Barton's Blog

If you’re not familiar with the name, Tillamook is a 99 year-old cooperative made up of over 150 dairies that produces high-end dairy products.  The award-winning cooperative, officially named the Tillamook County Creamery Association, is located up in the north west corner of Oregon.

Until recently, processes were passed down from artisan to artisan in the form of what Steve Burge, who runs TIllamooks’ Business Process Management Office, jokingly refers to as “tribal knowledge.”

There’s a new Sheriff in town and he’s a fan of BPM

When Tillamook’s new CEO came on board he realized that he needed to get a handle on the company’s processes in order to move forward and compete in today’s market.  It was Steve’s job to put together a Process Management Model to lead the collection and documentation of the company’s processes.

>> My Interview with Steve (7:06) : Listen (mp3) Listen (ogg)

Some of the topics we tackle:

• How Steve built a core team where IT was in the minority and the majority of the members came from the business side.
• How the team decided where to begin.
• Why they decided to abandon Visio and cocktail napkins for Blueprint and the value they saw in a hosted application.
• How they involved over 150 people, from all over the company, to help detail the processes
• How they got process owners from the business to own execution after the initial documentation effort.

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.