BPM Solution Brings Big Changes through Small Processes

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By Linda L. Briggs

Sometimes, smaller really is better. In the case of Panda Restaurant Group, the restaurant chain has had great initial success with its new business process management system by focusing first on renovating small processes.

Panda Restaurant Group is a global firm that owns Panda Express, Panda Inn and Hibachi-San restaurants, which together form the largest Chinese foodservice provider in the United States. Yearly sales top $750 million, and the company employs 14,000 employees in restaurants in 37 states, Puerto Rico and Japan. Panda has over 800 stores and is expanding at the rate of 165 new locations a year.

Developing a BPM Strategy

As growth has continued and technologies have changed, Panda realized in 2005 that its 13-year-old Windows-based client/server architecture was working at cross-purposes to the business. Over time, the IT group had built an assortment of Visual Basic applications that worked well individually, but didn't really share data or processes well. For example, although Panda had created online forms to capture user input automatically for various processes, those forms still sometimes had to be printed out and the information entered by hand into another system. "We had system application silos that weren't connected," according to Caleb Mitsvotai, executive director of information systems development at Panda.

"As we began to look at our growth," Mitsvotai said, "we took a step back and said, we really need to look at our software platform. We need to grow to 10,000 stores. We started looking at our business process and realizing, we're doing things the same way in many areas… that we've been doing for 13 years, when we had 35 stores."

To address the problem, the company decided to move to a Java-based server-side solution running on Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The change is intended to take the company from its current 850 stores well into the future.

In addition to changing development platforms, Mitsvotai realized that the company needed to automate many of its business processes in order to speed up and simplify processes, and eliminate the restrictions created by individual applications that couldn't share data. Those processes, while often simple, added up to significant management efforts in total. They included such tasks as completing and approving a form for a leave of absence, the new hire process, a time and expense report, a new vendor report, and a request for a new menu item. "Some of these requests were halfway automated, but many of them weren't automated [at all]," Mitsvotai said.

In order to get the most out of its existing and planned technology, the firm realized that it needed to take a hard look at business processes. "We decided we had to either introduce business process simplifications or improvements," Mitsvotai said, "or re-engineer the business process entirely."

Searching for BPM Tools

After studying a list of top BPM products from research firm Gartner Inc., and conducting an extended RFP period, Mitsvotai found that most of the products he reviewed were too formulaic for Panda. Solutions seemed designed to automate huge primary business processes such as customer support for a large manufacturer or claims processing for an insurance company. That sort of pre-built help wasn't what Panda needed. Also, the initial product cost was universally high, and the cost and effort for implementation would have been "tremendous," Mitsvotai said.

Instead, the company wanted a flexible, easy-to-use, browser-based tool that would enable them to create their own BPM solutions, addressing small but repetitive tasks like processing leave-of-absence or time-and-expense forms. "We wanted to find a product that [made it] easy to automate the simplest of processes," Mitsvotai said, "not only our major processes." Mitsvotai also wanted process owners to be able to make simple workflow modifications on their own, to reduce support from IT.

In the end, Panda selected iMarkup Server from iMarkup Solutions. This Web-based solution provides business process management, automation and reporting capabilities. Built on an integrated document management and workflow automation system, iMarkup provides storage, categorization and search technologies for documents, electronic forms and workflow processes.

Panda also found iMarkup's pricing to be far more competitive. And the small size of the company helped the restaurant firm feel comfortable that iMarkup would work with them as a partner in modifying the product for Panda's purposes.

A mantra of Panda's BPM rollout from the start was to target small improvements in oft-performed business processes, realizing that automating those tasks could represent real gains in efficiency for the overall business.

For example, with iMarkup in place for its pilot project -- automating leave of absence requests -- Panda has seen a 600% increase in the number of requests it can process in the same amount of time. "That means something to the employee, of course," Mitsvotai said, "but also means that rather than [a full-time equivalent] person, a store needs someone for just a few hours a week to handle such requests."

BPM Deployment

Once Panda made the purchase decision, the overall rollout took about six months. Three months of that was an integration phase in which Mitsvotai's team and iMarkup worked together to create an interface between iMarkup, which uses Microsoft's ASP.NET platform, and Panda's new J2EE-based system. "It was important for us to create a seamless flow in the workflow through those applications," said Mitsvotai.

The ultimate integration goal was to build reusable components in VB that would allow the Java developers at Panda to use pre-built components without knowing VB.

Caleb's team involved users from the very beginning in the complex rollout, which included the move from the Windows-based client/server platform to J2EE. That meant that his team was building the infrastructure and framework for the new system at the same time as they were creating standards and building service layers. "Users had to be patient," Mitsvotai said, "because we were inventing things for the first time."

Users range from benefits managers and analysts to VPs and supervisors, and include AP clerks and other accounting staff, operations management, area coaches, restaurant general managers and financial analysts.

Panda selected the leave of absence as a pilot because it wasn't a critical company function, yet was representative of the workflow that many forms followed, with escalations, automatic approvals and integration into Panda's own backend Java application to print the letters.

With the leave of absence process working well, Panda has moved on to automate more processes. For example, the IT group has just completed automating the process by which a "secret shopper" company that inspects restaurants for quality, service and cleanliness submits its reports.

As the restaurant continues to get a handle on its smaller business processes, and as management sees the returns, Mitsvotai said, Panda will then begin to target larger business processes involving issues such as new restaurant development. But for now, thinking small in its BPM approach has worked well for the company.

Useful Links

Panda Restaurant Group
http://www.pandarg.com/

iMarkup Solutions
http://www.imarkup.com/

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