Competing in the VUCA world with SAP Business Process Intelligence

Pandemic. Lockdowns. Volatile markets. Inflation. Changing consumer behaviors. Shifts in priorities. Emerging technologies and trends. Geopolitical conflicts. Unclear developments. All this has happened over the past two years alone. Scary on the one hand, a beautiful challenge to tackle on the other hand. Today’s fast changing business environment consequently comes with the conditions to either win or lose market share. An opportunity. For you as a company. To win. To outperform. Let’s do this.

The challenges of today’s business world

Our globalized world is so crazily fast moving that there is even a term for it – VUCA. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity as well as Ambiguity and represents the umbrella term for challenges businesses are facing today. Disruptions through new technologies and business models are additionally taking place in almost every imaginable business area. At the same time, we find increased complexity in terms of product variety, business processes and stakeholder relationships.

How to cope with all this? Quick adaptation, collaboration and transformation of the business strategy and its structures and processes. Successful companies of tomorrow yield competitive advantage by embracing transparency, automation, agility and improved decision-making. Smart technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) support organizations in pursuing this mission in order to sustainably drive real results in the era of Big Data and Industry 4.0. SAP therefore created a bundle of products, services and tools to support organizations with their digital transformation: RISE with SAP. The principal idea of RISE with SAP is to provide business transformation as a service, covering various areas including infrastructure, technology, applications and business processes.

In this newsletter series, we focus on the latter. SAP Business Process Intelligence (BPI) helps you to reach the next level in our VUCA world.

How SAP Business Process Intelligence can help

BPI by SAP provides a comprehensive portfolio to drive your business process transformation beyond functional silos. The holistic approach fully supports end-to-end transformation and process improvement initiatives while ensuring a seamless handover from process insights and guided recommendations to value-adding improvement actions.

BPI solutions represent the base for the intelligent enterprise of tomorrow. They allow you to chart your digital transformation at your own speed and on your own terms, regardless of your starting point. It requires a solid understanding of your customers’ pain points, in-depth process analysis, benchmarking with your industry peers, process reimagination and a smooth collaboration of all involved parties, to name a few, in order to cope with the modern business challenges mentioned above. BPI from SAP is the first to bring all these components into a unified set of solutions, combining deep process analysis with the tools needed for process re-engineering or creating entirely new and innovative business processes. It covers business process design, benchmarking, gap analysis, improvement, and process change management – with the ultimate goal to reach your next level in today’s fast-moving world.

For example, you can secure instant value with SAP Process Insights : Quickly gain performance visibility, business process deep-dive with advanced analytics, as well as benefit from tailor-made improvement recommendations. For instance, if you find a key performance indicator (KPI) with an above-average “Days Sales Outstanding” you may view dedicated benchmark values from the industry and start working towards better management of receivables based on recommendations like the setup of automatic matching of incoming payments and invoices, credit management or dunning procedures.

With SAP Signavio Process Intelligence , you have the possibility to visualize your process reality: From running detailed process analysis for business transformations (S/4HANA migrations included), investigating and interacting with business data to leveraging process mining for fact-based changes in order to uncover the hidden value in business processes and data.

You may further refer to SAP Signavio Process Manager in order to completely reimagine your business processes. This tool helps you to quickly respond to unforeseeable business and regulatory changes, to collaboratively scale the process repository of your enterprise as well as to simulate business processes in order to define alternative business scenarios.

SAP Signavio Journey Modeler is another helpful tool, supporting you to deliver customer excellence. You may use the Journey Modeler to deliver customer excellence through the design of customer journey models for touchpoint improvements, alignment of business processes to customer experiences as well as sharing customer-centric journeys for feedback and potential experience improvements.

With SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub , you can collaborate and work together in your own way by building a single source of truth across all your teams, breaking down business silos and shaping an improved understanding of KPIs, tasks and projects.

In order to secure the success of the rollout, you may relate to SAP Signavio Process Governance . Process Governance supports you in gaining complete visibility and governance over your workflows, developing prototypes for rapid deployment and scaling up workflows without coding, as well as reducing business process variations and rework.

Wrap-up

The challenges related to the VUCA world are real. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are a byproduct of the fast-moving and digitalized business world we are living in. It requires a certain agility and transformation in order to compete in such a globalized environment. Traditional approaches insufficiently support fast-paced change and lack significant business process insights, resulting in decision-making based on outdated information, and ultimately leading to unhappy customers and consequently reduced competition.

Nevertheless, there are strong opportunities to unleash the full potential of your company and to outperform your competition despite heavy market conditions. BPI by SAP brings it all together in a holistic business transformation suite, harmonizing your business processes, data and systems while emphasizing the human aspect of your organization. As BPI lays the foundation for the intelligent enterprise of tomorrow, its solutions provide both next-gen and end-to-end capabilities for strategic process transformation and the reinvention of customer experiences.

We at Westernacher help you identify and tackle your specific business challenges. We are there for you. We are walking this journey together with you, keeping one objective in mind: helping you run even better in today’s VUCA world.

Johannes Strasser, CoE Lead | Business Process Intelligence at?Westernacher Consulting