The Art of Process: Building Blocks for Process Excellence with Henrik Olsson, Telia

This is the "Mining Your Business" podcast, Michelle, all about process mining, data science and advanced business analytics. Hey Yakup, how you doing? I'm doing fantastic, Patrick. So, tell me, what do you know about process excellence? Well, at this point, Patrick, I hope that's quite a bit. Well, we are lucky to have Henrik Olson, transformation executive atalia, on our show as he is currently on parental leave. And we are going to touch on what a process-focused business looks like, internal versus external consulting, and the four building blocks needed for process excellence. Let's get into it. Hello again, and we are back with new episode of "Mining Your Business." And Patrick, I had a joke here, but I'm not sure if I already said it before or not. This was regarding the lead time of the guests. Did I say it before? I think you might have said this already last episode. Because I've written it down, you know, sometimes I write this intro so that I know I don't lose my train of thoughts, and I try to kind of build up the expectation of the episode. And I had this joke about the lead time for guests. And today we actually have Henrik Olson, the global head of process excellence atalia. And before I give a word over to him, I just wanted to say again that the lead times with guests are sometimes getting longer, and we were joking here with Henrik before we started recording about the process jokes. And I think we've had some bottlenecks there before we go to Henrik on the show. And Henrik, first of all, welcome to our show. And second of all, thank you for making these jokes with us. Thank you guys. I mean, I think it's, though they say it's third time the charm, right? So, you know, at first you try and then second time you try again. And third, you know, this is when we do the own run. So, super excited to be here. It's great to talk to you guys. And, you know, I really love the fantastic job that you're doing with the process mining community and just process excellence, you know, in general. So, really excited to be here today. And we'll have a really interesting conversation. Well, thank you for that. We really appreciate it. And Henrik, I know that you are currently still on your, let's say, a deady leaf. And I was wondering, I wanted to ask, what's going through your head when you're like walking the stroller? Are you still thinking processes and are you excited to get back into work and finally getting back into process mining world? Let's say process world. Well, I mean, I think it's one of those things, you know, you're a bit torn, right? So, it's one thing you've now come into the routines with, so in my case, is that I have a 15 month old daughter. So, you got it into the daily routines, which is of course, you know, very similar to what you want to have in a process or a factor or any kind of standardized world. And also, it's beautiful weather that we have 25 degrees in sunshine. I think, you know, the first time you and I talked, it was cold. I think it was a little bit sunny, but we've had a really harsh winter up here in the Nordics. So, you know, it's a little bit both ways, right? We'll see where it gets to, but, you know, of course, when you're out there walking and she falls asleep, that's, you know, sometimes when you'll make a call, you know, you'll talk to somebody or some friend. Or you listen to a podcast and you try to enrich yourself with, you know, now everything that's happening with AI and how that's getting any more and more integrated into, you know, the world of ours. And the process is right. So, you know, it's not difficult to spend the time, so to say, but most of the time goes to, you know, the daily routines, making breakfast, diaper, you know, getting out, you know, making lunch and so on. But it's a bit, it's very similar. It's very reminiscent of a process in that way. With some ad hoc elements spiced into those. What are the biggest inefficiencies in the daddy processes? The biggest inefficiencies in the daddy process is not being able to forecast kind of the unexpected, right? So, you know, sometimes the diaper schedule gets a little bit out of hand depending on, you know, the amount of food you load into the baby. Again, I can't imagine that. I'm probably not saying this, but you know, there are some ad hoc elements in there. And again, like with everything else, it's just like an SLA, like the contract that you signed with your baby, you have to allow for some, you know, variation in the times. So, if you think that you're going to make it into town to go for lunch for an hour, you better be planning for 90 minutes and you know that, you know, an A few in a rush, you know, something is going to happen. Well, well, I bet that you already have a master black belt in a diaper change, but you know, speaking some sigma, Aline, six sigma language. Henrik, you had quite an interesting historian. You worked in a consulting, you work in house. And because before we even dive into this, I wanted to ask if you could sort of go back in time a little bit and look at your beginnings in GE. And how did you even enter this world of processes? It's a really good question. And something that I thought of myself, because processes keep on coming back, right? Whichever capacity, role, advisor or or. But if I go back to it, I, I studied operations management and it was part of my curriculum and there I got to go and visit Scania. And I got to see some of the lean work that they had been doing and heard everything when I, you know, we're in the early 2000s here, but you know, heard about the failures that they've had in the early 80s of implementing this difficult was getting it into Swedish culture. And they were very consensus driven, but still with a little bit of a mix and influx of other cultures, you know, Scania, a very multinational company. And, you know, they, they did it repeated times, right? Multiple times. So, you know, so that's where it started. And we did a case that I remember. And then I started to look at, you know, the motorrollers of the world. Did I think I would start to work that way? You know, I mean, there's, there's two careers that you could do at my university, which was the Stockholm School of Economics. I would become an investment banker or Australian consultants that was like two career paths that's carved out for you. And I really, I really enjoyed the Stockholm super industry like that. And so, so I chose the, you know, the investment banking routes. I went to London to work with equity research, but there was so curious. I remember I had this factory visit that we went and we went into, you know, somewhere in the Midlands. And there was this really cool warehouse. It was one of the first automated warehouse. I think of this as like three pre-Amazon. I can't remember the name of the company. It was a conglomerate. But I was so impressed with the warehouse that was splitting out goods. And this was before, you know, the e-commerce boom, right? And I was looking there and I started asking some questions to the plant manager and I, I'm boss kind of, don't ask two detailed questions. We're just to understand the finances. And I was like, how are you good? So I don't know. It's something there that kind of bit me. So just looking at numbers, just looking at financial statements, it doesn't give me a sense for what's going on in the company. And I think that's where it's so important, you know, the operational side. So it was more a coincidence that I ended up at General Electric. So do you ran a big program in, I don't know when it started, but it was, it was accelerating in 2004. But I joined them called simplification. Very good. Very good one. And it was, it was, you know, in my case, it was focused on purchasing and indirect sourcing. So what GE found was that, you know, we have way too many vendors doing the same things for us. So for example, professional services. We're salty and sourced or telcos. We have too much of the same thing. So how can we simplify the way that we purchase things. But it was an overarching kind of theme as well. So when I moved into that, you know, GE even then had a very kind of well developed academies. You can study on your own, you know, the mentoring was fantastic. You know, we spoke about steep learning curves. We're young people. I mean, wow, I didn't even know how to work there. I almost terrified my first couple of weeks. You know, GE is so processed for them. Everyone has a role, you know, you get a role description. It's kind of, you know, it sits like ingrained in the, in the, in the skeleton of the business, you know, how do fix, right. So all the managers are trained in this way. So when you start to kind of grow up in that, we're kind of, everything doesn't work perfect, but there's such strong structures. It kind of bites you. And then I don't even think we talked about processes back then. We didn't talk about operating movements. We just, you know, we just talked about things working, probably mentioned processes. What I did do remember is that, you know, the more time I spent with GE was the sense of, you know, structure. And what always impressed me was that, you know, you could take a manager from one business that did aircraft engines and did pricing there. And you could bring that to Sweden to do pricing of mortgages or something like that. And it worked very well because the processes were very similar, at least at a higher level, and that it was all about learning, you know, the other bits, right. So, you know, that's, that's really where it started. So it's actually started purchasing and, you know, doing some supplier consideration. And actually, one of the first things I got to do was to build workflow for, with then a European contracts database, very early on, you know, how do we digitize purchasing contracts so that we can get, you know, simple reminders that, you know, this contract is about the expire, this is the size of the contract. And also kind of a single source of truth. So what we would have is, you know, every country would go and negotiate, you know, a manpower or an echo effect, but, you know, very sourcing focus. And that's where it started. Move back to Sweden. And there I had an opportunity to do a green belt trade. And then, you know, it just kind of accelerated from this or from green belt. I moved more into a business development road. I got to work more with our call centers. I also got to introduce net promoter score as a kind of a metric for us, you know, measuring follow up the business. Or something that we've grown up globally. So we then also, you know, got the input of that. So I saw how some big initiative cascaded down to local markets, the local functions, but also how it then, you know, how we as a business really benefited from the structure. So that's really kind of, yeah, that's where it all started. And I was surprised when I got out that, wow, I think someone working as well as a D. But of course, you know, even a D, there were some, some black spots, you know. So, um, one of the things that you mentioned is that you got a green belt. And for those of us dummies that don't know what that is, do you mind sharing a lot of what that means? Sure. So, so, you know, just like any cool training, you know, you need to have something to do with Japan or, you know, the old sense is kaisen, you know, Japanese cool sounding words. No, but so, so G had chosen the, it was a belt kind of path. So every memory would be, I think it was like a white belt, it was like a 30 minute introduction or train to what is the, why do you need to focus on this? But, and then you had a little bit longer training for certain leaders and people that weren't maybe super exposed to making the decision that was like a yellow belt train. Right. So it's like different levels of complexity. And in the green belt training, essentially it was a six month train program where you got trained for about a week and then you were coach for about six months to run improvement project in the business. And for me, what I did, I picked my contracts database experience and I improved the quality of our contracts in our Swedish business. That was my program that kept on running. So it was often something very close to your business. And also it was sponsored by somebody more senior in my case, it was our CFO. And then the next stage was black belt and then you went into, you know, becoming a master black belt. It was different levels of training, essentially going deeper in statistical models that felt like back then. The next stage, a lot of the tools about that, but you know, God knows how many hours are spent in Excel and mini tab and what to just the statistical analysis. So it's essentially a very different levels of experience where, you know, master black belt and then, you know, they shouldn't really be any more levels beyond that. I think it was like quality boost, something that I was prevalent throughout, you know, 3G. And I think it's also been a standard that's been adapted by a lot of other companies that have rolled up these programs. Let me just say that we've all started in Excel. I still have, I'm still waking up in the middle of the night just thinking about the macros. I was writing back during my days in Siemens. I don't like remembering those. However, I have a question also going back into the GE times and you said that this company was in general very mature when it comes to process frameworks and organizing around or, you know, going with this initiative of having lean processing in the first place and everybody was sort of introduced to the topic and people were also pointed to the direction of thinking about how efficient, how efficiently their processes should be. You've also worked in consulting, you work for a different company now. Would you say that this is a trend or this is something that's usual and normal for the company. So, or would you say that GE back in the days and maybe even in today's world is kind of an exception. I don't know, we can all see what's happened with GE since then, right? So, I think like everything, you have to revitalize yourself, you have to do. I think there's maybe, you know, maybe there were elements of things that, you know, all the GE had this basis for a process person, a transformation person like myself, it was like a dream because it was just such structure. And maybe that's what made it more rigid. So then, you know, the, I mean, GE has struggled for several years. I think it's just now that some of the share prices started to bounce back, that they split the company up before. But, I mean, I haven't been close to GE for so long. But, I mean, it's just something that I came back to in terms of reference, you know, it was built around, you know, the budgeting process. You built, you know, on top of that, you have a very strong HR and performance process. And then on top of that, you know, everything else was cascaded into that. And it just, it was just on repeat. And everyone was just used to working in that way. And so, one of my first projects I did for a manufacturing of what emotives, and I don't know if this goes which company was, but I was just so surprised because we came in to help them do forecasting and budgeting. And we were there in April, and they hadn't finished the budget, you know, landing the budget for that year. That would have never happened that GE was not tolerated, right? Because, you know, we wanted to start to measure. And I think also that was something that GE was very good at on both steering very hard on financial metrics. Well, those financial metrics were tied with an understanding of, you know, what part of the operation is actually driving that? Even there, you know, they were not looking at the lagging KPIs, which, you know, steering also towards the, you know, the leading one because other ones it's really hard to change direction. So, it's something I was surprised by at least, you know, the first couple of years in consulting because there I was largely doing, you know, transformations for the factory companies that have bought, you know, not very well-functioning companies. I mean, maybe that would have been a very expensive company, but you know, we found very little processes, very little communication between them. So, at least back then, when we were talking now, like closer to 2008, 2009, when I went into consulting, you know, there was some trial and error. Everybody was kind of, you know, doing something around change, but someone tried to leave to expensive, you know, maybe not have the right people, you know, they didn't succeed at first. So, then they stopped. And this is why I think it's just so important that I'm the skonier games, because I think they stumbled a couple of times. This takes a lot of time, right? And a lot of the, you know, world-class organizations, the reason why they're there, I mean, Siemens was mentioned here earlier. The reason why they're there is they've been keeping nagging at it for like six and seven, eight years. And, you know, you just get a different focus function. Now, I have to ask. So, as you're, at least went into the investment banking route from university, right? Now, what are some of the transferable skills that you think are applicable from investment banker to going on process improvement and transformation improvements? So, so the funny part is I kind of, it sounds like I'm riding my biography or all of my energy, but when you start to reflect on it, you know, there's things that, you know, things goes in circle type. So, I think there's some really important things as an investment banker or somebody that works with equity to research. It's so important. But, again, if you can't take the operational met from further than the value, and if you don't really understand, for example, what I shareholder values, which, you know, might be everything from dividend to other things like these to you, etc. I think there are skills that are very, very close. So, it really helped me. Like knowing Excel very well, you know, I could crack out of DCF. Knowing how to build a business case, very detailed going into the PNL. So, some of the, you know, the best transformation projects or programs or, you know, where we really rely on my teams that are going to have been really successful is when we've been working very closely with business controls, financial controls and CFOs, decide off all of the same. Right. With all the data that's available, you know, through process mining and so on, that certainly have become a lot easier. But there's still that craftsmanship on, you know, how do we make that tie that, you know, sometimes it up ultimately ends up in head come, but it's also, you know, cost of, you know, opportunity cost. It's, you know, inventory and all that. Those things need to be measured because, you know, there's still a number of widgets that stands out there in the inventory, right? Well, one is a hundred, you know, a piece and the other one is two, you know, you better pick the right one, which are you going to optimize for? So I think having that understanding is a key strength for any kind of transformation, or anyone that works with it. So I didn't think it would help me that much. So, you know, if we fast forward a bit into my career, when I was living in the US for close to five years, I worked a lot with something that was called client value labs. And this is with Accenture. And what we typically did was look at large transformation, how Accenture could help. What would be some of the big ticket items, if you would roll out, you know, let's say sales force across the group, or if you would, you know, we would look at pieces of head capital, depending on what the client could share with us in terms of data and the insights that we have. Look at, you know, opportunity costs to getting, you know, more automation into play, etc. So it certainly helped me there, because what we ultimately did was that we tried all of these initiatives that we could help them identify pretty much like a spreadsheet program. This is what we believe, you know, this return of investment, and this is how it's going to impact, you know, your shareholder value. So I spent quite, so it's like, oh, this is some of the stuff I did back in, you know, London in the days. So it was definitely useful, but, you know, you need some retraining because a lot of things had happened once, you know, I got it. Now, Hendrick, when we first talked, you said that, and you said it also in the podcast now that you've been part of a lot of these transformation journeys and a lot of digitalization projects and so on. And you said something very interesting, what kind of struck me a bit. You said that a lot of companies simply didn't have their resilience to see through the change of the processes. What did you mean by that? I think a lot of times management expects, I mean, a lot like first time they expect so much, and then they just see, oh, it was so hard. I mean, take an IT implementation. You don't want to go through that, you know, replacing your ERP system. You only want to do that like once every 20 years because it's like open-heart surgery, right? And then when you start to some scale that into something smaller or more agile, sometimes that, you know, the scarred memories of doing such a thing kind of remains, right? And once you start to aggregate, you know, smaller initiatives, we do many initiatives. I think there's often an impatience where, you know, you don't see the journey, right? You don't learn from the journey and the results not might not be there. For me, it's very much about, oh, you know, we f'd up, you know, we didn't perform, but we learned something. How do we apply that the second time? So, you know, for me, I've seen transformation. I think the ones that are good at it are resilient. They continue to train their people. You know, I mean, which company today doesn't live in like permit transformation? I mean, with the pace of change now, you have to, right? Yeah. So, and I think what I saw at least from, you know, when there's different methodologies, there's different philosophies. So, when I started working in a, we were predatement, it has to be six months. If you're running a black belt product, it had to be 12 months. You know, it was like, I'm big one. But very quickly, so, you know, that's not really adaptable for a fast moving consumer goods business, for example. You have to be a much quicker, you have to be able to turn around something in maybe three weeks, etc. So, even if, you know, as a consultant, we saw the conception that the lead times have to go down in terms of how to deliver, because also there's a cost element to it, right? And you can often achieve a lot more than you think in, in, you know, a short time frame. And then, you know, I do lots of examples there where, you know, you don't need a lot of IT to improve things. You know, you just, there's process fixes you can do through your communication, getting some simple KPIs in there, seeing what's actually going on and starting to discuss it. You know, discussion elements, you know, yeah. Now, Henry, I also had one question, which I really wanted to ask, because it's also very close to our hearts, because we are basically external consulting company, and we are coming to companies and trying to navigate them in the world of process mining and how to utilize it to the best of their capacities. You've been on, on, on both sides of this, of this approach, you've been an external consultant, but you also work in house, where you currently actually in Tilia, where you're leading this transformation and, you know, the business processes. How do you see it, how does it differ being on the site of the external company, helping to improve the processes, and on the contrary, working as an in house, basically consultant or manager, whose job it is to improve these processes. And what do you see, how, first of all, maybe how do these two differ and how do they complement each other? I think the, on the inside, you're inside, that means the pace, you know, and also the network, you have to get to know people, you can connect the dots a lot quicker, and you also can move with more credibility. So, we're not there to say, I mean, of course, we always, you know, we sell ourselves, we sell, you know, the results, you know, we believe we can achieve the dreams, you know, you know, we're always selling in some, some sense, but there's not that inherent, unsafe threat of, you know, selling. But you, you're only here because you want to sell a couple more hours. It can be elements of that sometimes, it depends on the model, I've also seen, you know, certain companies I've worked for had a, you know, a transformation model where, you know, you were paying a lot of some money. So, I mean, of course, you pay for things, but it was a lot more evidence how you were pricing it, and that kind of inhibited the actual usage of if you embed it, and so on. But I think, you know, it's the pace, it's the credibility that you can move at. And I think it is absolutely critical to have certain of these skills. So, if you have these skills built up, if you take, you know, the skills of pros is mining and it's, you know, if I work with an organization that has existing lean practitioners, existing people that work with, you know, data and so on. You know, especially lean or lean six, it is so much quicker because it's not the process, lingo, it, you know, the time stands becomes like, you know, the small process, you know, the process, 3M clips that you put on, you know, the post it notes. Yeah, it's just more faster. Otherwise, you have a completely different photo. I think, surely, there is, you know, you have so many bosses to piece, right? It's not only maybe, you know, your senior partner, but you have to piece, you have to, you know, you have to piece your team, you definitely have to piece the client to make sure that you understand it. So, there's a lot more complexity navigating from the outside before you can get inside, right? To it. And then, you know, it's also hard, something that I've always found the hardest is in implement. How do I get things to stick? Right? So, we're now spent, you know, six or eight weeks together, we run through a proof of concept, we've looked at an order to cash boxes. How do we get this to stick to that? I transfer that knowledge to you. Typically, or that typically, but in some instances, you know, what I've seen is, this is not my day job. And you're sitting with people that should own this in the finance organization or in a sales organization, it should have, you know, but that's not my day job. That's not my day job. And then, you're just stopped, right? You can't do anything more. So, you know, it can be, it can be really frustrating to be on the outside, or, you know, you find three or four people that are super passionate about it, but then the boss or somebody else, you know, just decides that we're not going to do this anyway. Like, if you just wasted, you know, all these time, you know, it's a, it's, it's a little bit different on the inside of the outside, but, you know, being on the inside, of course, you know, you know, you're there for a longer time. But still, the pace that you have to move at, it's very rapid. So, very similar, I would say stakeholders are different. You know, typically what I've seen is that they struggle with the same things, you know, getting through communication, you know, coming back for the early question around, you know, the cycles continues learning. Very few organizations have got the stamina to look at something again, you know, I don't know how to improve this again, how to improve this again, which, I mean, successful problems always look at, how can we do this better? Not only on a product, I mean, we sometimes do it for the product side, right? But our app needs to have more features. Our product needs to have more features. Our car needs to go faster. Oh, fuck it. You know, do it that way. The process is well. You know, let's make sure that our business is running, you know, faster. How do we do that? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's fairly competitive. So I kind of want to, that product mindset of, you know, if you bring more of that, maybe into, don't make the process is more complex, but, you know, make them what the customer is willing to pay for. Now, when you're looking at the difference between in-house and external consulting, do you find that the sense of detachment and by detachment, I mean, if you're an external consultant, you can just leave. At any point and that company will just continue to exist without you or not, you know, so, but in-house, you're very much ingrained, right? Your future of, you know, a bad process is also inherently then tied to you because, you know, if a, if all these processes don't improve through your help, you know, at the end of the day, it's also you that's going to be suffering because you're inherently tied to the efficiency of the whole business, right? So does that detachment play a factor in how you make decisions in this type of consulting work? I don't know. I think I've got, you know, at least what I find myself with is, you know, to work as close to client as possible, but sometimes you just don't have enough time. So, so, you know, at least I've always tried to do that, but I've tried to coach my team to do the same thing, and it's probably going as close as possible. You know, sometimes you're really successful in it and sometimes, you know, it just doesn't work. It's like a relationship, but there's no dancing, right? It's like, you know, we're on this diet and traveling. It's going to be, you know, babies. Sorry, yeah, it's hard to say. I don't think there's a secret sauce. You know, some of the techniques that these obvious over years to, you know, gain the trust with senior leaders, you know, in different cultures, you know, together with my team, you know, some of my words at that, you know, telling where I'm currently, and some effort has important, you know, and it's also, you know, it's a timing thing. It's definitely like a relationship. Sometimes, you know, you're just not ready because you're busy with some other thing, right? So timing is important. I think understanding of the agenda, like how you support that is risky. And so what about like a company culture? Because I know that, you know, as a consultant, you can also come into the way of doing things and you suggest something that is very obvious to you. And they say, well, we've never really thought about it that way. And because you're coming at it with such a fresh pair of eyes, that it can inject the whole new viewpoint into the into the process. Because the people that have worked in it have been biased or blinded by years of working in the same way of working. Do you fear that that could happen to you as an in-house consultant, right? That you from the company itself, you kind of know? No, never. I mean, I would never become, you know, blinded by it. But I would be fooled by external snow. I mean, our minds are fluid by it, right? And I think it's really important to the power of perspectives. I think that's why, you know, consultants are, you know, the modern day shamans. I think, you know, the storytellers. And, you know, they do bring a lot of experience and different perspectives. I mean, when we work with different clients, they do, you know, they can bring that. I mean, I'm kind of on the opinion, you know, sometimes to the detriment, I think we sometimes stare ourselves a little bit too blindly on to kind of industry specific stuff, right? If you take an order to cash process, whether it's a mortgage that needs to be ordered and paid for, or, you know, a telephone or whatever, the steps are fairly similar, right? But again, there, there was in the detail that somebody that understands, you know, cash conversion cycles, and that's seen that through. Typically, consultants, because they have a luxury of seeing monthly, they can be so powerful in terms of challenging that statistical Patrick. And, you know, getting these different perspective, what is the order of the boss? I think, you know, in that order of the possible when you sit on the inside driving a transformation. You know, the legacy spaghetti that you sometimes get in French, which is culture, lighting systems, people's beliefs, you know, that kind of mismatch. Yeah, it's what you have to kind of wave through. And, yeah, whether you're an interlink or external there, I think the challenges are pretty much the same. What is the skill sets that you bring to the table? How do you, you know, as an external, how do you help your clients become as successful as possible? What, what do you bring to the table that helps them navigate, you know, to make the transformation even more successful? I think it's very much symbiosis, really good consultants know how to walk in their client shoes, right? They really understand it, they understand their targets, and how to help, and help them navigate that. And also the challenge, I think it's really important to challenge and just call out things. You shouldn't sit there and if you think something is wrong, as a consultant, just boys and half, which can be really fun. Having accumulated on this experience with working in-house or as an external, you actually became a global head of process excellence at Alia. And despite now being on a dead belief, you have started building there something that you call a transformation team that consists of four building blocks. You will dive into those four building blocks in a sec, but before we do that, can you also tell us what a global head of process excellence does for an organization such as Alia? So, I joined it back during COVID, and it was 2021, on the 17th of May, because Norwegian national holiday, national calendar, that they celebrate. So there was a global transformation stood up to help accelerate, to get this transformation. And as part of that, there was kind of a transformation office that looked after lots of projects and different initiatives in the final departments, or pretty standard set up. What Alia has always struggled with is to get really solid process, customer journeys, end-to-end thinking, and I was tasked to help make it more efficient and executing that transformation. But we had, you know, the 1,000 projects, how do we help accelerate and build the structures on the foundations from the kind of the more the center of excellence perspective, so that the business units, so our six markets, which are around five, then we're having soon to be done with this. Depending on the approval, and then all the functional units, like HR, and all the other people, so in perma kind of transformation, how do we best support them with the process excellence skills? So the task was really to help us enable and accelerate the commitments that we had done or had made to the markets, and bring an acceleration into a different transformation. And then it's really at the customer part, that's something that our CEO teaches a lot of that, which is really a customer-led transformation. And it's really hard to do that without having, you know, really good data sets, data structures, but, you know, you need to have solid repeatable processes. Hopefully, it's supported by, you know, great systems that then really have a great customer experience. That's a bit of a background. Does it also mean that you sort of become the process owner, or that's still, let's say, on the departments, on the teams that are managing these processes? Or how does this dynamic actually work? Well, so that's really interesting that you have, because that's something that we spent quite some time debating. And I've also spent it, you know, over the last 19 years to debate it, and I'm on a very firm belief that you can't own a process unless you have a data, or you only have to use, or, you know, you have some kind of mandate, which is, of course, complex when a lot of organizations still are matrix, or, you know, very simplified, or, you know, they sit very P&L structure, right? And that's how, you know, your people are aligned, and unless then the P&L is more aligned to the process, which I've seen. I've seen some examples of it, but when you have the hybrid running across, it's hard. So we spend quite some time, you know, discussing process ownership. And so, you know, you could see me as I'm the process owner of process excellence process. So how do you, I mean, that's, I'm ultimately the process that owns that. And I think that's maybe what you would call like the business management process, or the business process management lifecycle. How do we, lifecycle process is similar to how we lifecycle products or platforms, how do we update them? That's people at all. So I would say, no, I'm not a process owner per se, other than that, but I own the process and the methodology for how to roll this out for the organization. And there's different process owners, you know, in other areas of our business, it's fine as learning to work with, you know, customer service. So entering tell you, you started building something that you call a transformation team that consists of four major building box. Let's take a look at the first one, which is BPM architecture and design. Tell us more about that, please. Well, so like any house, right, you need to have some kind of foundation. And then you know, operating more than any enterprise, you typically have different layers of architectures. You know, you have a business architect, you're enterprise architect, you're IT architect, you know, architect. There's so many architectures, it's just like a house, right? And I think one of one of these architectures that, you know, just to make the world in the more company, you know, it's any type of processes, you can have some other kind of customer joins. And for me, that's where, you know, the process of how to manage that architecture, but also trying it into IT, you know, products and, you know, how does this all into act? So sometimes, you know, I use the, you know, the symbol of, you know, the subway system. You know, when you're in the subway, it's very dark and all of a sudden you're at the subway station, which one are you at, right? That from used to cooking a process, you know, something happens there. If you have the subway system, you know, you start to see the map, you start to see the complexity of the dump bin. So, you know, am I now in the pre-corrected pre-process? Am I now in the word the cash process or which one am I in? Which subway line am I currently running it, right? Who's the conductor? Who's making the decision? So you can then start to mayor it and then start to understand, you know, the complexity of the organization. So it's very, you know, it's like building a house, right? You build a corporation, you build a house. And for me, the process architecture is so, it's important because it ties these different things together. Now, is this something that is already existing when you're looking to improve a process that the, that this has been mapped out already? And you can kind of already see how things are running or is this something that you have to go in and map yourself and kind of talk to everyone and say, "Okay, how is your process actually running? Who's responsible for what? How does this tie in wear? And does that take up a lot of, of your time?" You can debate forever, right? Sometimes they're working on things and the details. I mean, if it's a day, there's a multitude of really, really good frameworks. So we had a framework that we've all, which is pizza, which is kind of a telecommunications standard framework or, you know, any telco. This is, this is, this is the typical process framework that they would have. And that process framework would then tie into an IT framework and so on. So it's, it's, you know, speaking the same language so that you can orientate yourself around, "Okay, this is where I need to push that. I'm going to release training to improve, you know, both the platform and the system and the process certainly helps." So there's a lot of these frameworks that get that, that you can start with as a starting point, but then as you start to get deeper into the details of it, they, of course, start to differ. Because, you know, you, you implement the different systems, they could be different regulations, but as a framework, you know, it just helps you to see where, where there are differences. I've seen both successful implementations are less successful, because when you start to go too much into the details and start to be too much about, you know, things that are not relevant, but those are really add value, you can, you can really go right. But it is certainly helpful to have that, especially, you know, just having a housing order with everything now related to security, quality and so on, you know, just having that architecture. And the process won't become working around it, so that, you know, where things sit, if you need to go and look for them, you know, if there's a data leakage, you know, it certainly helps to understand which process is the data leaking in and, you know, which system is not leaking from. And, you know, so if you have a really good structure, just like, you know, on a subway station, you know, there will be an alert that, you know, there's might have been an accident, there's a red, you know, same thing for us, right? You can very quickly then orientate yourself into the worst problems. I think, foundationally, I'm a big believer on BPM and, you know, the power of that. There's also other things within business process management that starts to look into automation, starts to look into workflow that you can apply. But I think there's other capabilities that we, you know, that we built that that leverages this, this basis, it's about understanding creative visibility, but also to create, you know, the ownership. So if you are a process owner, what we worked a lot with, and this is, you know, 20 years from my career is to ensure that if you are a pricing manager, you should own the pricing process. Right, and if you're the, you know, part of the pricing manager's team, there's a sub-process that probably, you know, where you do something, either you be a product orientated or might be, there should be an ownership for that as well. But, you know, tying those two things together is, is really important. So the architecture, the ownership, the overarching structure and the ties into other things. If you get those things right, it's not about, you know, this process mapping, it's not about having those posted notes out for using a, you know, software, or a bigger system just to collect the process. That's, you know, it's useless. The minute you collect the process, it's already changed. But at least from a foundational perspective, right, if you work with the process, if you work with these tools, they're extremely powerful. So it almost sounds that you're also trying to create not only ownership, but almost accountability that if something goes wrong, it's basically you and you know that it's you who's accountable for this piece of process. It's really hard to own something if you're not accountable for it, right? So it's really hard to be accountable if you don't own it. And that's why, you know, it's it's it's it's always tricky where, you know, if you're responsible for something, but not accountable. That's one of the, you know, that's one of the most tricky parts with, you know, how businesses work, but because the way that functions works on the way that poses the work is not one to one. Yeah, that's where you need to kind of get into the, you know, external internal humble mode and then sometimes negotiation. But the most important thing is, you know, it's like 80%, 80% right, and then you can fight about the 20%. If you just got the 80% right, you know, it's better than zero. And it, you know, don't go for 100 because you'll just end up debating things until one of you guys or, you know, somebody just, you know, curls over and gives up. Yeah, speaking of debating you, your second building block of a transformation team is something that you call the process execution academy. I guess this is something maybe going also back into your G.E. days where you saw that there was quite a lot of process awareness. So my assumption is that you're trying to train people who are capable problem solvers. Yeah, so maybe there's two things that we're doing. One is to, you know, upscale management and really anyone that wants to listen. So there's some online training. I think they should have done that by now. But, you know, I think it's so important in the meeting. To sit down and talk to this is your strategic plan. This is, you know, the process that could be impacted by this is how you can start to think about it. So we do some, you know, generic process training because if you don't understand processes, it's really hard to talk about automation by time. Like, if you don't have that visibility of how the process looks like, it's really hard to do automation. And then you know, the more details you go into where there's, you know, true decision making process or, you know, our system. Well, that's what you need to really automate. So I think it's a basis for any company that that's on a big plantation journey to have some of this. And so we've spent quite some time educating, you know, both senior senior management, but also other management. This is something that can happen for quite a while, but this is also what I've seen in other organizations. Then the second part is, you know, to point around, you know, good problem solvers. I mean, we have a lot of people that are out there, you know, working daily to solve things. What we wanted to make sure was to refresh a bit, they're two bucks. And just ensure that it was up to speed, but also to shine some light on all the important work that they do. So if we can, you know, make them better problem solvers with you know, a little bit more to, you know, more practice. Looking at things, you know, through different perspectives. So that's what we plan to bring into that training. And where we borrow the lot, of course, from lean thinking customer doing anything and so on. But it's really about, you know, making people. You know, take a problem. We'll take you through a, you know, x number of weeks journey through different modules on how you can go about solving this, right? From, you know, bringing business games, bringing some burning platform, understanding how the process works and the things that I think relating to that. What's the worth for solving that? What are the solutions? And all of this, you know, very much, you know, in collaboration with the teams, right? So it's something that I don't know if you know about the Akira storage box example. It's a Harvard business. Things I can't remember when it was done, but they essentially they did a study with two different groups where they asked, "Could you, you know, price this set of, you know, a Akira storage box, right?" And the first group that then got to build this, right? And we all know what it's like to build an Akira, right? It can be really hard, right? Things are missing. The group got together, you know, you got to build it as a group, to build the solution. So they got to do it themselves. The second group, that got this kind of, they just got to look at the furniture box, right? And what they had to do was to come up with a price. Which group did you think priced the shelf or the Akira box, the highest? You go first, Patrick. The second group. The second group, okay. I would say the pricing could be more for the group that actually touched it because then they realized, "How does it look like? How does it shape? How much work could have been to even create a manual for that?" So I would guess the first group. So that was the result. So what they saw was when the group participated, right? And they were building it themselves, which is, you know, a fundamental principle of all of these is to come together and go see and work on it together. They put a much higher value on the product that they build. I think there's a lot of, you know, insightful conclusion there, that really, you know, collaborating, solving things together. It's so important. I think, and that's much harder in teams meeting. And then you can probably, you know, sure you can apply chat GPT to do all sorts of funky things now. But, you know, this is the agenda, these were the decisions made. But, you know, ultimately, I think the human interaction of solving things together is so, you know, that's a satisfactory. It's a bit of a shout out to my friend Tim Hill, so I know that you had one on my day, a while ago. He's probably heard about this example, you know. Just that building, that process together is so important. So being part of the solution or the problem. So for us, it's really important that we help scale our people. And then this is kind of just the foundation. And then, you know, you add more skills as you go. And I think that's leading us to the third building block, probably, right? Yeah, which is the intelligent automation. Yeah, but let's actually let's go. Let's start with process mining. Because I think that's kind of those before. And that's the floor building block, by the way. Yeah, boil over anybody. Let me shuffle them around. Because I think what I always search for in my 20 plus years now, you know, working with the processes. And, you know, going all the way from excelling in the tab was to have something powerful visual. That, you know, easily pulls out the data. So, you know, I live in the world. We're doing these massive, you know, brown papers on the walls with thousands of closed-lipped notes. And you would go through, you would have a walkthrough with management. And, you know, you would talk for a thing, you know, you would capture the lead times. It was just a massive exercise to do this. I'm not saying that it takes less time to do it in, you know, when you do it in process mining. But it just took so much time. And so, you know, once you start to move up the ladder of having, you know, the architecture. You start to have a few people that are these practitioners. And just back to the investment of doing a process improvement. Sometimes, you know, just doing a process improvement project. We're like any kind of consulting project. It comes with a 300, you know, KU impact. It just costs so much. But if you've done it once, and if you kind of standardize, then you package it. Which I think process mining to some extent does because it goes in. It pulls out the data from source systems. It can be coupled several source systems together. And all of a sudden, wow, you know, you have a flow. And you can start very similar to my, you know, some way example. You can start to cool down on the details. You can look at it, and you can do all these kind of cool analysis. And I was, you know, sweating with my calculator on the mini path. And I was going to draw a show in PowerPoint. All of a sudden, you have it there at the fingertips. So for me, you know, the pros of mining, reading terms. Some of the, you know, practice and theory that we're building in the two earlier blocks into action. It makes it a little more reading. You can see the results. You can measure it, continues. Plus, it allows you for some, you know, really powerful root core analysis that you wouldn't otherwise have. So for me, it was a necessity. So when we got the opportunity to partner with one of the more powerful vendors and out there. And I think we've mentioned sillowness. I think it was a press release. We really jumped at it. We were super excited about, you know, this technology and what they brought to the table. And we're all so excited about what some of the others are doing because we have other several other partners that we work with. And this is an area, you know, alternating your processes, you know, making them more intelligences. It's really hot, right? Yeah. So for us having that capability, you know, what was really key. So it's something that we're also scaling. We're looking into, you know, the core process areas with it. But it's also a, you know, a new way of looking at things, which requires, you know, both kind of an IT lens. Helping with a, you know, data scientist, engineering lens, and then the processing sense. It's combining those two worlds into something new, which I find really, really cool. So having that, you know, the capability to deploy this onto some of our, you know, big, complex, hairy processes. To take out some of the bias discussion, you know, those are, you know, order to activation process takes 70 days, or is it fine? Like, just to take that out, you know, that discussion out of the equation and be able to show it. And to show the deviation, you know, the conformist checking, you know, I just think it's just so powerful and elegant. So super exciting that we have, you know, those capabilities and that we're scaling them. To be able to solve for some of the more complex and maybe repeatable, you know, transformation work that we want to, want to do. And now, the, the final part of this building block. Yeah, so intelligent automation. So, so in that block, well, what we saw was, it's very easy when you start to develop processes that you, you know, either you go from an IT lens, right? And then you assume that IT does 100%. Very few IT platform does 100% of your process, right? It would pick out certain parts of it and 100%. And then the rest, you are the stock with manually or, you know, you have to develop local solutions or RPA or accounting, post automation. But very seldom you can get something that's 100%. I don't think that we're in that world yet. So for us, it was important to kind of understand, if we again go into our subway station with the landscape that we're in, how automated army, right? How much, you know, automation is our systems actually providing us with. And we also do that as a query on like a challenge. We should be doing more with with our core systems, right? Why are we not doing these things? Why are we not acting in these models? To pull up on that ladder. So let me ensure that we're consuming, you know, the platforms that we're investing a lot of money in, in the right. And then when we make decisions, not to do that, what are the technologies that we then apply? So we built in the past, you know, and it's been very successful building lots of, you know, archaed lots out there. But those things also age, right? You know, we also now looking at more like multi-passing, you know, type of bots and let's start to move up to complexity of certain virtual agents. We start to see some of the chat you can see five elements, you need to make sure that, you know, the house is in order your data sets are in order. What should be our strategy? What should be the use cases that that we go after that, you know, we can deploy safely, you know, for our customers. But also that, you know, are good for our company from a cost perspective and also from, you know, from a staff and, you know, all with all of these things. Does the x-ray of your business that the process-mining technology allows does that feed into this intelligent automation discussion or is that the foundation of everything that you base these decisions off or use some sort of other metric to figure out what to automate or what to leave be? I think they're all, you know, lenses, right? So we can go into a standard kind of high-send type of problem solving. We don't need the process-mining. We can just see, okay, well, here's a lot of stuff happening. And that could become a lot more powerful if we also have, you know, process-mining running the background. Because there we could see, I mean, there we could see, for example, the number of decisions or the number of times the task gets completed. And you can see that from the process-mining you can see off, this time-stem pair gets ticked, you know, four million times. Why? You know, you use that to start to ask why, okay, well, should we then, there's this something that we should have a bolts doing instead, or should we have a fallback with an action flow or something like that? Could we do that smarter? So they're very much, I think, feeding each other and complementing each other as building blocks, right? I wouldn't say. After you build up this steam, and now you are going somewhere, which is actually going to be my next question, by this one is about, is there something already that you could say that you're proud of that you achieved, having assembled this steam and applied these ways of working? I mean, I'm super proud of the team that we built. You know, we, and I think what the transformation has achieved so far without going into any of the details of, you know, fantastic things happening at the end of the day that, you know, one of these two or three years ago, I think there's conversations happening that would have never happened if we would have had some of these new perspectives. And that's happening daily, right? I think there's a movement now that is definitely different, you know, from two years ago. I mean, transformation is tiresome. It's really tiring to be in a constant flux, right? But I think it's just something that you have to kind of, you know, this is just the, you know, this is the new now, right? Just accept that, you know, that's going to change. 20% is going to stay the same. I'm incredibly proud of my team. I mean, for me, Helker was somewhat of a new industry. So, you know, I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about some of the specifics around our core processes, how we don't kind of ties together. You know, it's been incredibly useful to sit longer. I mean, I've done really long projects before. I mean, now I'm in the midst of all the transformation that's been going on for two plus years, just to be able to have that perspective of all the different stages of it. It is an extreme kind of luxury to be able to look back at, you know, to see all the challenges of to learn from it. It's a big learning experience. I'm also really proud, you know, that we brought in some really, really new perspectives. If you look at the, you know, the automation again, the info of the automation at the end of that. And then this is really, you know, the big cause to the team I have on the ground on, I had a batting at this, you know, while I've been away and while I continue to be away. But they've really continued the same way we have to be the power of automation. It starts, you know, if you have bad processes, if you have bad data, you're going to end up with really poor automation. It's probably going to go the other way. And if you want to be customer success, then if you want to be so customer focused that you want to be, it starts with having efficient processes. So we, you know, it's, it's about fixing those, having the accountability and doing that repeatedly. I think we're starting to see some of that resilience, you know, in there. And I hope that that, you know, we'll continue to see that. I mean, I sometimes make the joke that what I was interviewing, they asked me how many years do you think it'll take before 10 years, process excellence. And that's at 50. Let's say we don't have 50 years. This is the wrong, this is the wrong answer, you know, it's like, but, and then I said, but what do you want to measure? Which is excellence in the way that is I grew up at that general electric or the way you would see it. The way you would see it's gone, yeah, or see. Right. If you haven't worked with it, you know, seriously continues before, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, and you let go of it. It's going to take that long. But I certainly hope it's going to take less. And I think what we're seeing now with the acceleration of technologies and, you know, how process mining is enabling some of that change becoming more, you know, more platforms. You know, as a, as a process nerd and a transformation nerd, there's just so much potential and power in these platforms that can be unlocked and democratized. If we have to ride people around it. So, so, you know, it's never really been a more interesting time than working with, you know, transformation and process. It's, it's, that for me has been really cool to be able to bring those things together and also to meet a lot of people have done. Even though I've been very focused on things internally, but I've still been able to meet people extra that are so passionate about this, and everyone is struggling with it. Yeah. And my final question is about the future. And I don't want you to look 50 years ahead. That's still a bit far away from for each and every one of us. But a few years or even a few months. Is there something that you are getting excited about? Maybe it could be a rising new technology mentioned AI, but it could be also anything else that you're really, really looking forward to tackling. And I think it's hard to avoid the challenges that comes with the chat capacity and these really powerful, large language models. And how they can get embedded into virtually just that can execute a lot more complexity into our processes. I think that's going to be a big kind of pancya and something for us to think about as transformation professionals. I'm super excited about that. There's also a part of me that's really terrifying because if that goes wrong, if you don't have the right data models, at least things start to hallucinate or go, I think things can go really wrong. And if you start to see a real positive trend on the MPS, you don't want to have a virtual agent that goes out and behaves very badly. And it can be transcoing, it could be whatever. So I'm super excited about that. But with the gardener and stuff, you know, probably wouldn't, you know, it will not make it as efficient maybe as possible to make it more maybe human. So no, so I'm super excited about that. But the same thing I know that's scared is because, at least, you know, the everything that I read about, you know, the the GPs of the world and these models. You know, everyone is saying, even, you know, the big research that knows a lot more about this than I said that this is, you know, 5, 10, maybe 20 years out and maybe we're now, you know, five years away from something that is, you know, almost as intelligent as a human, right? So it's going very quickly. Then, you know, if you are to harvest that, you know, there's still a lot of legacy that needs to be, you know, worked on. But I think, you know, it is so interesting. It's so cool. If we can harness that, but that power to, you know, and lock it through processing power. I think that would be fantastic for humanity. Maybe we could take out a lot of these mundane boring tasks that, you know, we always, you know, we always talk about. You know, let's really get rid of some of these non-value ads. We can create, you know, beautiful experiences. I mean, if you're a salesperson, no more sales sheets that you need to fill out or, you know, sales for it wouldn't be fantastic. If, you know, you have a recording, you know, sitting in a car, you press record button, you kind of do a voiceover, right? And then the AI or the virtual agent just writes it all out, it just fixes it in the back end. And then it spits out, you know, the three next recommendations and all that. I mean, all of a sudden, for me, you know, that is talking about the dream that we always have with very high automated process where, you know, the expensive part is us humans, right? We apply, you know, AI with our thoughts back to something I'm super excited about. And I think there's going to be just such a cool new sets of jobs that we've never seen before that would be great. I mean, who knew what a, you know, web creator was, you know, 30 years ago. I mean, that's my expert. I mean, my favorite now is an AI problem. There's like God's sake. It's somebody to ask questions to, you know, to, to, oh my God, I mean, it's, it's certainly interesting, right? So I'm, so no, I'm very, very excited about the promise of artificial intelligence. I mean, that is a true game changer. And I mean, then on a personal and I'm super excited about getting my small ones into kindergarten and see where they go. But I think we're, you know, with all the things, I'm always wondering, what kind of jobs would they have in their life? And it's conversation with my father and what, you know, what did you think the world would look like? And, you know, the answers there is, you know, it's very different. I think, but I think the pace up with the things are changing up now. It's just, yeah, it's just scary. I think you're, I think the future ones will be watching over AI not to go wild. One of the jobs, maybe. I just have to walk on that. I saw, I saw something really cool. And I think I might have shared with you guys. So it was this, well, I, so there is this famous, you know, homey where, you know, there's, there's a bunch of cavemen that I'm walking with, some kind of, you know, square wheel. And, you know, somebody walks, walks by and win around wheel and say, you want to have a round wheel and go, no, no, no, we're fine. We've always been doing this. We know what we're doing. And then I think there's been this kind of, um, a Boston dynamics video now with a, with a kind of a car wheel being proven by a Boston dynamics robot. And it got me to think about, you know, if you really want to harness all of the power of the capabilities that we talked about today, right. It's very much still a hybrid process environment that we have, right. Um, so if it's manual, there's still some human in the loop of nation can still be pretty scattered, but, you know, if you start to have an understanding of how these things are connected. From his mind, it can be part of kind of that, that solution in. And you understand how the subway system works. You know, where the bolt to make sure that could be a, you know, really powerful starting point to really allow, you know, the potential of what, you know, artificial intelligence or someone to bring on. Otherwise, the risk is that you're just going to have a really, you know, super expensive new horse pulling the car, right. But it's not going to move any quick. And that's what I've seen so many times, you know, you buy this Ferrari on a system, which sales forms or SAP can be. And but if the rest of the company is not moving at that pace, where the degree of automation is not the same level, it really backs you down. The slowest, you know, transformations that you're only as strong as your weakest link, right. Or your slowest robot. And Rick, what an amazing discussion. I was really, really cool to hear your insights based on your career, your experience. But also what you're doing and where you're leading your organization in Tilia right now. So thank you so, so much for coming to the show. It was a pleasure talking to you. Super. Thank you guys for having me and hope you guys can enjoy some sun and that, you know, even working as consultants that you do get some summer holidays. I know that you guys are, you know, super busy with probably all the clients trying to do all sorts of work here while they're gone away on holidays. But always remember, right, the IKEA box example, make sure that you always have the client in the room so that you solve things together because they don't value it more. But thank you so much guys. This has been a true pleasure sharing some, some, you know, experiences mine. And yeah, I hope to see you around. Likewise, guys, likewise. Who I also need to think is obviously you really soon. So thank you for sticking with us with yet another episode. If you have any questions whatsoever, just reach out to us on LinkedIn where we are pretty active. You can also write us an email on mining your business podcast at gmail.com. And if you like us, leave us a review. Thank you very, very much and talk to you in two weeks of time. So bye bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]