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.”