BPM: Strategy Before Software

When Enterprise Rent-A-Car deployed a business process management (BPM) product to help revamp the process by which employees request IT hardware, software and services, the company’s strategy for implementing BPM and maintaining the request system going forward was every bit as important as the technology itself.

The St. Louis based company, one of the largest car rental companies in the world, leveraged a BPM suite from Appian to consolidate several technologies that supported the request and fulfillment process into one unified platform. The result is fewer manual steps, reduced errors, and a foundation that will support ongoing automation, ensuring that the IT request process will be scalable for growth in request volume, says Ron Puno, senior manager of IT at Request Services.

The company’s Request Services department uses the platform to process, approve and to enable the fulfillment of requests for IT products and services from its thousands of employees worldwide. Before the revision, Enterprise used multiple systems—which were mostly manual and incapable of being expanded—to handle such requests.

Request Services launched a strategy for implementing the changes that have proven to be critical to the success of the project. A big part of this strategy was dealing with the cultural changes that would take place with the implementation of the new request system.

The department engaged and continues to involve key stakeholders—mainly the people who approve IT product and service requests and those who fulfill the requests—in the development phases of new services and functionality.

“One of the benefits of our particular platform is we're able to take stakeholder requirements and rapidly incorporate them,” Puno says. “But prior to making these live, oftentimes we'll engage with stakeholders in sessions where we show them what we've built in part—basically a demo or working prototype of the intended functionality.”