Achieving Radical Change
ArcWorkbench is a comprehensive set of integrated software tools that help organisations to manage in a process-centric manner. It links together and supports definition and maintenance of an organisation's business strategy and process architecture. It supports continuous business process improvement projects and system selection and implementation projects.
Developed by Draxmont Owl, a training company that focuses exclusively on business process management and improvement, ArcWorkbench is provided free to organisations that attend Draxmont Owl training courses so that attendees can implement what they have learnt into their real life business environments. It consists of nine integrated application modules:
- System Administration
- Set up ArcWorkbench users so that they can access different applications with different access rights.
- Define or import out-of-box system design elements such as database structures, presentation screens and reports so that configurations and changes made to them during system implementation projects can be monitored.
- Project Management
- Create different project environments for undertaking business process redesign, improvement and system implementation projects.
- Configure external documents and applications that can be initiated from within ArcWorkbench and linked to particular projects.
- Strategy
- Define and maintain the business strategy in terms of its strategic themes, it strategic key performance indicators and financial goals.
- Define the business operating environment in terms of external change forces and the organisation's own internal strengths, weaknesses and cultural policies, and the impact that these can have on the organisation's pursuit of its strategic themes and achievement of its strategic goals.
- Define strategic technology and systems opportunities and how these could impact the process architecture.
- Process Architecture
- Define the business process architecture in terms of process inputs and outputs and process key performance indicators, and their targets, so that all processes remain synchronized with each other and the business strategy.
- Map current organizational activity and policies to the process architecture, to provide an 'as-is' starting point for process redesign and improvement.
- Identify priorities for process change and improvement.
- Process Analysis
- Define required process output performance levels.
- Analyse process output chains and the extent to which individual processes can ultimately impact strategic themes and overall business performance.
- Document alternative process activity flows, identifying value added and non-value added activity.
- System and Service Selection
- Define the high-level system and service requirements needed to support the process architecture.
- Manage system selection projects by distributing requirements to potential suppliers and evaluating supplier responses.
- Undertake objective assessment of supplier responses.
- Prototype Development
- Capture detailed system configuration and design change requirements made to out-of-box systems, that are required to support the detailed process design.
- Manage system change authorisation.
- Change Preparation
- Plan and document procedures for testing new process designs and their supporting systems, and manage testing.
- Plan and document training in new process designs and their supporting systems, and manage training.
- Change Implementation
- Create a strategy for populating new system databases with legacy and additional data.
- Automatically create data migration scripts.
- Plan the cut-over from the old process design to the new process design.