Corporate Modeler enabled Europol to effectively communicate processes to stakeholders, providers and management bodies

This case study focuses on how Casewise products have been used within a large international public sector change program. The program has a strong emphasis on IT and business as it covers the entire Europol Analysis environment as well as the operational processes required to carry out all Europol analytical activities and specific strategic projects.

The Europol Convention states that Europol shall establish and maintain a computerized system (TECS) to allow the input, access and analysis of data. This Convention lays down a strict framework for human rights and data protection, control, supervision and security.

The TECS has three principalcomponents:

1. An information system
2. An analysis system
3. An index system.

Components 1 and 3 have already been implemented and are in use. The development and deployment of an Overall Analysis System for Intelligence and Support (OASIS) was required and constituted right from its start. A vast and ambitious change program involving the Europol Analysis and ICT environment was undertaken covering the processes designed to carry out all the analytical activities and EU Member States projects with Europol Support.

Notwithstanding the acquisition and integration of the analysis system itself, the challenge was to design and capture existing business processes - but also to measure, simulate and publish them with the final goal to:

• Improve some of the key business area
• Document processes and create procedures in a visual and straightforward way serving as a basis for requirements specification and future workflow development
• Simulate processes bottlenecks and potential improvements and demonstrate to management the gap between the current situation and the future expected situation
• Communicate the processes to the users’ community and effectively implement business rules and key business processes.

In 2005, a dedicated BPM project was initiated as part of the OASIS Program.

Due to the complexity of the Europol processes and business rules, Europol came rapidly to the conclusion that the solution was to acquire a tool which has powerful graphical editors to document processes as well as a repository to store process models. The tool also needed the allow efficient business process simulation and publication.

As a result, the Casewise Corporate Modeler Suite v 10.2. (SQL server) was chosen. Business process experts and senior users were then equiped with the tool.

The Corporate Modeller Suite was used to:

• Carry out business process mapping, analysis and reengineering. The OASIS project team paid particular attention to increase measurability and control without dehumanizing the work place and jeopardizing initiative and intuition
• Concentrate on core business processes while broadening the process vision and increase transparency
• Simulate and communicate efficiency gain
• Communicate requirements to providers using Casewise schema
• Publish processes in a web format and integrate them into the analysis portal as an on-line process manual
• Tackle the automation of the key business processes, using Workflow capacity of the Europol Document Management System.

• By using Corporate Modeler, Europol has been given a clear vision on its key processes and communicates them effectively to stakeholders, providers and management bodie
• Corporate Modeler has allowed the gradual redeployment of resources to focus more on analytical tasks instead of less added-value one
• The tool has changed the way BPM is perceived by people and is used as a strategic tool for the organization

Going forwards, one of the challenges will be to go beyond the Europol analytical processes and core business and use Casewise in other areas such as Corporate Finance and Human Resources.

A more technical challenge will be to interface Casewise with Europols workflow management tool in order to allow a more direct link between process modeling and process execution.

The full integration of the technologies used to design and represent workflows with the ones used to enforce them would make maintenance and future evolution more cost-effective and less stressful.