Process & quality management as the essential key to success

The Huf Group is successfully represented in 14 countries around the world with subsidiaries in the area of production and/or development. Due to this worldwide positioning, flexibility in the establishment of the process structure, multilingualism and rapid distribution of process changes were basic requirements for the establishment of the process management system. From the very beginning, there was a need to establish a process structure that would meet the requirements for defining central default processes, but also allow flexibility for local processes. In addition, it had to be possible to map process variants in different ways using an intuitive modeling methodology. In the automotive industry, the quality management system also plays a crucial role. For example, the various Huf companies have received more than 40 different certificates over the years (including ISO/IEC 27001:2005, ISO/TS 16949:2009, ISO 14001:2009 and OHSAS 18001:2007). The company was therefore also looking for a solution that would meet these requirements.

The quality management managers at Huf were aware that the key success factor of the process management initiatives lies not only in the modeling and analysis of the business processes, but above all in the user-friendly communication of the process information throughout the company. Therefore, after an extensive tool evaluation, they decided to switch from the ARIS® platform to the BIC Platform. The change was intended to focus on user acceptance, on the one hand among the modelers, but above all among the users who are supposed to read and live the processes. In a first step, the processes modeled with ARIS® were migrated using an import interface. After the data migration, the modelers were trained, fundamental issues such as the structuring of the process map were examined and changes were made where necessary. The new management system is divided into the classic process categories of management, core and support processes. The value chain is characterized by the process areas of product creation, manufacturing process creation and production and - in line with the defined process hierarchies - is concretized by detailed processes.