If Your Governance Is Weak, AI Will Accelerate the Confusion with Hana Prooij

In this episode, Sam Lewis speaks with Hana Prooij, Business Process Management and Transformation Leader, formerly Head of Business Management Systems at Versuni, the global home appliances business behind some of the world's most recognised consumer brands.

Hana spent over four years at Versuni, leading the design and implementation of the business management system through one of the most demanding periods the organisation faced, a full carve-out from a major multinational group, combined with an end-to-end S/4HANA deployment. Before that, she built her expertise across medical devices and consumer goods at Philips, working at the intersection of quality, process and organisational change.

This is a grounded and honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a process and quality management system that the business genuinely uses.

They discuss:

• Why Hana did not set out to work in process management and how she ended up there through a consistent pull towards reducing friction between smart people who were misaligned
• What quality management actually means in a large organisation and why it should never be a separate system from the way the business works
• What it was like to build a management system from scratch during a carve-out, while simultaneously deploying a full S/4HANA stack and keeping the business running without interruption
• Why S/4HANA does not tolerate ambiguity and how that forces the process clarity most organisations have been avoiding
• How governance becomes a stabilising force rather than a bureaucracy when it is designed well and owned at the right level
• The challenge of managing global standardisation against local variation across markets that have always done things their own way
• Why process improvement initiatives lose momentum and what it takes to keep them connected to the business rather than becoming a documentation exercise
• Why AI will not replace process thinking but will expose every organisation that has not got its governance and ownership right

If you are responsible for process, quality, transformation or systems in a large organisation, this episode will resonate.

Host: Sam Lewis, Director at bpmd 

Guest: Hana Prooij, Business Process Management and Transformation Leader

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Work in Process, a BPMD podcast. I'm joined today by Hannah Proy, a business process management and transformation leader based in Amsterdam. Hannah spent her career at the intersection of process people and organizational change, most recently spending over four years as head of business process management systems at a global home appliances business. Behind some of the world's most recognized consumer brands, Hannah has taken part in large-scale change at organizations, often focused from a quality perspective, making sure the products are safe and that if anything goes wrong, that the correct reactions are taken by the organization. But yeah, we're going to dive deeper into Hannah's career and her perspective on how process works in organizations. So Hannah, thank you very much for coming on the show. We started working together probably three years ago when you were going through a large separation from a big group. Before we dive into that, I actually don't know anything about your career up until then. So I'd love to hear about your journey from uni into being at that point when I met you.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

I didn't actually set out to work in business process management. And I don't think many people do. I think it's something that happens, right? What I was drawn to, like I said, was complexity, more specifically, reducing friction inside of a company. And I keep finding myself in situations throughout the years of my work life where smart people are actually trying to do the right thing, but they were misaligned. Decision rights were unclear, handovers were messy, work is being done and then redone. And this is really something that I can see throughout the career, throughout different companies, in different industries, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, fast-moving consumer goods. This sort of has been the picture that has painted itself for me. And at some point, I guess I realized that fascinated me wasn't just improving a task, it was really shaping how an organization consciously designs how workflows across boundaries. So working in these big corporates, it's more difficult than when you have a small company where you can just hand it over to the guy sitting at the desk next to you. So for me, a process has never really been about flow charts, but it's been about clarity. It's been about helping people understand how their work connects to others and where accountability truly sits. So that's really what sort of pulled me deeper into this space.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Okay, that's interesting. How have you seen it change from maybe when you were first starting out to now the people working with process and maybe it going from sort of like RPA automation stuff into you know having a system to do things?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Sure. So in the beginning, of course, everything was paper-based. You'd have these Bibles sitting at their people's desks that explained how you had to do something. Oftentimes they were misaligned with each other because somebody forgot to change the copy in one of the books and then not the other. But also there was no visibility, there was no transparency of how this interaction actually takes place. It was very much siloed into this is my Bible for my workstation, and that's how I'm going to do things. And today, of course, IT playing a huge role in this. It creates that visibility and breaks down these silos and really creates that transparency as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

From a quality perspective, I'd be really interested to hear for people that don't know what the role quality actually means in a large organization. And second of all, what the transition was like going from perhaps goods that are more medically used to goods that are more used in the home and domestic. And there's sort of different levels, I'd imagine, of quality control that goes into that.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Quality has many different angles or areas. So you have quality of the products. So how you design a product, you make sure that quality is designed into that. Um, you have manufacturing quality, you have supplier quality looking at are my suppliers really doing what they're supposed to be doing and giving me the product that is at the right level of quality that I need. You have a regulatory compliance quality. So you mentioned that at the introduction, if there's a problem with the product, how do I have to react towards a regulator, towards a government, towards, you know, a notification that something is wrong, maybe perhaps even a recall. There's many different areas of quality. And having a quality management system sort of pulls all of that together. It makes it one. And there's also, of course, certification that is part of that, oftentimes, more so in the uh medically relevant industries than not, but also in the non-medical industries, certification is very widespread. The requirements for a medical device are much stricter, so there's lots more you have to do, and there's also lots more you have to document as compared to more a leaner, sort of easier, same concept, but just less burden of documentation on the side of the non-medical devices.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

We spoke about quality and process. Was it that you entered through a world of quality management and then ended up realizing that actually the business processes are really important to that? Is that the way you came in?

SPEAKER_01 5:13

Yes. And realizing also that quality is a subset of the business management system. It shouldn't be two separate worlds. It really should be one management system. The way we work should not be separated into the way quality works or the way sustainability works or the way another domain may work, but it should be the way we all work together. That's how you can really create synergies because the sustainability guys have the same requirements than the quality guys. And if you can then see that by using a system and combine those forces and combine those requirements, you can, in a much easier and leaner way, create a system that works for all.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Going back to sort of the carve-out situation that you worked in, where a standalone company was created from a big multinational group, what was it like working for an organization whilst that was happening? And how did that impact the quality management and the process management? And maybe just to intro that, maybe you could explain a little bit about what exactly what your responsibilities were in your role when that started to happen.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

So, first of all, I think joining or being part of a company that is going through a carve-out like that was intense, but it was also incredibly formative. It was my responsibility to make sure that we had a management system. It was my responsibility to make sure that our quality management system would be re-certified in the scope of the new company with the new people and the new company name and all these things. And then, of course, also select and deploy a tool that would support it. So there was an IT aspect, but also a business process aspect to it. Felt a bit like the organization was separating, but at the same time, it was reinventing itself. And it wasn't just structural that we invention, it was technological. You're moving from legacy systems that company had been using for many, many years, and then you're going into a full S4 HANA stack deployment, and that changed everything. It changes the way you do things simply because you are now using a different system. And it forces you also to confront some fundamental questions. How do we actually want to work? You now have the opportunity going from a completely green field to looking at what makes sense for me. Why were things done in a certain way? Do these requirements perhaps come from more of a medical requirement that we now no longer need to follow? Where do we standardize? What are our core end-to-end processes and who owns what? I think the beauty is the S4 HANA does not tolerate ambiguity very well. So it requires process clarity and it requires defined data structures and it requires governance. So in many ways, having the IT information and transformation sort of became a catalyst for organizational maturity. The technology was then shaping how we were doing things, how work was being executed, and the behaviors. So we weren't just replicating a legacy into a new system, but we really had a fantastic opportunity, and I think also a rare opportunity to rethink from the very bottom up. At the same time, of course, business continuity had to be flawless because your customers don't pause while you're reinventing yourself internally. They want to have the product at the level of quality that they are used to, at the speed that they are used to. So I think that combination of having the operational pressure, the structural redesign, and that full stack technology deployment created both a bit of the urgency and the opportunity that you got to work with.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

In terms of an opportunity to start again almost, did you notice there was a lot of shedding of some like really old school ways of working that was happening? And, you know, for the first time in say the big group had been around for decades and decades, right? So did was there a lot of shedding of a quite an old way of working that took place? And how did people get the balance between business as usual, but also like, yeah, big change to get with modern standards?

SPEAKER_01 9:16

It was a challenge. But first of all, yes, we had to shed a lot of the weight because our group was not that big anymore. We didn't have a department of 20 to do the work that now needed to be done by four. So we have to be very smart in rethinking how do we get done what we need to get done, and then also find figuring out what is it that we actually want to do. So, like I said, how do we actually want to work? What do we have to do? And which part is just a nice on top of that maybe nobody even looks at or wants. So that I think really shaped a lot of it. And then what happened was that we went extremely simple. So you kind of go the other way and you toss everything out that you never liked doing before because you can. And then we came back to find a balance, a middle that worked for everybody. So it went from the one extreme to the other extreme and then back into the middle naturally.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Which parts of the business would you say that was most challenging for supply chain, marketing, where maybe from a quality and process standpoint, is it hardest?

SPEAKER_01 10:18

That's a difficult question, especially because I imagine every company operates differently. And if I say it was for HR, HR will probably say, no, no, no, these guys had a tougher. It also depends on how many people did you bring along. Uh, how big is your team now? How big was your team before? But I would say if I had to choose one, sorry, I would say supply chain just simply because it's the biggest, right? There's the most dain to be gotten, but also the most loss to be had. So it's just the biggest group, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Even the standalone company, it was still sizable. So you're still looking at a company that probably operates in like 90% of the countries in the world, and you're coordinating a number of different brands across those different countries and selling different brands. How do you manage that level of complexity in one system?

SPEAKER_01 11:06

So the scale was indeed significant. Global brands, multiple markets, functional depth, but also regional variation. And that was a structural complexity. So it wasn't something that accidentally came up. It was structured in that way. So you have global ambitions, but you have local realities, commercial flexibility in the markets, financial and operational consistency requirements that are centrally managed. And then layered on top of that, you have a system transformation that enforces the standardization, whether you're ready or not. It doesn't ask those questions, it just transforms. So I think the challenge becomes how do you design a governance? And I think that's really the most important thing that we did that supports both that scale, but also gives you the agility. So basically, where process management becomes critical is not as a bureaucracy, but really as a stabilizing force. So you have the governments, people understanding who's responsible for what, who owns what, and using it not to certify something or a place to write stuff down, but really giving you that stable basic where you can go and find your source of truth.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

How do you go about identifying regions that want to work differently just because that's always how they've done it, or because that's what they're used to and yeah, what's convenient, versus an actual desire to operate differently because it's really good for that local market, or there's a legal reason, or there's very valid reason versus, I suppose, something that's a bit more just force of habit.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

There was a lot of that force of habit, especially in the markets, because every market has, of course, its specificities, its local requirements, but also its cultures and the way that things needed to be packaged or sold, or and a lot of it was force of habit, and a lot of it was that autonomy that the markets naturally wanted to keep. Hearing something from coming from corporate always felt a bit like, yeah, but you guys don't know what it's like in my market. You guys don't know what I have to deal with every day. So governance was really the key driver and ownership of the system, that desire to transform and create a system that was a one source of truth for everything that we do, even if it wasn't traditionally part of quality. Think about finance or think about legal, right? Should they write down their processes? But that decision, it helps you then, of course, create the connections. It breaks down the silos. It's not just legal in itself or finance in itself, but it is understanding what information flows into finance and where does it go from there, because it does impact more than just its own silo. So to having the executive leadership, the CEO, really drive or own the system, lend their commitment and their voice to it, really, really helped for people to hear that this was not some sort of a quality-driven project that was then another one of those, but it was really a company-wide transformation that was part of the global transformation that the company was going through.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

And do you think the carve out and the senior leadership seeing the importance of process benefited you from a quality standpoint? Because it wasn't like you were going there just saying we need to do this for an ISO accreditation, and that's the only reason. There's actually other reasons because it's better for your performance, et cetera, et cetera. It's better for the customer.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

It actually gives you visibility, right? Not knowing what the other guy's doing doesn't give you visibility, it gives you so much opportunity because you can now look at how all these different markets are doing the same thing. And of course, there is local requirement that drives variation, of course. But the underlying global process is the same. So then, yes, of course, you would add the local variation that is required, but also having the global process owner of that process understand the variation in all of the countries helped them become a better process owner and helped them understand the connections that they had to other processes and other owners as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

So transformation programs can lose their momentum quite often. But I also think these kind of process management initiatives can lose momentum quite often, usually falling into the trap of the models that are being created or have been created for a certain purpose, eventually lose traction, people stop using them, and people start to question the value of the exercise, even though it may have served a really good purpose when you go live on the new systems as part of a standalone separation. Why do you think process management exercises sometimes lose momentum?

SPEAKER_01 15:46

People get comfortable, people do their daily job, of course. I mean, I would be lying if I said I go in every day to look at how am I supposed to do my work. Of course not. So, but there I think it is really important to have that governance, so to have the experts and the owners of these processes truly take ownership of their processes, but also connect to each other. So that was one thing that I think we did very well is creating networks of owners and of experts to exchange, to also look at data, measure why is not my process not being looked at in the system, or respectively, why is my process being looked at now? And then maybe you can see that there has just been a change implemented, or maybe there's an audit coming up, so everybody wants to refresh on what's new. But it's important to keep it monitoring. And I don't think it's necessarily bad that the usage goes down because it becomes part of your daily routine and your daily work, but it needs to be monitored and understood.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

And in terms of perhaps your comparisons between older process tools that you'd used and more modern ones like Signavio, maybe instead of BlueWorks, Auris, some of the older on-premise stuff, what would you say are the advantages of the more modern ones? And then also how much further do you think they need to go before they're used more consistently and add more value?

SPEAKER_01 17:07

I think the advantages are for sure the ease of use. So if you want to model a process, it's quite self-explanatory, I think. Though what I have noticed looking at past and looking at current ways of working, is that in the past people would just sort of have their own understanding of what a process model needs to look like, what kind of detail you would put in there. It was sort of replacing Visio or so, but that's not what it should be. And really understanding the BPM annotation, really understanding what standards, what levels do we have, how are we going to document this, and also there, who's gonna do the modeling for us? Because it really reduces that ambiguity and it makes it more readable. If you have a system that has so many different levels of detail in the same sort of process, makes it really difficult to read for the end user. And they will not find what they're looking for, and that will be the end of it. So I find that so ease of use for the modeler, for the person creating the system, and the opportunities, of course, to extract data, to look at analytics, to look at how many clicks have I had on this process, or how is this uh other process doing from a compliance perspective?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

And I suppose you've seen process improvement exercises come go and fail and or come go and succeed. What do you think is the biggest challenge with modern organizations and the fact that they have lots of different teams that are trying to drive improvement and that perhaps they're not all referring to the same processes or they don't have this strategic guidance from senior leadership, they're trying to achieve things that maybe aren't actually beneficial to the organization? What are those kind of challenges you've seen, I suppose, sitting from a almost from a quality perspective, watching a lot of those improvement programs happen, a lot of those lean six sigma kind of type stuff in the factories. What's your assessment of what makes them work and not work?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

So I think individually they're great, but as a that they're rarely ever considering the whole because the whole is rarely ever seen. So if you can create a great process, a beautiful documented flow. You can lean six sigma, it you can super lean, but then if you forget the requirements from a compliance perspective, you might be not creating a records that you need to create to have evidence that you've, I don't know, tested something or whatever. And also there is no clear ownership, then oftentimes, right? So then you're again creating salos. There's no real ownership of the whole. There's no strategy behind as a company, where are we going? It's more a I see that this is a problem and I'm gonna fix it, and that's fantastic. But it gets lost in the big picture.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Yeah. And is that fair also? Would people could people make that same argument against sometimes quality initiatives that they are trying to solve a problem as a tickpock at exercise rather than as a strategic thing or something that's actually gonna for sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

And that creates a lot of turmoil, right? It creates a lot of extra uh work frustration, men hands need it, so FTEs need it to execute something at the end of the day that may not even be needed. But we're trying to solve a problem, and then somebody it created a problem for somebody else, and then they're trying to solve the problem, and by the end, you've created so much chaos that nobody really knows anymore who owns it, who's making decisions, it's a complete uh mess.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

Yeah, perhaps a few quick fires questions. Having worked in uh, I guess, using Signavio a lot in the UK and across Europe, I find that the Netherlands seems to be a bit of a hotbed for it, and companies really engage with technology like that and concepts like quality and process management. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01 20:38

I have no clue why that is in Holland. Maybe because we're such a small country that they have to work naturally with others to do stuff or to connect, and that drives the need to have that clarity. But I don't know why specifically the Netherlands and not Switzerland. I mean, why not? They're also small and they're also uh acting internationally, so I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Yeah. Uh AI and automation, how do you see that impacting quality management and process management?

SPEAKER_01 21:05

AI is accelerating what's possible in process management. You of course you have many more integrated systems, you have real-time data visibility, you have predictive insights, you have intelligent automation, you have all that great stuff. But if the ownership and decision moments and the decision authorized, just the people making the decisions, if that is unclear, then I think automation will accelerate confusion. All of a sudden you get all of this data and all of this automation, but if nobody knows who's going to decide what, I think it really creates more confusion. So uh AI is probably not going to replace your process thinking, but it will elevate it if your governance is strong.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah. And your master data and things like that. I know that you've had bits of experience looking at master data from a quality perspective as well. Why do you think that always goes so wrong at big organizations that have master?

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Ownership is unclear. And I really think that's what it boils down to. So you have so much data, but mapping out where it goes, mapping that journey of master data, becomes impossible because you don't know how to further, and the ownership is unclear. So it then people get stuck very easily. But I think master data in itself is probably not the problem. It's understanding the journey of the master data that really would add the value.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Another quickfire one. If you could get rid of one piece of jargon or word or phrase that's used in, I suppose your world, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 22:34

I'm not sure if it's a word and maybe a concept about business process that I think really, first of all, it's not correct, but also it really creates that step that people are not willing to cross to really get into business process management because it's uh boring or stupid or whatever, is that it creates complexity, that it's bureaucracy that you're creating. You're writing stuff down. Why would you do that? What's the value add? So, really that bureaucracy, that tediosity of having the system itself, I think that's really a big misconception because doing it right can save you so much in time, in money, in frustration, in FTE. And it can give you so much in clarity, calmness for the organization.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Yeah. And actually, sometimes people avoid the complexity, so they treat it more of an afterthought after a system's been designed or after they've done all the analysis of what's wrong with a process, and then they involve maybe the quality team to document and stuff. What's the disadvantage of people doing that?

SPEAKER_01 23:34

I think even more so, what I've seen happen a lot is if it's not an IT-based process, it is completely forgotten. So if it's a process that uses, I don't know, a SharePoint maybe or something that does not have an underlying IT tool, it's not even thought about. And then you lose the connections and you lose the transparency. So the problem with that is that afterwards you can go write down how things are being done, but you forgot half your requirements. You forget maybe the interactions, you're creating silos again instead of creating transparency that helps teams within a company work together much better.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Well, that's all we have time for today, but thank you so much, Hannah, for talking us through your viewpoints and experience with process and quality.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Thank you for having me, Sam. It was a pleasure talking to you.