Lessons from Corporate Express' seven-year transformation

Large-scale process change is a centrepiece of Corporate Express’ business transformation.

The company formed from 16 organisations in 1996 and has made about 70 acquisitions in the years since. Those acquisitions were brought under the Corporate Express brand but their business processes were left as-is.

“We had 40 locations [in A/NZ] and we had 40 different ways of doing things across our business which wasn’t scalable or efficient,” Whatley noted.

Whatley spearheaded the drive for business transformation around what he saw as a “burning platform” issue.

“Because of the business growth, I started looking at what did we need to do to sustain that going forward,” he said.

“Our systems were constraining us but I actually knew I couldn't get a view of our requirements because of the different processes across our organisation.”

Whatley initiated the project “under the guise of a system review”, which was “really [about] coming out with the conclusion that we needed to get standardisation of our processes”.

“The program that I started was around the burning platform, which was really around standardising our business processes, structuring our business accordingly and then looking at how we can optimise those processes with technology.

“I presented the burning platform to our executive and our board and really got the approval to start that program of work.”

According to Whatley, the early years of transformation focused on “as-is, to-be” process analysis and modelling, a method commonly used to map out planned process transformation works.

In the second phase, Corporate Express went out to market and chose SAP to implement its new process blueprint.

It performed a “single, big bang implementation” across all 40 A/NZ sites, barring three warehouse sites that run Manhattan Associates supply chain software.

After the SAP system was bedded down, the project’s focus switched largely to benefits realisation, with business process sustainability works undertaken by a newly established business process competency centre of “subject matter experts” from the transformation program.

“That's a key thing that's got a lot of credibility from a business perspective,” he said. “[Right now] we’ve got six core processes that we’re focused on improving.”

The organisation has also undertaken to continue building organisational capability around SAP, including upskilling of so-called “super users”.

“It's our utilisation of what we've actually built which is where we’re focused on,” Whatley said.

Integral to the business

Whatley saw the business transformation as having positively altered the perception of IT at Corporate Express. Broader business positioning of the program of work had also proven perception-altering.

“There's a difference because now when I talk about IT, I’m also talking about business services,” Whatley said.

“Collectively as a group, I think they’ve [the IT organisation] got a lot of credibility in regards to driving change.”

The business services added e-business systems to Whatley's remit – “not the development but our overall e-business strategy for the organisation. We do roughly about 80 per cent of our business online so it’s a core part of our business”.

A business intelligence group also now acts as a fundamental input to the continual improvement cycle and future process change initiatives.

“It's been a good journey for us,” Whatley said.

Garry Whatley will discuss "How CIOs Migrate into Business Transformation Roles" at the CIO Strategy Summit, August 28th-30th, Gold Coast's QT Hotel.