BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT
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The Starting Point: Processes Scattered across Heterogeneous Formats
At tl, the Operational Excellence unit — led by Soidri Bastoini — covers two missions: continuous improvement and improvement projects. In practice, this means managing productivity indicators and, above all, mastering processes: modelling them, analysing them against indicators and risks, and then defining improvement actions.
© Lausanne Region Public Transport (tl)
Before ADONIS arrived, there was no company-wide modelling tool. Each team documented its processes in its own way: some as highly textual RACI documents, others as flowcharts in PowerPoint, Word or Excel, and still others with Draw.io or Visio. Soidri Bastoini’s team had been using Visio for three years.
Soidri Bastoini,
Head of Operational Excellence, tl
This dispersion of formats and storage locations made finding information time-consuming and made it hard to get an overall view of the company’s processes.
The Solution: ADONIS as the Common Denominator, connected to ADOIT
The trigger came from IT: tl’s IT unit, which was already using ADOIT for its enterprise architecture, proposed connecting that architecture to the business processes modelled in ADONIS.
“It was an opportunity put forward by the IT unit. By modelling in ADONIS, we could specify which information systems were affected — that let us anticipate business needs, and vice versa: when IT was going to change an application, we had a direct view of the impacted processes.” – Soidri Bastoini
Before any rollout, the team started with a proof of concept: a trial platform tested for around six months by the six members of the Operational Excellence team (two project managers and three project support officers, plus Soidri Bastoini). “I think the first month was enough,” he sums up, highlighting how quickly the team got to grips with the tool.
Once the solution was validated, tl and BOC combined the ADONIS and ADOIT contracts. This was followed by administrator training and in-depth support on the document approval workflow, delivered by the BOC team over several half-day sessions.
“Process governance is not a simple topic — introducing the process approval workflow was a real plus for us; it forced us to formalise our modelling.” – Soidri Bastoini
Results & Benefits: Quality, Navigation and Governance
Beyond modelling itself, ADONIS has enabled tl to enrich its processes with information that could never be attached to a simple drawing before: applications, risks and responsibilities.
“We can now analyse more easily by adding annotations to an object — before, we just had a drawing and couldn’t attach anything to it. We’re now able to say that a process has an impact on a given application, something we couldn’t even imagine back then.” – Soidri Bastoini
Soidri Bastoini stresses that the gain is above all qualitative. Adoption, for its part, was immediate and almost unanimous within his team.
This new rigour has also transformed the relationship with the business units. Since this year, tl has been gradually opening up ADONIS to its internal customers as readers of the approved processes.
“The level of process mastery and how each process is placed in the context of the tl ecosystem also reassures our internal customers. You can feel that it makes the relationship much more formal.” – Soidri Bastoini
Outlook: Extending to the Business Units and Integrating AI
Having stabilised its own way of working, the Operational Excellence team is preparing the next step: building a genuine community of modellers within the business units, able to find their way through the process hierarchy from level 1 to level 4.
“It’s easier to have a tool than to have a culture. I don’t want us to rush headlong into it — first give meaning to our approach, then roll it out again with our internal partners.” – Soidri Bastoini
Another initiative being followed closely: rapidly migrating the many processes still documented in disparate formats (Visio, PDF) using upcoming AI-based ADONIS features that generate processes from images. “We have quite a large volume of processes — that is clearly our challenge now and going forward,” says Soidri Bastoini.
In Summary: tl’s Advice for Successful Adoption
Asked what advice he would give an organisation looking to equip itself with such a tool, Soidri Bastoini stresses above all the need to step back before rushing towards a solution.
“Always take a step back: who are my direct and indirect partners that I will have to work with on this kind of tool? You need to really understand and grasp your environment before getting started.” – Soidri Bastoini
His second piece of advice: stay focused on a clear objective rather than chasing every possible feature. “If we had wanted a solution that does everything, we might have been disappointed that a feature was missing.” At tl, staying focused from the outset on synchronising processes and the information system allowed the team to discover, along the way, additional benefits — governance, quality, navigation — that it had not anticipated.
The result: an organisation that, building on ADONIS and ADOIT, has turned a patchwork of disparate documents into a living process map that both the business units and IT can use — and that is already preparing the next stage of its rollout.
