Innovate the process itself

N: When I started to research about this subject, I read pretty opposite things. First I found that the process innovation is probably the least sexy form of innovation. But on the other side I read that this is completely different from incremental innovation both in scope and size and somebody described process innovation as creating radically game changing shifts. So this sounds pretty sexy. Where is the truth?

Ivan: The truth is out there, yeah? I was an X Files fan. Well, we are trying to make it sexy and sexy is a subjective topic. For some people this is sexy, for some people this is very boring and not sexy at all. Process innovation is there to make radical and game shift changes to happen. It’s there to allow people who are able to make magic, to make magic itself, so we are trying to put aside all the boring stuff and all the routine stuff and try to make methodology that is going to make them able to make the magic they have.

N: So let’s go back a bit. Since we are talking about how to innovate the process itself, can you give me some more details about this?

Ivan: Yes, sure. I just wanna go back a little bit more and I want to share some private story. When I was a child, when I was a kid, my best friend was my grandfather and he was really my best friend. He was playing with me all the time and somehow I believed he considered that I was his best friend. It was very strange.

N: And it is very interesting.

Ivan: Yeah. I think that if people have this opportunity, they are really lucky, because some people don’t have that opportunity. And he treated me like I was equal, I was with him in his office very often. And I went with him to football games, to business meetings, going to coffee with his friends. And it was interesting because he was always asking for my opinion, asking a child what he thinks about something. I think he was playing with all other people. He was my hero back then, and I chased him, and when I looked at the business, he was the guy that I wanted to become. He is still alive, and I am very proud of him. One thing was really important, he was working for a company named Phillips. Phillips is a famous company, its innovative company and my uncle is still working there. And back then, Phillips had…

N: But you are not there.

Ivan: Not there. I never worked for Phillips. And they had the slogan, and the slogan was ”Lets make things better”. And in my room, because they have big posters, when you entered my room when I was a child, it was Phillip’s “ Lets make things better”. And I think I didn’t know the meaning back then but it was everywhere ”Lets make things better”. And somehow I think I grew up as a person who wants to make things better. And Simplify as a company is doing exactly that. Our Why is to make things better, our Why is to simplify the process in order for people to have a better job and to have a better life.

N: It’s very interesting to me this story of your grandfather. I presumed that it was a great experience for you to learn from him. He was an engineer in Siemens?

Ivan: No, he wasn’t an engineer. It was a great experience to learn about the business and still is. I believe back then I didn’t know this. And back then it was just a play, just a game. But now I think it’s coming back to me.

N: Usually this type of situation is in family businesses but it’s the first time that I hear something like this.

Ivan: Because back then you have to be crazy to bring a four-year old child to the business meeting.

N: Incredible. So your main thing that you do now is the process of automation. Can you tell me more about this?

Ivan: Process innovation and innovating the process itself, it’s not a new topic. From the start of the work, people try to understand how to work better. And we have methodologies that are old seventy or eighty years. But people rarely know about them, people rarely implement them. We have new methodologies, we build our own methodologies by watching the best companies and best consulting companies by streamlining some new things, and are new for some people like agile, agile circles. To the business in order to get them streamline, to get them changed, innovate and for people to work better.

When we see the knowledge of the world about the process itself, about the management of itself, the knowledge is huge. If you can read books you can see what the best colleges are, what they do. If you look at the scientific papers about everything, but what scares me is that in practice you have a totally different situation. Methodologies are not used, knowledge is not used, and you have a huge gap between the science and what the best companies are doing, and between the practice and what the worst companies are doing. And we try to streamline between that, to help everybody. Because we want to release time for people to think, and people to make magic and not to be bored with things like invoices or whatever.

I want to share my opinion, I will try not to mention those guys and those companies. For example when people are talking about this, they all mention people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jack Ma or whoever. If you are in science, you are mentioning like Tesla, Faraday, Barbara McClintock who won the Nobel prize. And I don’t believe that is good because it tends to motivate some people. But if the goal is so high, if you are chasing Tesla for example, if you are chasing Elon Musk, I am not sure you are going to get there. Maybe we need some other heroes, some local heroes that you can chase and you can become one day. And I was playing basketball when I was a kid, my hero was Michael Jordan and I am not playing basketball anymore.

So let’s find in business and in process innovation some people you can chase and you can become when you get older. As I started this interview, my hero was my grandfather and I think I am close to him. What I wanted to say also about the process innovation, everybody has their own opinion about how to innovate the process or how to do something differently. For example if you are a biologist or nuclear physicist or doing chemistry, if you are arguing about some topic and you say something, most of the people will agree with you because they don’t have enough knowledge to tell you “I don’t think so”. But for process innovation, everybody has their own opinion. And I think that is the beauty of that because you hear a lot of thinking of other people and what they think how to do this in a different way and you find some kind of conclusion. But I would like to invite everybody to read more and to see..

N: That is a good opportunity to learn from people’s experience.

Ivan:It’s a great opportunity.

N: Every time you can move to some other dimension or some other way that you haven’t experienced before, right?

Ivan: Yeah, sure. We learned a lot in every project we did. And with every client, with every person we learn a lot, and we still have a lot of things to learn.

N: Can you share with me some examples, if you can tell who is the client or not, it’s not important. But example of good process innovation, process automation?

Ivan: Just to add one thing, when I talked about Elon Musk and guys. They are game changers, they pretty much change the game itself. So we are playing the game differently because they exist. You have the same story here in Serbia. We have those companies like Strawberry Energy, Nordeus, Schneider Electric DMS from Novi Sad, and they are game changers and I love them and support them and we can help them also but they are not the topic. We are mostly working for international companies. In Serbia I can share two stories that I consider very good.

One is the company Termovent and together with them we are trying to help them to become industry 4.0 or now 5.0. And we have automated one process together with them that took like one or two days to happen and now is just one click or two clicks. So click ones, click another time and that’s it, they get the product. Also, we helped Bel Medic that is one of our famous hospitals and how we started everything, we started talking to owner and she said to us how we can work together and we ask her what was your the biggest challenge in processes, she told us their biggest challenge and then we took all our knowledge and worked for three or four months to try to figure how we can innovate this and how they will from challenging process, they can boost on and get the process they are proud of and they are the best on the market. So, we delivered one, after all process of innovation, one predictive model software that is basically changing what they do so far. And what is interesting is that I read like two weeks ago about one idea in the USA that raised venture capital in one hundred and million euros and we already built that idea so we already have software that is doing exactly that, we didn’t turn one hundred millions but time is there so we will see.

N: Maybe you can ask for some of that one hundred million.

Ivan: Yeah, we can ask for one percent, it will be okay.

N: You told me that these are good examples, can you share with me some of the bad ones? I’m sure that there are some of those.

Ivan: Bad examples of things we didn’t make yet. I will share one common story, okay? I believe you received the invoice last year that was on paper signed by the owner of the company or the representative with the stamp. And I really don’t know why anybody now, in 2021., is sanding invoices in paper signed with the stamp. Because there is no single reason why anyone should do this anymore.

N: It’s not a law anymore.

Ivan: It’s not a low anymore,etc. It’s faster to send digital invoices, it’s cheaper or negligible cost. If you send digital invoice, if everybody would send digital invoice in Serbia you will have all services and all products invoiced in just one day, hopefully paid and the government will have the taxes and everybody will be happy and this boring job like sending invoices and making invoices will be automated. And there is no single reason why you shouldn’t do this and we are going in that direction just it’a a matter of time. But in our experience people are in love with papers, people really like papers.

N: I’m one of those guys.

Ivan: Yeah, but okay I read books, I don’t read ebooks. I worked for a publishing company and I love books. I maybe never read an ebook, just when I have to. But invoice, it’s there to help you get some deals with the company. So, people really love papers, people love to sign the papers and people love stamps, like stamps are the holy grail of the management or of the business, people like stamps. So, because people like stamps we have so many people working in jobs that calls make invoices and sanding invoices and we are trying to automate the process in few companies, but everybody needs to understand that we will send the digital invoice and when everybody send the digital invoices that will be history, and that is going to be a history for sure, just it’s a matter of time.

N: When we talk about process innovation and process automation it’s usually connected with losing jobs and I’m sure that because of this you can encounter a big resistance in the organization. What can you do to win this battle? What can you do to maybe even get a long run benefit even for the employees that can actually lose their current job?

Ivan: Thank you for this question because I’m thinking about this all the time. And what is interesting in our projects we’re trying to save jobs, because I think the process of automation and process innovation is inevitable, okay? So, if you are thinking about the Matrix, we took the red pill and we moved on. If you like Terminator we would never blow up this factory, so we are going into the terminator phase.

In the world if you like it, we may like it, we may don’t like it, but everything is going to be automated, every routine job is going to be automated. It’s just a matter of time and it’s just matter if we are going to do this or some Romanians or some from the US or whoever is going to do that. But, let’s forget about automation, if you have any kind of job and twenty people are going to do this for two or three years, eventually you are going to figure out how to do the same outcome with five people or with two people or without people.

So, I think automation is just speeding up everything. I think we are not quite ready as humans. Simplify, for example, is not fast enough, but if you compare us to the others I think we need to be faster and to understand that this is going very fast and we are not going to recognize our city, our jobs and the world we are living in for ten years from now. We are going to live in totally different place and we need to adopt, so we cannot stop the change, we just need to adopt and we need all our knowledge, courage to rethink and to make the world that is going to be better for us with automation. Because technology exists to help us, technology exists to simplify our life, every other use of technology is a misuse of technology. So, If you have technology to build atomic bombs you are not doing a good job, if you have technology to make the energy cheaper, to make the energy cleaner, the same technology, then you are doing a good job. So, it’s up to us. So, we are making this world now and when I was a child I was looking in the people who are older than me and wanting them to make the world better for us. Now, we are old enough to make the world for ourselves. Do I like the world currently? No, but I think it’s up to us what we will build in a future.

Every employee needs to know or I think he needs to know, my opinion is that he needs to continue to learn and he needs to learn new stuff, to adapt and to change. And I think somebody who is twenty years to thirty years old thinks that is normal, that is okay, we all understand this, but somebody who is ready to retire it’s very hard for them, biologically it is hard. So, biology doesn’t let you change when you are older, it’s very hard. So, people need to learn new stuff, people need to continue learning and learning is a continuous process, you don’t stop learning. And you need to adapt to the circumstances, and circumstances are going to be that we are going to have automation everywhere. So, I talked about invoices earlier, that is going to happen. What is strange? We are not okay with this, but we are okay with cryptocurrencies. So, we are okay with some kind of virtual money, we are okay with things that are going to happen very quickly and that is automation cars, Milos talked about this. So, this is going to happen. If you are a taxi driver in five years you will not have a job, you need to do something else, you need to learn new stuff. If you don’t like this, I don’t like it, maybe personally, but it’s inevitable.

N: That’s progress actually, that’s how humanity goes forward, right? So, I wanna go back to the beginning and in our introduction I mention that you got Manager of the year from Serbian Association of Young Managers of the year and I wanna congratulate you again for that. I’m also a member of Serbian Association of Managers. Can you tell me your experience from that organization cause it’s interesting to ask you this question?

Ivan: First of all, I’m very proud to have this award and for me the main thing is that I’m still young, yeah? So, there are a lot of ways to go. Maybe someday we will achieve the Manager of the year prize. I think a Serbian Association of Managers is a good and positive story in Serbia. So, we, who are there, are trying to do good stuff, trying to do good examples and trying to bring forward some people that have good careers and they can be heroes for someone to chase and there is a lot of potential for Serbian Association of Managers to change some things in Serbia and maybe to change some things broadly, in Europe or internationally with coordination with other people. So, you have there the managers who did some things to change their companies and to change things for better and innovation is one story that we can talk all together and try to make something different.

N: I always like, at the end, to go with something that is going to be in the future and I like to ask leaders about the vision of the future. So, from your perspective what is going to be the future of innovation of processes?

Ivan: So, I talked about what is happening now and trying to be Nostradamus, if I could?

N: Without a crystal ball.

Ivan: Without a crystal ball. You have software now for process mining, you have software for task mining, you have software for predictive models, you have software that makes music, software for process mining and for business analysis is changing me and my work so I need to learn new things in order to compete with the software. Because he is not sleepy, he doesn’t think about anything else, he is just there to do the job. So, things are changing pretty fast and I think the only thing we have left and that is not going to be made, the period of time that I can see, is that we can imagine things, we can dream and we can think something totally new and that is where we compete with the future. I really do believe that we will find the courage and strength to make a better future for all of us and to understand that eight or ten or eleven billion people in this world need to have their place and need to have a good life and to do something good for the world. In order to be sustainable I have proven in my PhD for example that the main indicator is the sharing of knowledge. So, the most powerful weapon we have is to share the knowledge we all have, but not to misuse it, and not to have fake news and the fake stories and to have the true real knowledge that will guide us forward. I believe this shift is going to happen because we really do need things that are scientifically proved and that can help us to move forward.