Trossen Los! (Cast Away!)

It was the theme under which Eye Wish Opticians & Grand Optical Belgium (Eye Wish) worked on the Carve Out from GrandVision[1] within a very limited time frame. Casting off the final ropes heading towards the open sea and the new mother ship MPG. What a journey it was and still is.

Building a new HQ team, implementing new IT-systems, new supply chains.....all with the stores still running.

 

Competing Carve Out priorities

To carry out a Carve Out there are three competing priorities:

• Speed (carrying out the Carve Out as quickly as possible);

• Quality (carrying out the Carve Out as smoothly and carefully as possible);

• Value (achieving the highest valuation of the stand alone company)

In this case GrandVision needed to dispose of specific assets (Retail Stores Eye Wish & Grand Optical) to comply with antitrust regulations. Therefore, speed was clearly the main priority during this Carve Out. But in addition, a lot of effort was put in creating a stand alone value of the Eye Wish company. With the most importantant challenge being the development ánd(!) implementation of a new Point-of-Sale system. With every store now fully operational on this new system Eye Wish has achieved the impossible.

 

Focus on TO BE

If Speed and Value are the main priorities out of three, there is no time (and relevance) to make a complete AS IS inventarization on the company processes before the end of the TSA. In this context my aim was to create something valuable for the future: Building an integrated Process House, focussing on the TO BE situation of the disposed company. 

 

A Process House, Why?

There are many reasons for creating an (integrated) Process House, but the main reason is to create a structured and complete overview of all working processes and the cohesion between them; a perfect starting point for Continuous Improvement. 

ARIS became the tool to accomplish this objective. It supports a layered set-up and integrates relevant objects such as Risks, Requirements and Systems,  increasing the chances of being adopted by the company. 

But where to start if every process has to be designed almost from scratch with Speed being the main priority? With a top-down approach slowly but steadily I was able to complete the framework, adding granularity along the way.

 

The Reference Model

In an (integrated) Process House all company processes are structured in a Reference Model. Think of it as a library, in which processes can be easily found and from which they can be selected for an End-to-End Scenario.

There are no strict guidelines on designing a Process House, but in general the Reference Model is based on a functional structure (not being departments!) and follows the ISO 9001 (QMS) standard categories: 

• Management processes
• Core processes
• Supporting processes

During the Carve Out Eyewish focussed on documenting  the core and supporting processes.

 

Process documentation in detail: Less is more!

Only a selection of defined working processes need to be standardized and documented in detail. For the detailed layer Eyewish uses the BPMN 2.0 notation. Reasons for Processes to qualify for detailed standardization and documentation could be: 

• Efficiency
• Legal Requirements
• Quality Standards
• Risk Mitigation/ Control Measures

But be selective when documenting a process in detail! For creative, incidental or tailor made processes there is no need to do so and can even harm the value of a Process House alltogether. However, for some process steps even a more detailed work instruction is needed. Work instructions are created "free format" outside ARIS but with a link to the instruction, ensuring the single point of truth in ARIS.