Ep 9 –The Best Process People Are Translators: Turning Complexity into Change with Mike Lucas

In this episode, Liam O’Neill speaks with Mike Lucas, Business Process Excellence Manager at Alkermes, a global biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Dublin with significant operations in the United States.

Mike has spent nearly 19 years at Alkermes, starting on the manufacturing floor before moving through supply chain, SAP, planning systems and transformation. That journey has given him a practical view of process management, shaped by working in highly regulated environments where getting a process right has consequences far beyond producing a good-looking process map.

This is a grounded conversation about the gap between how a process is documented and how work actually happens, and why closing that gap requires process professionals to spend more time with the people doing the work.

They discuss:

• How Mike’s early experience in aviation and pharmaceutical manufacturing taught him the importance of structure, discipline and processes that work in practice, not just on paper
• Why Lean and Six Sigma are valuable as a common language for improvement, and how a Yellow Belt project helped Alkermes improve the efficiency of master data collection by around 80%
• How BPM can evolve from supporting business change to actively driving it, and why a beautiful process map that nobody uses is not a measure of success
• What Alkermes’ move from ECC6 to S/4HANA has revealed about its existing processes, and why the programme is being used to move away from heavy customisation towards greater standardisation
• How SAP standard processes and Signavio can provide a useful starting point for transformation, reducing local reinvention and creating more consistent processes and documentation
• Why process ownership and governance remain difficult to get right, particularly when accountability stretches across functions, systems and end-to-end processes
• Why the best process professionals are translators, getting close to the work, listening to SMEs and turning complex business reality into something people can understand, adopt and improve

Mike brings a refreshingly practical perspective shaped by years spent close to operations as well as major transformation programmes.

If you work in process, transformation, supply chain or enterprise systems and want process management to influence how the business actually works, this episode is worth your time.

Host: Liam O’Neill, Managing Director at bpmd
Guest: Michael Lucas, Business Process Excellence Manager at Alkermes