Spotfire is seen as an important BI tool at ASML and it has gained rapid acceptance in our line organizations. As soon as we saw how quickly it could provide actionable insight, we thought of many ways it could be used throughout ASML. Cem Musullugil, Business Process Improvement Group, ASML ASML is one of the world s leading providers of lithography systems for the semiconductor industry, manufacturing complex machines that are critical to the production of integrated circuits or microchips. Headquartered in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, ASML designs, develops, integrates, markets and services these advanced systems, which continue to help its customers - the major chipmakers reduce the size and increase the functionality of microchips, and consumer electronic equipment. DEPLOYMENT SUMMARY ASML is rapidly deploying TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM and TIBCO Spotfire analytics software for business process management, reporting and analytics -- providing visibility into business processes. TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM and TIBCO Spotfire enable the organization to streamline its many approval processes and run the business more efficiently. ASML Deploys TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM and TIBCO Spotfire to Gain Visibility into and Accelerate Enterprise Business Processes ASML first experienced the benefits of business process management (BPM) in 2007 when it used TIBCO iprocess to streamline corporate accounting processes. More recently, the company decided to do a pilot program with TIBCO s ActiveMatrix BPM (TIBCO AMX BPM) and Spotfire products with the goal of automating manual approval processes. This is a key component of a strategic corporate initiative to address rapid business changes and improve efficiency. The overall idea was to keep the corporate ERP system as standard as possible and achieve the required rapid business changes with TIBCO s ActiveMatrix BPM platform. The company selected a core business process, the Prototyping Work Order (PTWO) process, for the TIBCO AMX BPM pilot because if successful, it would provide a lot of visibility throughout the company and gain wide acceptance. The PTWO process is an approval flow that spans several business silos throughout the organization, with approvals and escalations going all the way up to the company Chief Product and Technology Officer due to the fact that a new machine prototype costs several million dollars. Typically this paper process took almost twelve months from inception to approval valuable time lost by the product developers. The TIBCO AMX BPM pilot lasted six months because ASML also wanted to establish a base infrastructure for this as well as future BPM implementations, to create a standardized way of automating processes with reusable common building blocks for design, and to implement a competence center in the business for BPM. In conjunction with automating the PTWO process, ASML wanted to create a comprehensive central task list (CTL) within TIBCO AMX BPM, enabling employees to log in, see their tasks, approve in the CTL, or be redirected to the appropriate legacy systems when necessary.
ENTER TIBCO SPOTFIRE FOR BUSINESS PROCESS REPORTING AND ANALYSIS After six months, ASML declared the pilot program a success. The PTWO process was streamlined by TIBCO AMX BPM in a number of ways. For example, all of the information was now in one place, making it easy for all participants to access the many details, attachments, comments and answers to questions needed in order to sign-off on their part of the prototype. It was determined that by implementing TIBCO AMX BPM, approval time would be reduced by 70-80%. Moreover, relationships between procurement, R&D, and production were strengthened because everyone had the same ability to monitor the flow of the process, facilitating better internal communication across business silos. COMMON BUILDING BLOCKS AND 20 STEPS APPROACH In the proof of concept two design principles were defined by ASML: common building blocks and the 20 Steps Approach. The common building blocks are reusable code blocks with functionality which can used in a new flow, e.g., authorization building block, pdf printing and storing in a data warehouse, and Q & A blocks. These blocks are speeding up the design and build process. Along with these common building blocks ASML designed its 20 Steps Approach: 1. Business assigns a key user for a flow 2. Consult the CC process consultant 3. Start designing the work flow 4. Align with CC BPM specialists 5. Finalize the work flow 6. Validate workflow with Competence Centre 7. Intake from Analyst 8. Complete design for deployment 9. Consult CC specialist if needed 10. Web services and Integration made by ICC 11. Prepare test scripts and data 12. Deploy and test work flow 13. Business accept 14. IT accepts the service 15. Business starts using flow 16. KPI reporting provided by Spotfire 17. After 3 month evaluation of work flow by Competence Centre 18. Make improvement list 19. Competence Centre track & trace improvement list 20. Update and maintain the Metrics This picture depicts the ASML way of working. The first 6 steps are done by the business. Steps 7 through 10 as well as 12 and 14 are performed by IT, while the key user is accountable for steps 11 and 13. Three months after the business starts using the solution (steps 15 and 16), all parties participate in steps 17 through 20. At this point the ASML team was introduced to Spotfire TIBCO s visual analytics solution. Until then, reporting on the status of each part of the manual approval process had been done more traditionally through the creation of spreadsheets by IT that took weeks to deploy to business users. Using TIBCO Spotfire analytics integrated with TIBCO AMX BPM, ASML was able to roll out new reports in three days significantly faster. The company immediately concluded that the business benefits of TIBCO Spotfire are significant not only in combination with TIBCO AMX BPM, but for many data analysis requirements across the organization. Spotfire is now seen as an important BI tool at ASML and it has gained rapid acceptance in our line organizations, says Cem Musullugil of the ASML Business Process Improvement Group. As soon as we saw how quickly it could provide actionable insight, we thought of many ways it could be used throughout ASML.
This Spotfire Flows State visualization makes it easy to get a sense of the status of all of the current PTWO process instances. The states are color-coded and can be clicked on to view details instantly (names of ASML processes intentionally blurred). TIBCO Spotfire and ActiveMatrix BPM provided true end-to-end process visibility to ASML s business users for the first time. This new level of visibility and TIBCO Spotfire s intuitive and powerful user interface immediately prompted TIBCO Spotfire to be used in the automation of ASML s Reporting Catalog. The Financial Control department uses this catalog to define all of their reports, as well as provide a way of organizing, authorizing, and providing links to individual stored reports. The use of TIBCO Spotfire also allowed reporting to be based on a fixed data set instead of a series of spreadsheets based on many different sources. This is a starting point for global worldwide standardized reporting enterprise-wide to worldwide processes. By doing this we achieve a higher level of business control and more focus for the business on efficiency, meaning lower cost in the end and better business decisions, says Musullugil. Following the success of the pilot program ASML automated several other processes in TIBCO AMX BPM: Prototype work order approval process for investment in research & development projects. Such projects typically require large investments with reviews and approvals involving many layers of the organization, including executive management. Vacancy request approval process for starting the search for a new ASML employee. Commercial services approval approval process for RFI and RFP sales cycles. Manufacturing order product process - process for building a product catalog, placing a product order, and for reviewing and approving it. Based on the order value, approvals are required by varying levels in the organization. All related products and cost centers involved in the order process are managed by TIBCO AMX BPM. Waiver process to ensure that a delivered wafer machine meets the required performance specifications and that the actions taken to meet the designated specifications are tracked in detail. This allows an auditor to investigate the process at a later stage. HR employee transfer process to handle employee changes for example, job changes, department changes, shift changes, contract changes, country changes, etc. Managed training forecast process to plan and forecast the training for manufacturing customer service
Other processes currently in development in TIBCO AMX BPM: HR contract employee allowance - approval process for allowances to be paid to contract employees either on a permanent or on an irregular basis Deviation notification process to track out of specification materials in collaboration with suppliers Customer special request process to track and approve customer quotation and orders for special requests Project approval flow process for approving IT projects Accounts payable approval process for the payment of invoices. The process itself is implemented in iprocess, but the user activities (tasks) are managed by TIBCO AMX BPM. In the near future, the accounts-payable process will be enhanced and converted to execute solely in TIBCO AMX BPM. All analytics and reporting for these processes duration, outstanding tasks, expired deadlines, etc. are handled by the TIBCO Spotfire analytics solution. During the entire life-cycle of a process case, TIBCO AMX BPM sends process instance data to its archival database. Information Links in the TIBCO Spotfire analytics platform connect to the archival database and populate the TIBCO Spotfire analysis files. Reports can be created automatically taking data from both the archival database, systems of record, as well as directly from TIBCO AMX BPM. The TIBCO Spotfire analytics platform then visually displays information about the number of completed processes, how many cases were approved, how many were rejected, the number of escalations, etc. This Spotfire Completed Cases visualization provides a high-level view of the number of completed cases for each process over a period of time in this case monthly over the course of a year (names of ASML processes intentionally blurred).
IMPROVED EFFICIENCY AND ELIMINATION OF PAPER FLOWS ACCOMPLISHED The TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM and Spotfire analytics solution has enabled ASML to meet its strategic goal of accelerating business processes, with some achieving an impressive 70-80% reduction in delivery time. This was accomplished by eliminating manual paperbased flows and linear tasks and making critical information available to all. Another clear business benefit of the TIBCO AMX BPM and Spotfire analytics integration is traceability of the approval processes. Previously nearly all implemented business processes were based on manual processes that did not allow any insight. The TIBCO AMX BPM and Spotfire analytics solution has fostered greater collaboration between the business and IT. The accessibility of the solution empowers the business users to model their own processes with minimal IT involvement. Taking advantage of TIBCO Spotfire s ease of use, the business units can now make their own dashboards and generate new reports in minutes, that could previously take 3-4 days to create. The business knows their flows best, says Musullugil. By putting process design control in the hands of the business users they are more involved in the process and at an earlier stage. With TIBCO Spotfire analytics, business users make adjustments and redeploy reports on the fly a smarter way of developing processes. TIBCO Spotfire is no longer just used in conjunction with TIBCO AMX BPM as a monitoring and analysis tool it is spreading out into other domains as a critical part of the new ASML business intelligent landscape and is now the corporate standard for all ad-hoc reporting. Working with TIBCO on that first pilot to improve business process at ASML was the catalyst for revolutionizing our way of working, says Musullugil. The common building blocks for process design, CTL and competence center all flowed from the success of that. POST-TIBCO AMX BPM AND SPOTFIRE DEPLOYMENT KEY METRICS Completion time of business processes lowered by 70-80% Previously, ASML could only work on 1-2 flows per quarter; now the company works on 6-9 flows per quarter Previous process for invoices used to cost 750K to prepare; after improvements with AMX BPM it now only costs 150K ASML previously required 7-8 people to prepare the whole workflow; now it requires only 2.5 FTEs Reports used to take 3-4 days to prepare. Now they are generated in minutes 300 processes are expected to be automated over the next few years http://spotfire.tibco.com TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) is a leading independent business integration software company and a leading enabler of real-time business, helping companies become more cost-effective, more agile and more efficient. TIBCO has delivered the value of real-time business to thousands of customers around the world and in a wide variety of industries. TIBCO Spotfire TIBCO Software Inc. 212 Elm Street Somerville, MA 02144 Tel: +1 617 702 1600 +1 800 245 4211 Fax: +1 617 702 1700 2013 All Rights Reserved. TIBCO, TIBCO Software, the TIBCO and Spotfire logos and Spotfire are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names are marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.