Ahead of ASUG Best Practices (in Houston, October 14–16; register now), 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; register now), 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.”
For more insights from Lertola, register for ASUG Best Practices, and don’t miss his ASUG Best Practices session “A Roadmap to Maturity: How Qorvo Is Building a Business Process Center of Excellence with SAP Signavio” (Oct. 15, 2:10-2:50 p.m. CT), during which Lertola will be joined by Steve LeGrow, Senior Director of Market Impact for SAP Signavio at SAP, to reflect on operational excellence at Qorvo and the future of the SAP Signavio suite.