path. So, thank you again very much for sharing those insights with us today.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes this segment and we're going to get ready for the next segment at the top of the hour at the top of the hour. We have John Nile and John ... going to be here to talk to us about, about process intelligence. And the understanding today and plenty for tomorrow's specifically, he's going to talk about how programs often struggle because the biggest ops obstacle to any complex, largest scale change is the lack of detailed knowledge of current State activities.

So this is a really good follow up of what we just talked about because he's John is going to talk about the Did a deep dive on current state and understanding what the current state is. Very much like what we discussed with an isa, and how can technology help there? And in a little bit more detail. so, see, everybody at the top of the hour. Remember, you can always provide your comments. As you close the webinar, there is a feedback form that you can use to provide feedback. You can also go on LinkedIn and posts or comments or questions there, and we'll be interacting with you there after the sessions are over today. So, see you back at the top of the hour.