Compassion International, Colorado Springs, CO.

When Brian Houghtaling first started working at the children's charity Compassion International after 20 years in the disk-drive manufacturing business, he wondered how he could apply his experience in business process automation and Six Sigma to his new job. Compassion had relied on lots of paper-centric processes since its founding in 1952.

"It takes time to help people understand why they should worry about processes and what Six Sigma is," says Houghtaling, enterprise architecture director.

He realized the charity wouldn't achieve continuous improvement if it didn't automate the key process of collecting and entering data on its needy children--name, age, parents' names, interests, academic grades and so forth--and then reviewing and approving the assistance. The charity handles approximately 475,000 case studies a year in third-world countries.

"Where there's paper, the process of getting the information into the system is invisible," he says. "While people try to keep records of the paper flow, it's inaccurate and it's not value-added. When you want to do a Pareto chart [Six Sigma-speak for a bar or line chart graphing root causes of problems] showing the Top 20 reasons case studies get rejected, the data isn't there, so you can't analyze and improve the process."

By instituting an electronic case file process using Microsoft BizTalk and the Ultimus BPM suite, the organization cut the study cycle from one month to two days. Case data is now entered at local offices and processed in BizTalk. The Ultimus BPM software is used for exception handling. To drive continuous improvement, the organization measures and analyzes process data generated by BizTalk and Ultimus using a home-grown BI tool.

Wherever possible, Houghtaling applied the five-phase Six Sigma improvement cycle called DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control). Last August, for example, Compassion automated the process through which sponsors change their personal information. More than 36,000 such changes are made per year, so automation is crucial. Using a Pareto chart, the charity categorized the exceptions and found that more than 80 percent were related to name changes (tied to sponsor marriages and divorces).

"While we couldn't eliminate name change exceptions, we were able to improve the process by changing the Web form," Houghtaling says. "Simple analytics of process data enables fundamental improvements in efficiency."

Other exceptions were sponsor errors in entering addresses in a Web form. The organization eliminated the problem by integrating Perfect Address validation software, which automatically repairs certain fields. By repeatedly refining the core case study process, the charity has cut costs by $1.2 million per year, largely through labor savings and reduced postage.

Taking BPM a step further, even resource orders--requests for posters, counter displays and booklets--that had been handled by e-mail were automated within the BPM solution in March. A few days after implementation, monitoring and analytics tools revealed that certain materials were no longer being requested. Root-cause analysis uncovered several "invisible" processes--people were mailing materials outside of the new process. Communicating with participants resulted in everyone adopting the new process.

Speaking about Compassion's BPM projects at a recent conference, Houghtaling says one attendee told him she had heard you have to make a process perfect before you can automate it in a BPM tool.

"I said, 'What you do is define and then measure.'"

He adds, "If you don't measure the results, how can you improve it? If you wait until everything's perfect, you'll wait forever." --Penny Crosman