Even as the Qor­vo, Inc., web­site con­veys how the glob­al com­pa­ny is ​“trans­form­ing the way you live, work, play, and com­mu­ni­cate,” Qor­vo is inter­nal­ly trans­form­ing the way it does busi­ness, in mul­ti-year ini­tia­tives that lever­age SAP solu­tions, includ­ing SAP Signavio.

The mak­er of com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems and infra­struc­ture, with more than 8,400 employ­ees and over $4 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue, is ​“SAP-cen­tric,” accord­ing to John Ler­to­la, Senior Process Architect. 

Heav­i­ly Into SAP

“Every­thing that flows through our sys­tems, every order, every trans­ac­tion, flows through SAP. And if SAP comes out with some­thing new, we heav­i­ly look at it, and many times buy into it,” Ler­to­la said.

While Qor­vo has yet to move to SAP S/4HANA from SAP ECC, the company’s busi­ness-trans­for­ma­tion ​“readi­ness” work is going through weeks of ​“pre-design blue­print” and ​“full blue­print” stages. An essen­tial dual focus is on a new busi­ness process frame­work and tax­on­o­my based on the APQC indus­try stan­dard and busi­ness process mod­el­ing based on the SAP Sig­navio suite. These activ­i­ties pro­vide the ground­work to achieve Qorvo’s over­ar­ch­ing trans­for­ma­tion goals.

“When it comes to busi­ness, we want to be fast, we want to improve speed in every­thing we do, and get rid of many of the man­u­al process­es we have,” Ler­to­la explained. ​“We want to be lean, to make sure we’re effi­cient in every­thing. We want to auto­mate as much as pos­si­ble. We want to have as much ana­lyt­ics as pos­si­ble, be cost-effec­tive, and lean toward tech­nolo­gies that will enable us to leapfrog what we do today.”

From ​‘As Is’ to ​‘To Be’

Qorvo’s leapfrog quest tracks back to 2019 when teams began to use the Amer­i­can Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty & Qual­i­ty Cen­ter (APQC) process clas­si­fi­ca­tion frame­work to realign and doc­u­ment process­es. To take that work toward process improve­ment, the orga­ni­za­tion moved ahead with an SAP Sig­navio tri­al in 2021. The tri­al helped to move the com­pa­ny from ​“as is” to the improved ​“to be” process­es, and to take the dis­ci­pline and process silos cre­at­ed using Microsoft tools (Word, Pow­er­Point, and Visio) into robust process flows, Ler­to­la recalled.

“The choice was to tri­al with­in the IT orga­ni­za­tion to real­ly see how Sig­navio works. We built up a good 50 process­es with a num­ber of process man­agers, and process mod­els, to build out what we could see and say from an enable­ment per­spec­tive with­in IT, to real­ly move for­ward,” he said.

In the last year, Qor­vo used SAP Sig­navio Process Mod­el­ing, Gov­er­nance, and Col­lab­o­ra­tion Hub to improve sev­er­al areas. In one case, more than 30 pro­cure­ment process­es with­in Qorvo’s SAP Ari­ba sys­tem were defined step-by-step using APQC, work­flows were under­stood, and improve­ments were sim­u­lat­ed via Sig­navio. A sim­i­lar approach also improved accounts payable process­es, among others. 

Gov­er­nance and Col­lab­o­ra­tion at Work

SAP Sig­navio Gov­er­nance pri­mar­i­ly applies to process reviews and approvals at Qor­vo, while the Col­lab­o­ra­tion Hub allows for com­ments, feed­back, and col­lab­o­ra­tion between process authors, review­ers, and users. Ler­to­la said the team used SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors’ Col­lab­o­ra­tion Hub inter­nal devel­op­ments as a mod­el for the Qor­vo implementation.

For Ler­to­la and the team, SAP Sig­navio offers com­pre­hen­sive improve­ment views and capa­bil­i­ties, an eas­i­ly approach­able struc­ture, sim­ple rules and error correction/​mitigation, mean­ing­ful reports, and graph­ics — and he said it’s ​“fun” to use.

“You can actu­al­ly build a process flow in 10 sec­onds, eas­i­ly,” he added.

With the blue­print stages set to con­clude and busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion soon to kick off, Ler­to­la said he antic­i­pates the 200 process­es already defined and under­go­ing SAP Sig­navio improve­ment analy­ses will grow up to 1,500 process­es. He also said the orga­ni­za­tion would use an esti­mat­ed 1,000-plus SAP Sig­navio-relat­ed best prac­tices to enhance and expand its efforts.

“The next step is real­ly the hock­ey stick. We will be able to pull in busi­ness best prac­tice process­es and hope­ful­ly eas­i­ly tie those with­in Sig­navio,” he said. ​“Our goal is to make as much use of them as we can.”

Explore this SAP Sig­navio Con­tent Col­lec­tion for more curat­ed content.