Ahead of ASUG Best Prac­tices (in Hous­ton, Octo­ber 14 – 16), gain insights from John Ler­to­la, Senior Process Archi­tect, at Qorvo.

From smart­phones to space­craft, Qor­vo is con­nect­ing the world around us with inno­v­a­tive semi­con­duc­tor solu­tions for 5G infra­struc­ture, Wi-Fi, and oth­er areas. 

Based out of Greens­boro, North Car­oli­na, with more than 6,100 employ­ees across the globe, this Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ca­tions chips mak­er spe­cial­izes in research­ing, devel­op­ing, and com­mer­cial­iz­ing core tech­nolo­gies and radio fre­quen­cy (RF) solu­tions for mobile, infra­struc­ture, and defense appli­ca­tions, as well as microchips for communication. 

Pro­vid­ing RF, wire­less con­nec­tiv­i­ty, sen­sors, and pow­er solu­tions to its cus­tomers is a $3.5 bil­lion busi­ness for Qor­vo. Lead­ing in this space has placed the com­pa­ny at the cen­ter of key mega­trends dri­ving the plan­et in areas such as con­nec­tiv­i­ty, elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, datafi­ca­tion, and mobility.

“Your phone prob­a­bly has our chips in it,” says John Ler­to­la, Senior Process Archi­tect at Qor­vo, not­ing that the com­pa­ny first gained recog­ni­tion for RF and pow­er man­age­ment for mobile device solu­tions, fol­lowed by auto­mo­tive technology. 

Keep­ing up with the high-tech trends of tomor­row, from bio­med­ical appli­ca­tions to elec­tric vehi­cles, is no small feat; doing so will require Qor­vo to become ful­ly dig­i­tal. ​“We’re try­ing to stream­line our envi­ron­ment through busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion on how we buy, make, and sell prod­ucts,” Ler­to­la explains. ​“Inter­nal­ly, we have a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty to trans­form this business.” 

Trans­form­ing the way Qor­vo does busi­ness is a mul­ti-year endeav­or involv­ing busi­ness process man­age­ment solu­tions from SAP, such as SAP Sig­navio. In par­tic­u­lar, process-min­ing capa­bil­i­ties have demon­strat­ed to Qor­vo to take a struc­tured approach to unlock­ing val­ue from exist­ing busi­ness process mod­els while dri­ving dig­i­ti­za­tion goals. 

“We are an SAP com­pa­ny,” Ler­to­la says. ​“Every­thing that flows through our sys­tems, every order, every trans­ac­tion, flows through SAP. Once we knew Sig­navio was being acquired by SAP, and knew there’d be more val­ue added through inte­gra­tion, it was an easy choice.”

Ahead of ASUG Best Prac­tices (in Hous­ton, Octo­ber 14 – 16), where he’ll present on Qorvo’s new stan­dard of oper­a­tional excel­lence, Ler­to­la sat down with ASUG to dis­cuss how the com­pa­ny is using SAP Sig­navio to estab­lish a robust busi­ness process cen­ter of excel­lence (CoE) and move toward high­er busi­ness process matu­ri­ty levels. 

Improv­ing Busi­ness Process Maturity

As the lead senior process archi­tect at Qor­vo, Ler­to­la is work­ing to build an envi­ron­ment that will enable the busi­ness to max­i­mize automa­tion and agili­ty — which, accord­ing to him, begins with stan­dards and a foun­da­tion of best practices. 

In eval­u­at­ing trans­for­ma­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties for Qor­vo, Ler­to­la looked to Gartner’s Matu­ri­ty and Adop­tion Mod­el, which dis­tin­guish­es six phas­es of busi­ness process man­age­ment (acknowl­edge oper­a­tional inef­fi­cien­cies, process-aware, intra-process automa­tion and con­trol, inter-process automa­tion and con­trol, enter­prise val­u­a­tion con­trol, and agile busi­ness struc­ture), as a resource. 

Gen­er­al­ly, across var­i­ous depart­ments, Qor­vo now exists in the first two of those phas­es, Ler­to­la explains. While busi­ness activ­i­ties are mea­sured and mon­i­tored, with busi­ness process­es mod­eled and ana­lyzed, process per­for­mance met­rics estab­lished, and process own­ers and a gov­er­nance struc­ture both iden­ti­fied, the com­pa­ny has strug­gled to direct­ly link process mod­els and rules to its desired lev­el of execution. 

To achieve greater busi­ness process matu­ri­ty, Qor­vo needs to re-align process­es with its mar­ket strat­e­gy, estab­lish enter­prise-wide process automa­tion and con­trol that extends to its cus­tomers and trad­ing part­ners, and ulti­mate­ly cre­ate goal-dri­ven process­es that exist with­in an agile busi­ness structure. 

Before any of this work could start, though, Qor­vo need­ed to select a com­mon repos­i­to­ry and tax­on­o­my, equip­ping its orga­ni­za­tion with a com­mon lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate and define work process­es. ​“You have to have a stan­dard,” Ler­to­la explains. ​“You have to have a way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing across the board, across dif­fer­ent func­tions, and we real­ly did­n’t have an indus­try standard.”

Mov­ing from its home-grown frame­work to the Amer­i­can Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty & Qual­i­ty Cen­ter (APQC) Process Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Frame­work, to realign and doc­u­ment process­es, made par­tic­u­lar sense giv­en this process framework’s inte­gra­tion in SAP Sig­navio. Allow­ing for process link­age across func­tion­al areas, cross-indus­try bench­mark­ing, and improved process effi­cien­cy, select­ing this enter­prise-class busi­ness process mod­el­ing tool set the com­pa­ny up for BPM success. 

Ler­to­la and his team took a deep dive into Qorvo’s lega­cy envi­ron­ments using this frame­work, which breaks high-lev­el cat­e­gories down into increas­ing­ly gran­u­lar units, deter­min­ing how to clas­si­fy each of the company’s process­es with­in APQC. ​“That told us a good sto­ry,” he recalls. ​“It told us that we are heav­i­ly invest­ed in mas­ter data, design­ing, sell­ing, deliv­er­ing, and finance, which helped us see even fur­ther what Qor­vo is all about.”

The frame­work also paved the way for Qorvo’s first SAP Sig­navio tri­al in 2021, with­in the company’s IT orga­ni­za­tion, to shift dis­ci­pline and process silos cre­at­ed with Microsoft tools — such as Word, Pow­er­Point, and Visio — toward robust process flows.

Cap­tur­ing dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing require­ments and build­ing mul­ti­level process­es with­in SAP Sig­navio, which include sys­tems and data objects while fol­low­ing indus­try stan­dard prac­tices, has helped to set a foun­da­tion for automa­tion and will allow Qor­vo to enable an agile busi­ness struc­ture, Ler­to­la said.

And to fur­ther deep­en their adher­ence to stan­dards with­in busi­ness process mod­el­ing, Ler­to­la also invest­ed the orga­ni­za­tion in Busi­ness Process Mod­el­ing Nota­tion (BPMN), a ​“left-to-right, up-and-down” flow-chart method that mod­els the steps of a planned busi­ness process from end to end. 

Opti­miz­ing Process Flows

Qor­vo has since lever­aged SAP Sig­navio Process Man­ag­er in addi­tion to Gov­er­nance (for process reviews and approvals) and Col­lab­o­ra­tion Hub (for com­ments, feed­back, and col­lab­o­ra­tion between process authors, review­ers, and users) in var­i­ous areas. 

“When we did this eval­u­a­tion, we looked at what the biggest val­ue was we could find with SAP Sig­navio,” Ler­to­la says. ​“You don’t want to just build process­es for presentation.” 

This led the orga­ni­za­tion to review SAP Sig­navio Process Intel­li­gence, which enabled the orga­ni­za­tion to gain deep­er insights into what process­es were being most fre­quent­ly used, and which process­es had fall­en out of use or been over­looked, while con­nect­ing them to geo­graph­i­cal data. For exam­ple, for an accounts-payable process flow, Qor­vo could see how AP process­es were man­aged in spe­cif­ic coun­tries or areas and eval­u­ate how effec­tive each was in terms of time spent to com­plete the flow. 

“Essen­tial­ly, you can take your process­es that you devel­oped, you can take six months of your trans­ac­tion his­to­ry, and tie them togeth­er, and that way you can ask, ​‘Did I write out what I exact­ly do inside my SAP system?’” 

One val­ue of SAP Sig­navio involves lever­ag­ing pre-con­fig­ured core process­es from SAP, load­ing process flows into SAP Sig­navio using the BPMN stan­dard, and once aug­ment­ed load­ing the process mod­el­ers into SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er. Out-of-the-box test scripts are often avail­able, ensur­ing that Sig­navio con­nects seam­less­ly with Solu­tion Manager.

Thus far, Qor­vo has grown to near­ly 500 process­es cre­at­ed by APQC cat­e­go­ry. ​“A lot of it is invest­ed in finance, IT, and HR, plus how we deliv­er, how we sell, and our mas­ter data,” Ler­to­la says. 

“We are trans­form­ing the busi­ness,” he adds. ​“We’ve only reached release one, which is heav­i­ly invest­ed in finance and HR. We do expect we’re going to grow — clos­er to 1500 process­es once all is said and done. Every day, peo­ple want to add more and more process­es, and it is build­ing the end-to-end story.”

With­in SAP Sig­navio, Ler­to­la can not only exam­ine process flows but go deep­er into a sys­tems view, then see every process that sys­tem is impact­ing and every doc­u­ment con­nect­ed to each process. ​“You’re real­ly build­ing a data­base inside Sig­navio, and the val­ue of this has been tremen­dous for us.”

The Future of Busi­ness Process Management

As the cen­tral hub for Qorvo’s busi­ness process CoE, SAP Sig­navio today facilitates: 

• Map­ping and doc­u­ment­ing process­es at a gran­u­lar level.
• Col­lab­o­ra­tion across depart­ments to ensure process alignment.
• Process analy­sis to iden­ti­fy bot­tle­necks and improve­ment opportunities.
• Per­for­mance mea­sure­ment through key met­rics and data-dri­ven insights

Ler­to­la has also eval­u­at­ed LeanIX and is excit­ed to hope­ful­ly next imple­ment the solu­tion, along with its enter­prise archi­tec­ture tool, with Sig­navio, lever­ag­ing the exten­sive data present with­in that tech­nol­o­gy to deep­en the lev­el of insights that his team can achieve into systems.

Cur­rent­ly, Qor­vo can see into its sys­tems at the appli­ca­tions lev­el, but LeanIX can eval­u­ate tech­ni­cal lay­ers — servers, net­works, ser­vices, etc. — and cre­ate a ​“sin­gle source of truth” con­nect­ed with SAP Sig­navio, Ler­to­la says. 

The com­pa­ny recent­ly com­plet­ed release one of its busi­ness process trans­for­ma­tion. Even in reach­ing this land­mark, Qor­vo encoun­tered an issue that illu­mi­nat­ed the need for fur­ther inte­gra­tion with LeanIX. 

“One busi­ness chal­lenge occurred in our lega­cy envi­ron­ment, and so we had to change some­thing up,” Ler­to­la says. ​“But to find all the bound­ary sys­tems, I had to find them in SAP Sig­navio and build out a spread­sheet; that’s about as far as I go. With LeanIX, you would have just pushed a but­ton, and you’d see the entire list, and you’d be able to make use of that and real­ly tie it all together.”

Still, that’s fur­ther ahead for Qor­vo. Qor­vo is on SAP ECC for all of its func­tions out­side of finance, where its SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion is focused, and the com­pa­ny is in the midst of explor­ing the new capa­bil­i­ties of RISE with SAP, which it has recent­ly opt­ed into.

Lessons Learned

In reflect­ing on the road so far for Qorvo’s busi­ness process trans­for­ma­tion, Ler­to­la is quick to cred­it the company’s employ­ee base for col­lab­o­rat­ing to learn the ins and outs of SAP Sig­navio — though his advice to oth­er com­pa­nies imple­ment­ing the tech­nol­o­gy is to invest in cre­at­ing a small team of sub­ject mat­ter experts. 

“It took 12 hours, across three four-hour ses­sions, to real­ly learn the details of SAP Sig­navio,” he says. ​“Not every­body has time like that avail­able. Once a few of us became experts, I com­pressed those 12 hours to an hour and a half, to make it Qor­vo-spe­cif­ic. Get some SMEs who can do that train­ing, tie it all togeth­er, and it will accel­er­ate the process.” 

So far, Ler­to­la has edu­cat­ed 150 peo­ple to become process mod­el­ers. He keeps his door open to those around Qor­vo still gain­ing expe­ri­ence with SAP Signavio. 

“Always mak­ing sure you’re avail­able for peo­ple that need help gives them a lit­tle bit of courage to go into it,” he says. ​“It’s not, ​‘If you build it, they will come.’ You real­ly have to sup­port them and grow them.”

To hear more insights from ASUG Best Prac­tices read our recap of the conference’s top­ics.