Woonbedrijf
            

Profile: Woonbedrijf is the largest housing corporation in the south of the Netherlands with more than 34,000 rental properties. With a team of 350 employees, the company believes everyone should be able to live well and undisturbed in a good neighborhood. Something they are very committed to – with a large portfolio of affordable rental properties available.

The road to process excellence

Woonbedrijf was established in 2005 from a merger of two housing corporations. This was a complex undertaking because both companies had their own way of doing things. Neither of them had digital processes to speak of. They were all written in text format and stored somewhere to be shared between multiple stakeholders. No process hierarchies, no process repository and no process roles were available. While work was being done to establish a shared culture, establishing a shared process architecture was understandably lower on the list. This changed in 2009 with the introduction of ARIS. For the first time, core processes were mapped out. A central repository was set up and users could collaborate on process updates and publish them using the ProcessWeb, available to all employees, not just designers.

In the period of 2009 to 2019, many new information systems were developed, and more and more digitization of various processes took place. This ever-increasing digitization of business processes also created the need to move the organization from regional control to integral process management.

"Our work is about contributing to a better world. A more sustainable world. But we developed layer upon layer of complexity. And each layer needed more people to understand and manage it. In 2020, we wanted to do our job even better with fewer people. And we started by setting up a process architecture that would simplify the way we work and involve fewer staff at each stage," Leon van der Zanden, Architect Information Management.

Continuous process excellence

The shift from regional control to central control started with mapping and visualizing a new process structure, containing the right hierarchies and user rights. ARIS made this process fast and efficient, inviting employees to share and see the processes they were involved in. In this phase, Woonbedrijf went one step further and tried to give ARIS a more prominent role in the field of process improvements. The company set up a dedicated process improvement and consultation team, which received change requests directly through ARIS. As part of a user's ongoing professional development, they had to submit these requests that had to include all the necessary documentation. Submit it all correctly and your change would be implemented.

This started with creating a culture of continuous process improvement in the company. "In the beginning with ARIS, it was mainly business controllers, analysts and accountants who were most involved with it. It was seen as a tool for internal control rather than a means of developing something better. Now it is seen as part of our ongoing company-wide commitment to process excellence," says Leon van der Zanden, Architect Information Management.

There is much more to do

With company-wide adoption, the potential for business process analytics and management within Woonbedrijf is greater than ever." ARIS is a hugely comprehensive product that brings even more with each release" says van der Zanden. "And it gives us so many features and possibilities that we're just getting started, as it were." The team is currently looking at how ARIS can help further with organizing the feedback on processes and managing process monitoring. There are also plans to use intelligent insights from process mining to intuitively improve process management. "We want to use the technology to do what it does best. This frees up our employees to spend more time where they belong and convert houses into long-term homes."