Need
A world leader in group incentive travel needed to confront a problem common to companies experiencing rapid growth and change: employees were no longer following best-practice business processes. New employees learned on the fly from only slightly more senior employees, and there was no single source for the “right” way to do the job. The travel company contacted Dashe & Thomson and asked us to help them design and implement a single repository for business processes and work instructions.

Solution
Dashe & Thomson worked with the company to design a new way to provide business processes to employees in a way that would be easy to use, highly intuitive, reliable, and easy to maintain and distribute.

We designed a web-based intranet architecture that captured business process flow charts, work instructions, and essential shared information like a business terms glossary and the companies mission statement. In addition, the site allows workers to use the browser to launch key documents and forms, like RFPs, POs, and pro forma P&Ls. The site brought the following benefits to our client:

• Created a highly visual and intuitive interface to business process information. Users start with the highest-level flow chart, then drill down through a graphic interface until they arrive at work instructions for task they need to complete.
• Provided a single place that stored all business processes and work instructions.
• Eliminated many of the department-specific or team-specific forms of documentation (notes, cheat sheets, anecdotal training) that were multiplying due to rapid growth.

Standardized and documented processes across the enterprise, and linked them to the reference materials.

To ensure that the client’s maintenance costs remained low, we developed and implemented a methodology to assure reliable content.

We transferred the knowledge necessary for company personnel to maintain and enhance the system.

Result

• Web Trends data indicates that use of the intranet site grew each month for the first six months of the installation. Over 97% of employees had visited the site and gone beyond the first page. (This indicates that employees were actually using the site to review or learn business processes.)
• New workers require less time learning how to do their jobs, and experienced users spend less time supporting them.
• There is now a single, agreed-on, best way to accomplish each of the key business tasks. Where client-specific processes require variation from the single best way, those variations are captured and noted in the system.
• Paper documentation of business processes has been almost completely eliminated. Workers access business processes, work instructions, and forms online.
• Maintenance is easier. Update turnaround time has dropped from weeks to hours and there is no longer a need to distribute massive amounts of paper.