When Business Processes Fail: TJX and Wal-Mart Just Don’t Get It

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October 04, 2007

When Business Processes Fail: TJX and Wal-Mart Just Don’t Get It

Before I being the current tirade, my abject apologies to everyone at ebizQ, especially all of you readers out there – all five of you – who’ve been wondering where I’ve been. (My even more abject apologies to those who didn’t even miss me, for returning.) Let’s just say settling into a new job is challenging and time-consuming, promise it won’t happen again without more warning and faster recovery, and leave it at that. And now, back to business…processes, that is!

So The TJX Companies, owners of TJMaxx and Marshalls, among other retail chains, loses credit card information and other private data for thousands of customers. The company goes to court, and hammers out a settlement that basically offers gift certificates to victims of its failure in multiple business processes, notably those related to IT and intellectual property (IP) protection and security.

So in effect, in exchange for losing my personal data and forcing me to cancel and replace all of my credit and identity cards, I’m welcome to come back to the store with the new ones, and spend more of my time and money? If all of this happens again, am I officially permitted to stop referring to it as isolated incompetence, and to begin instead calling it a business practice?

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, has embarked on a campaign to reduce human-to-human customer interactions, according to reports on National Public Radio and elsewhere. The company has removed from its Web site its former customer service number, saying that answering the volume of calls it was receiving was getting to expensive.

So it’s too expensive to help those people who are unable or unwilling to go online, but who are able and/or willing to make their way down to a Wal-Mart store and spend time and money there. Next, Wal-Mart will be telling those same customers to stop using cash and checks, because those transactions cost too much to process.

Or, maybe both companies will come to their collective managerial senses, and realize that one can squeeze operational costs out of an environment in ways that create costs and risks elsewhere. Like the costs associated with reputational risk, when a retailer is seen as insensitive to the people it depends on for its revenues.

What can we learn? If you’re a business and/or IT decision-maker, don’t summarily change or remove something just because you decide it will make things work better, even if it will. Just because a change makes things work better doesn’t mean it will compel the people using those things to work better, not without clear communication with and inclusion of those affected.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • IT Infrastructure Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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Comments

Michael:

Aside from winning (hands-down) the award for "Best Analyst in a Comedy Series", the story you related is both a comedy (of errors) and a tragedy for the innocent bystanders whose lives and credit ratings have been--or may still be--harmed by the fallout from this security and business process debacle.

I am reminded of a stern warning my class received from our professor (also a CPA) in a Finance course that I took at UPenn:
"The end result of running any business with a primary goal of cost reduction, is going out of business."

For companies as crass and imperious as these, we can only hope...

Mark

Posted by: Mark Talaba at October 8, 2007 02:33 PM

Its quite interesting that established vendors are now entering the BPMS space via acquisitions.

We are a Micosoft shop and almost all of our servers are running Windows. We evaluated several of the BPMS products mentioned here and finally selected the BPMS solution from Selcian Inc. We are doing a proof of concept internally for automating the business processes for our call center operations and a few HR actions.

We looked at Ascent, Ultimus & Selcian. K2 was not considered due to some prior issues we had with them. One year ago, we started a project with them and it went sour. This is our second attempt at BPMS.

Some of the findings are as follows,
PROCESS DESIGNER: Ascentn's designer is essentially a plug in to Visio. Limited functionality. Ultimus's designer is hard to use and based on a excel metaphor. Selcian's designer is standalone and is developed on .NET platform. Custom steps can be added easily.

BPMS ENGINE: Selcian's BPMS engine has a built in state machine and state management facilities. Its multi-threaded and uses thread pool for resource management. I am suspecting that Ultimus's BPMS engine is single threaded and so tasks can fall behind if many are queued at the same time. Ascentn is very code based and does not have BPMS engine concept. This is an area where they are least mature.

USER INTERFACE: Both Ultimus and Selcian support InfoPath forms and custom .NET UIs. Ascentn only supports custom UI which you have to write and integrate directly in their framework.

INTEGRATION : Both Selcian and Ultimus offer excellent integration capabilities. Again this is an area where Ascentn lacks severly. Selcian had an edge over Ultimus due to its tighter integration with MSMQ and native support for pre=built adapters for ERP packages like PeopleSoft, Axapta.

So we have decided to go with the BPMS product from Selcian Inc. Since Selcian is a new entrant in the BPMS space, we have decided to manage the risk and do a small scale Proof of Concep first and then launch the bigger project. I will keep you guys posted.

Can anyone else share their experience with Selcian ? Also I would like to get in touch with people who are using Selcian BPMS.

Posted by: Vdamodar at October 10, 2007 09:12 AM