Combining Process Excellence and Automation – Key to Greater Business Value and Scale

Automation alone cannot unlock the value enterprises seek in their digital transformation initiatives. The element that is often missing with automation is process excellence. Taking this technology-driven approach that unleashes objective and actionable data-based insights is the key to realizing transformational benefits. To discover the power of process excellence, read on.

Why standalone automation cannot serve the purpose

Enterprises have continuously expanded their focus on digital transformation over the past few years. With the COVID-19 pandemic further amplifying the importance of digital transformation and making it a strategic priority, enterprises are accelerating the shift to become digital-first with automated and intelligent processes.

However, digital transformation initiatives implemented without fully and accurately understanding business processes can impede enterprises from achieving the desired Return on Investment (ROI). To improve the value realized from these initiatives, enterprises need to adopt an inclusive approach that combines process excellence with automation.

Process excellence involves leveraging technologies such as process mining and task mining to discover, monitor, and optimize processes in a data-driven, faster, cost-efficient, and scalable way. This growing technology-driven approach unleashes objective insights based on facts derived from data and helps organizations make better decisions, replacing manual-intensive (e.g., interview-based) process discovery and analysis methods.

Why enterprises should combine process excellence with automation

While automating low-hanging fruits can result in some quick wins for enterprises in cost and operational benefits, it has now become evident that automation alone lacks the potential to deliver transformational benefits.

Businesses face several barriers as they adopt and accelerate digital transformation. Some of the major challenges many organizations must overcome to get the value they expect include:

• Lack of process visibility and insights – Most organizations start with defined Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for their internal processes. However, over time those processes change to meet the day-to-day operational pressures. These process variances are not being captured and documented properly using traditional manual techniques. Manual process discovery and analysis take a long time and significantly delay Time to Value (TTV) realization.
• Inability to identify the right optimization opportunities – Redundant steps, unwanted variances, and other inadequacies are often introduced in the processes over time. It is important to identify the right level of standardization and optimization opportunities because significantly less value will be realized by automating non-standardized processes. Additionally, applying automation to broken or inefficient processes could amplify inefficiencies and potentially derail the digital transformation initiative.
• Difficulty in maintaining a strong automation pipeline – Organizations target obvious automation opportunities that are not always optimal. Then, after the initial wave of benefits from easy opportunities dry up, they find it difficult to maintain a healthy automation pipeline using manual techniques, resulting in lower automation rates and lack of scale.

Combining process excellence with automation transforms the way enterprises think about their operations and creates the opportunity to re-engineer processes to achieve tangible outcomes from digital transformation initiatives.

Process excellence focuses on adopting process mining and task mining technologies that leverage event log data and User Interface (UI) data, respectively, to discover end-to-end processes.

This data plays a vital role in generating fact-based process insights and transforming these insights into action. Process mining provides appropriate macro-level insights (rework rates, process deviations, process flows) and task mining provides micro-level insights (time spent on each activity, frequency) and workforce intelligence (user productivity, idle time).

These solutions are being used across various areas such as process discovery, process conformance, process standardization, process optimization, automation opportunity identification and prioritization, process simulation, process monitoring, and workforce intelligence.

Benefits of process excellence

A process excellence approach could yield cost savings, operational improvements, better customer experience, and top-line growth. It can deliver the following positive impacts:

• Cost impact

–??????Greater cost efficiency in process discovery and analysis

–??????Increased capacity and freeing time for resources involved in the manual process discovery exercise to focus on their core work

• Operational impact

–??????Significant improvement in process discovery and analysis quality by using a fact-based approach versus manual techniques that rely on opinions, bias, and abstract information

–??????Greater scalability of automation initiatives because it helps enterprises better identify and prioritize the processes and tasks for automation by discovery and analysis

–??????Improved governance and fact-based compliance checking

• Business impact

–??????Accelerated digital transformation with an enhanced ability to create and maintain a healthy transformation pipeline

–??????Improved ROI and value realization from identified automation opportunities

–??????Enhanced customer experience due to the improved ability to identify and offer actionable insights to address customer pain points

–??????Improved extraction of hidden process insights that can uncover new cross-selling and upselling opportunities or better ways of conducting business

How can a process excellence approach help across the different stages of the digital transformation lifecycle?

Here’s how a process excellence-driven approach that leverages technologies such as process mining and task mining can play a critical role across the six stages of the digital transformation lifecycle:

• Discover – These solutions aid enterprises in discovering as-is processes and generating an aggregated process map. The discovered process maps help visualize the current state of process flows and validate known process flow information. They also reveal various deviations, variances, and essential step information such as time, cost, volume, and frequency. Process mining and task mining reduce the discovery time, effort, and cost versus traditional manual techniques.
• Optimize – Process excellence tools provide an analytical approach to optimize processes by investigating process deviations through conformance checking. The derived process models can be compared with the perceived process model defined based on SOPs to identify the path, time, and cost deviations. It helps streamline and re-engineer processes by identifying exceptions (e.g., process loops) and process vulnerabilities. Task mining helps derive insights into employee collaboration that can be used for better resource allocation and work delegation.
• Automate – Process mining and task mining solutions help identify and prioritize automation use cases and candidates at both the macro-level (i.e., processes) and the micro-level (i.e., tasks and activities) based on automation potential. They provide data-driven insights on performance and productivity to design the best automation strategy. Task mining solution also provides the ability to trigger Robotic Process Automation (RPA) robots for the identified automated opportunities.
• Evaluate – These tools help enterprises carry out process simulations to test process changes without impacting their day-to-day operations. Enterprises can simulate various improvement scenarios to predict the ROI and create and validate the business case. These simulations minimize the risk of implementing improvement projects without the knowledge of how they will impact real-time operations.
• Execute – The combination of process mining and task mining can provide a data-based end-to-end view of all processes with transparency. It can highlight interdependent process problems, thereby breaking down departmental silos and promoting collaboration to achieve a shared organizational goal. It can aid in evaluating changes during the transition stage so that required actions can be triggered for improvement or course correction.
• Monitor – Process excellence focuses on monitoring processes on an ongoing basis to plan for further efficiency improvements. Monitoring processes in near real-time helps enterprises predict any challenges in meeting critical service-level agreements (SLAs) or any potential key performance indicator (KPI) breaches, and plan for remedies, ensuring business resilience. It also helps create a feedback loop to the discovery stage for continuous improvements.

The way forward

As enterprises navigate their digital transformations and continue to focus on accelerating their journeys, adopting a process excellence approach that encompasses technologies such as process mining and task mining can uncover a company’s process DNA and help to drive continuous improvement. Process excellence offers great potential for enterprises to unlock exponential value and benefits from their digital transformation initiatives.?