Synoptic Consulting Chooses Holocentric to Deliver Online Business Architecture Models for Global Market

Australian Consultancy Slashes Business Process Modelling Time By 66%, Delivers Online Franchise Manual for Resi Mortgage Corporation.

Leading Australian enterprise modelling software provider, Holocentric, today announced that Australian business management consultancy Synoptic Consulting has chosen the Holocentric Modeler to deliver online business architecture models – including an online franchise manual for leading non-bank lender, Resi Mortgage Corporation – fuelling the consultancy’s expansion.

Holocentric provides the only practical enterprise modelling solution capable of delivering usable online business architecture models, according to Garth Holloway, Managing Director of Synoptic Consulting. With Holocentric, the consultancy has slashed the time taken to model an individual business process from three days to one.

These abilities, and a host of other benefits, have given Synoptic Consulting competitive advantages which is fuelling its business expansion within Australia and internationally. The consultancy expects staff numbers to grow from 10 to 40 people within 12-18 months to service clients in Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Germany and Dubai.

Resi Mortgage Corporation recently engaged Synoptic Consulting and has benefited from its expanded business modelling capabilities. After using Holocentric to map Resi’s business processes, the consultancy has delivered an online franchise manual that allows franchisees – and Resi’s own staff – to easily and quickly access systems and procedures. The online franchise manual is just the first step in a project designed to continually improve the delivery of services to Resi’s customers.

Other projects using Holocentric include assisting the Australian subsidiary of a US company consolidate its disparate sources of knowledge for US Sarbanes Oxley compliance into a single repository. This involved the conversion of over 40 business processes into Holocentric Modeler, linking people, processes and technology and modelling their inter-relatedness. Another project saw the company model 14 main financial administration processes and improve their performance.

“Before you could never build a business architecture model and deliver it to the client in a way that would be exciting or usable for a business executive,” said Holloway. “With Holocentric we can and we do. Models published online with Holocentric are intuitive and easy to use at an end-user level. That is a key competitive differentiator for us.”

Synoptic Consulting also evaluated IBM’s WorkBench and Microsoft’s Visio modeling tools. “IBM lacked the flexibility and agility of Holocentric and, for the price point, Holocentric Modeler’s functions and features hit IBM for six. Publishing to HTML from IBM, for example, was prohibitively expensive compared to Holocentric,” said Holloway.

“Visio is good for what it provides – a two dimensional flat map. It captures one view of the truth. But business process improvement requires multiple versions of the truth – such as Excel with calculations and Word with procedures. Version control is also important and with multiple versions of the truth it is difficult to manage. With Holocentric you can capture everything in one place so you have just one version of the truth. Holocentric is three dimensional: people, processes and technology. You can click on a person or a process and find out everything about them. You can’t do that in Visio.”

Synoptic Consulting has now standardised on Holocentric for all its business modelling, which is part of almost all of its client engagements. It has also migrated legacy business models created using IBM and Microsoft tools for almost all of its clients to Holocentric.

“We have clients that email us Visio and Excel files and we send it back as a Holocentric model published online. We can now offer an outsourced process modelling shop and deliver it remotely,” said Holloway. “We have built templates in Holocentric based on our methodologies so we can use lower level consultants and oversee their work. That has allowed us to go offshore and scale the business. With Holocentric we can quickly make new consultants productive and valuable to the clients.”

With Resi, Synoptic Consulting used Holocentric to refresh existing Visio process maps to create a set of standardised up-to-date business processes within a single repository. These were published using Holocentric to create an online operations manual which is easily accessible to Resi’s 40 Group Office staff and to its national network of nearly 40 franchises.

The online manual is improving Resi’s communications. It has already proved a valuable induction tool, helping to make new employees and franchises productive more quickly. “With Holocentric, you can layer access to the system, so that different people only see what is relevant to them,” said Piers Ramsay, Head of Operations for Resi.

It is also expected to have an impact on operational efficiency. “Until I could define the processes properly I could not explore the efficiencies. With Holocentric I can look at a process and I can see where the gains and efficiencies and tidying up of processes can occur. If you can identify something that you do 200 times a month and see that you are not adding any value, then you can do something that improves efficiency, reduces cost and provides benefits to the client,” said Ramsay.

“I challenge any of my industry colleagues to be sure their processes are neat and tidy and efficient if they have not been through this sort of exercise.”

Resi expects the main benefits of the new system to come from customer loyalty, however. “We are looking at long term customer relationships and service levels are key to that,” said Ramsay. “We need to make sure that a client gets dealt with clearly and responsibly. If our processes are defined and standardised, there is much less chance of human error. We can prevent poor customer experience that comes from a poorly defined process.”