How SAP Signavio helped Jabil standardize and integrate business processes to drive innovation
Founded in 1966, Jabil, Inc. is a global manufacturing company serving customers across various industries, including healthcare; technology; automotive; computing; consumer products; and networking and telecommunications. Today, Jabil has a global team of over 279,000 people across 100 locations in 30 countries.
With a focus on innovation and ingenuity, Jabil works with customers to manage entire product life cycles—from design and manufacturing to delivery and services. Jabil delivers unmatched end-market experience, technical and design capabilities, manufacturing know-how, and global product management expertise to enable success for the world’s leading brands.
As Jabil’s operations have grown, so has the complexity of its business systems. With more products in development than ever before, Jabil was investing a lot of money and people in managing the growing complexity. But this approach wasn’t sustainable. As part of its Global Operations strategy, Jabil kept people and process at the center and embarked on a journey to reimagine how they managed Jabil’s business processes.
Process synchronization and integration are essential to business growth
For years, Jabil had managed its business processes on traditional, siloed legacy systems. But with a vision to expand its business while increasing profitability, leveraging in-house expertise, and optimizing core business operations, Jabil needed a solution with more speed, agility, and efficiency.
By upgrading its process management system, Jabil aimed to improve performance and drive innovation yet manage expense at scale.
Jabil has a wealth of internal talent and expertise to draw from, but the company was missing valuable opportunities.
To achieve its strategic goals, Jabil focused on transforming a few key areas:
- Process alignment to eliminate silos
- Process standardization
- Talent optimization [and diversification]
Jabil needed a solution that streamlined tools and aligned capabilities across departments and platforms to deliver actionable insights and efficiencies at scale.
SAP Signavio improves performance with a single intelligent platform
With ease of use, collaboration, and integration as its top priorities, Jabil turned to SAP Signavio, a leader in the enterprise business process intelligence and process management space, to support process modernization. Previously, Jabil had used other solutions to map and manage its processes. But SAP Signavio offered a more robust, comprehensive platform that made it a standout solution.
To build a common development platform, Jabil literally brought their subject matter experts (SMEs) into one room “to all sit together to decide the standard core process workflow,” explained Michal Wierzchowski, who is leading materials organization and business process management effort. “From there we could define the best tools to use, the best processes, and the data we needed to collect.”
Jabil chose SAP Signavio for its intuitive platform and collaborative approach, which make it easier to get stakeholders involved, and develop and empower SMEs. These were primary selling points, as Jabil needed a simple solution that would help leverage in-house expertise at scale. With SAP Signavio, users can quickly gain an overview of the company’s operations and easily see how the system works at every step — key features that enable better onboarding and collaboration across the company.
From complexity to clarity
Streamlining and bridging processes across a global company is no small task. But SAP Signavio was up to the challenge.
Today, Jabil hosts its entire business architecture with support of SAP Signavio, managing processes and standard operating procedures connected and aligned with the use of SAP Signavio. Before SAP Signavio, Jabil spent considerable time building alignment and identifying dependencies. Now, SAP Signavio makes process management accessible to SMEs across the business—enabling faster onboarding, better decision-making, and synchronized operations at every level.
As Jabil looks ahead to migrating to SAP S4/HANA and implementing real-time enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP Signavio will ensure the company has the right tools and processes in place for success.
Proven practices for a modern business
- Find success with SAP Signavio by following these practices proven through Jabil’s efforts:
- Start with processes, improvements, investment, and strategic objectives. Use SAP Signavio to penetrate the baseline and pull it up. For further analysis and alignment, use Process Collaboration Hub.
- Leverage SAP Signavio as a central connection point to link procedures, key performance indicators (KPIs), tools, and data.
- Don’t use SAP Signavio for storage. Rather, use it to keep and manage process maps and links to mentioned elements.
- Collaboration is key. Subject-matter experts can use Process Collaboration Hub to review suggested changes continuously toward the baseline.
- SAP Signavio aligns all forums. Take advantage of this feature to view feedback and approve changes in real time or provide comments.
- View processes from the data flow perspective and manage IT architecture through SAP Signavio.
- Define processes and connect data in SAP Signavio. Use the SAP Signavio engine to drive process mining, achieve insights, and implement improvement. Discovering the most common paths users follow and noting any exceptions helps simplify processes.