Simplify and accelerate: powering new business value at Rolls-Royce

Meet our customer

Present in 48 countries, Rolls-Royce is a UK-based engineering company that powers some of the world’s most critical technologies in the air, at sea, and on land. For more than a century, it has built a reputation for innovation. Today, its 42,400 employees work across Civil Aerospace, Defense, and Power Systems. In 2024, more than 350 million passengers flew on aircraft powered by Rolls-Royce.

Strategic change – the simple way

As part of an ongoing enterprise transformation program, Rolls-Royce wants to cut product costs, improve delivery, and embed continuous improvement in all its operations. This transformation is also a shift in mindset. “We want to raise the bar for Performance Management,” said Sunny Lu, Senior Transformation Executive. “It’s about bringing more pace, rigor, and agility to everyday decision-making so teams can act faster, respond sooner, and anticipate earlier.” 

To make this happen, Rolls-Royce needed to simplify its process landscape. In the Legal department alone, process management involved 17 steps and five variants, with each of the five Legal divisions following its own method. Employees often had to navigate around 100 documents to complete an activity, with multiple process designers and owners involved. Reducing complexity had become essential. Controls needed to be systemized for proactive risk management. And processes had to be made clearer and more measurable to close the strategy-to-execution gap. 

With a unified, process-based approach, Rolls-Royce would eliminate duplication, streamline operations, and accelerate transformation while freeing up employees to focus on higher-value tasks. 

Clarity and control in the cloud

The company relies on the Rolls-Royce Management System (RRMS), which aligns different parts of the business to enterprise-wide strategic goals, to embrace a single, cohesive way of working across the organization. Bringing RRMS to life requires powerful digital tools – and for Business Process Management (BPM) and Analysis, Rolls-Royce has relied on ARIS since 2019.  

“We needed an industry-standard framework to serve as a single source of truth,” explained Sunny Lu. “With ARIS, we were able to methodically map all our processes – a crucial step to prepare us for the sweeping process change we needed to increase business value.” 

Working with the ARIS Services team, Rolls-Royce has achieved: 

• Risk & Control Assurance Transformation: by embedding enterprise controls into management processes, the organization has strengthened compliance, enabled earlier risk response and clarified responsibilities. 

• Simplification and alignment to new operating models: the streamlining of documents has defined process purpose and value, ensuring every process outcome is quantifiable. 
  
• Requirement and decision-rights integration: clear decision-making is now established within processes, defining who performs each task, and harmonizing requirements. 

Simpler processes, stronger governance, faster change

With ARIS as its BPM tool, Rolls-Royce has achieved measurable change at unprecedented pace. The time required to implement process change has accelerated by a factor of six. “ARIS provides us with consistency, structure and visibility – and that’s precisely what we need to accelerate the flow and automation for change management,” explained Sunny Lu.

With ARIS as its single source of truth, Rolls-Royce has slashed complexity by more than 30%, driven a one-third reduction in process variants and removed a quarter of all legacy documents. Today, processes are fully aligned to strategic initiatives, and users no longer waste time reading unnecessary documents or duplicating tasks.

• Strategy Development has been radically simplified. Previously, multiple process designers and owners were duplicating work. Today, the number of process steps has been cut from 50 to just 13, and related documents and templates have fallen from 213 to 133.  
   
• Legal Management has also benefited from considerable simplification. The transparency afforded by ARIS has allowed Rolls-Royce to design a standard suite of processes for instructing outside legal counsel, replacing 88% of variants that previously depended on where people worked.  

Furthermore, ARIS’s GRC capabilities have been a springboard for embedding enterprise controls into day-to-day management processes. Today, risk controls are clearly defined, fully integrated into operational workflows, and supported by a structured assurance program. There is also full visibility into which roles operate each control. The initiative spans 66 product safety controls, 23 anti-bribery and corruption controls, and 10 export controls – and includes training in the Three Lines of Defense model. As a result, the business now enjoys stronger compliance, more effective controls, and greater resilience.

From compliance to proactive performance

Looking ahead, Rolls-Royce wants to rapidly increase adoption of its process landscape, reaching a target of over 80% adoption. “We’ve involved process users to design processes that are simpler and more intuitive,” said Sunny Lu. “This should help teams see their value as a practical tool, rather than viewing them as an extra task.” 

With safety as a constant priority, Rolls-Royce wants to strengthen the risk-aware culture across the organization. The next phase will cement the shift from reactive compliance to proactive, informed decision-making, further embedding risk into the BPM framework. 

With ARIS underpinning the journey, the RRMS will continue to unlock new business value, becoming a catalyst for sharper decisions, stronger performance, and sustained better results.