Overview

Malcolm Pirnie, a leading environmental engineering services firm, is capitalizing on the power of modeling and simulation, coupled with over 100 years of industry knowledge and experience, to generate new levels of customer value.

One way Malcolm Pirnie’s Red Oak Consulting division differentiates itself in the marketplace is through sophisticated enterprise modeling, enabling its consultants to actively define and deliver business value in ways that conventional service providers cannot. Red Oak helps clients streamline business processes, eliminate redundancies and realize significant operating gains. Indeed, the firm’s model-driven approach builds client confidence, deepens understanding and drives momentum for critical business changes and process improvements.

Challenge
Driving Fiscally and Environmentally-Sound Business Process Improvements

With a client base that includes water, waste water, and solid waste utilities, federal and state governments, local municipalities, and private industry, Red Oak faces complex challenges in the marketplace. Red Oak focuses on management consulting and information technology solutions with expertise in information management, financial services, maintenance and operations, capital project management, asset management, instrumentation and controls, and security.

A primary responsibility of Red Oak is to redesign business processes and systems, as well as enhance them to strengthen operating performance. New regulations, technologies and industry practices create a demand for continual process renewal, particularly in the utilities industry. “We need to understand the client’s current processes before we can move ahead,” said Craig Zavadil, senior management consultant, Red Oak Consulting. “To do this, we delve down to each department/division’s activities and determine how those align with the organization’s larger strategic objectives.”

In the past, they used tools like Visio and PowerPoint to provide a graphical representation of organizations, processes and systems. These helped Red Oak’s clients visualize existing processes, but didn’t help them fully comprehend the opportunities to be gained through change.

“We had the ability to diagram organizational models, ‘as is’ models and ‘should be’ models,” said Mr. Zavadil. “But we didn’t have the ability to take a true model-driven approach. We couldn’t simulate dynamic models of organizations, communication, process and workflow. We weren’t able to easily analyze processes based on varying assumptions and quantify the costs of different approaches. And we couldn’t effectively carry our models through and tie them to the client’s strategic objectives.”

Red Oak needed to take that modeling a step further with simulation, analytic capabilities and activity-based costing.

“We wanted to show clients a realistic model that would clearly demonstrate the benefits of a program in terms of time, money and resources,” he said.

Solution
Embracing a Model-Driven Approach

Red Oak began exploring alternative modeling solutions. The team’s internal experts developed a matrix of leading tools and diligently comparing them, with the goal of finding an intuitive solution that also offered robust simulation capabilities. Ultimately, the group decided on the Metastorm ProVisionBPA software. Metastorm ProVision also offers robust capabilities for importing and leveraging data from other tools, like Visio.

With a team of consultants now trained to employ the tool, they actively use it for critical activities such as business requirements gathering, “as is” to “should be” gap analyses, simulation, and organizational structure design.

Whether the Red Oak team is implementing a new business system for a municipality or redesigning operational processes to ensure a water utility is achieving regulatory compliance, it can deliver greater client success using Metastorm ProVisionBPA to identify disparate systems and redundant processes and quickly target opportunities to establish process efficiencies, business rules and best practices.

“Many of us have observed that although people understand their own area’s business processes, they don’t know how those tie in with big picture,” Mr. Zavadil said. “Modeling enables them to see the whole process and identify the cross-organizational impact on other departments, time and effectiveness. I have participated in many meetings where I’ve reviewed ‘as is’ processes, and the managers will realize that they each have similar responsibilities or capturing unnecessary data. It’s an eye opening experience for many of our clients.”

He added that the big-picture process discovery enabled by Metastorm ProVisionBPA allows Red Oak to rapidly advance to the innovative phase of its work—helping consultants identify opportunities for efficiencies, eliminate process redundancies and improve the capture of business requirements.

After “as is” process modeling is complete, Red Oak moves forward to simulate “should be” or “what if” processes using Metastorm ProVisionBPA’s robust simulator engine. This enables the consultants to define unique business case scenarios and perform process simulation and animation with cost, timing and resource analyses for all the client’s workflow models. Each process can contain multiple processing scenarios, allowing an unlimited number of “what if” analyses. In addition, the simulator runs a process scenario, so Red Oak’s clients can visually spot and analyze bottlenecks prior to incurring the expense of deploying or automating business processes.

“The simulation tool allows us to establish a realistic business process, and then analyze and measure the results. Without simulation, you might be able to reduce a process time by five minutes, but you don’t understand and capture the true business value that analysis through simulation really provides,” Mr. Zavadil said.

Results
Confidence, Credibility and the Wow Factor

The core benefit that Red Oak has derived from its use of Metastorm ProVisionBPA is its model-driven approach to client engagements. Consultants now have the power to tie proposed business process changes back to the strategic objectives and quantify the impact of various potential actions.

Modeling helps Red Oak’s clients visualize how their localized activities fit into a wider system – and how deeper organizational alignment drives measurable performance gains.

“Now our clients can look at the models and break away from the way they’ve done things in the past,” adds Mr. Zavadil. “They can think unconventionally and take action much more rapidly. That’s been a huge success factor for us.”

Benefits obtained from Metastorm ProVisionBPA include the ability to:

• Provide a clear “as is” model that builds better understanding of a client’s existing processes, programs and activities;
• Present multi-dimensional “should be” models that allow a client to model different scenarios and commit to an approach that promises the strongest results;
• Run simulations that vividly demonstrate the impact of proposed programs on time, cost and resources;
• Ensure that programs and process improvement efforts are clearly aligned with strategic business objectives;
• Build confidence and buy-in from the client by enabling them to participate in the development and demonstration of key models.