It seemed entirely appropriate that an extraordinary first day’s program at Nimbus IP11 closed out this evening with a stunning set from the amazing a cappella vocal group Naturally 7.
It was a day of superlatives. I lost count of the number of people, whom I’d never met before, saying, in the breaks: ’This is amazing!’.
As one delegate put it, the Nimbus plane took off some time ago, lifted high by client enthusiasm. And the video message from TIBCO founder and CEO, Vivek Ranadivé, who was keynoting at TUCON in Las Vegas today, confirmed that Nimbus now has an extra large powered-by-TIBCO jet engine strapped under each wing.
As ever, it was Nimbus customers who fizzed with energy. And, as usual, their candor was remarkable: this was real knowledge-sharing among pioneers in an approach to enterprise business process management that will one day be business-as-usual.
My own highlights from the stage, picked out from a packed program, would be...
Tim Leach from Northrop Grumman, on the challenge of bringing together the insights of 23k people (many of them actually rocket scientists, he laughingly pointed out) and aligning them in the cause of continuous improvement. If Northrop Grumman can assemble all the parts for the most advanced aerospace equipment, and keep them aligned so the plane can fly, then why is it such a challenge to get people aligned and flying in formation? How could it be that having 7k people trained in Six Sigma and Lean was yielding so little in terms of sustainable cost reductions and service improvement? The answer: bring their work together into a single process repository, within a single process architecture, and connect that with how people get real work done. “Our failure”, he said,”was that we tried to build it ourselves. After 18 months we found Nimbus, and that was an immediate 85% of the solution.”
Richard Miller from Marathon Oil, manager of a platform in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea that cost $3bn to build, costs $160m to operate every year – and that pumps $1.6m of oil and gas per day, when everything is working properly. After a Nimbus Control implementation that has successfully enabled a major in-sourcing exercise, and a re-implementation of SAP: "The thing I notice", he said,"is that things are becoming much more predictable. Not just in planning work and the delivery of materials, but right across the business."
Darren Anderson, Principal Solution Architect for Sony, based in Tokyo, steering Sony's global SAP program (which is his 32nd major SAP implementation), and striving to ensure that process is at its heart. "We had this realization - I knew this but could never vocalize it - that end-to-end process is what we have to focus on." That realization had enabled Sony's European business to reduce the timeline for delivery of an SAP program from two years to just one. "The critical success factor was Nimbus: working around one process. I want the business to be thinking about how to improve the process, not have to think about changes to SAP. Nimbus Control has the potential to accelerate our global program, and to help us win in the marketplace by being One Sony."
Gregory Reynolds, Head of the BPM Center of Excellence at Nestlé, described as a 'no-brainer' the final decision, after an exhaustive evaluation, to adopt Nimbus Control as Nestlé's global BPM platform. "There's almost unlimited potential", he said,"because continuous improvement is baked into our culture."
Anne Salétes from Novartis on how Nimbus Control is enabling process improvement in the most challenging regulatory environment by providing end-to-end visibility. "We are all talking about - and challenging - the same perspective on our clinical operations processes. Our people working in clinical trials are, naturally, very precise. What we are doing is helping them to see the big picture as well. So we can see how we can improve - and show our regulators that we are efficient and managing the risks."
The funniest moment, for me at least: Richard Parker, co-Founder of Nimbus, talking about the company's evolution within the SAP landscape, and noting that: "We're not just going around helping the victims of SAP implementations any more." (Images of ambulance-chasing to get to the scene of an implementation and help to restore the vitals of the enterprise fast...)
But I can't neglect to mention the Guide Dogs video, which was hugely inspiring. I happened to meet a delegate from the conference on the train on the way home (as I wrote this - she recognised my conference badge!) - and it was the Guide Dogs, and Naturally 7, that she wanted to talk about.
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