Tactics for winning the game of business

I love football or soccer as it is called in other parts of the world. I enjoy the goals, the very good players, the competition, but what I also love about football, are the game tactics. This includes the coaching, what’s working, what’s not working, the areas to improve, the time it takes to build an attack to score a goal, and ultimately win the game, because at the end, it’s always about winning.

Whether it is winning a game, or winning at business, both are about understanding your assets, assessing how they are currently doing, and what are the areas that can be improved. I think you all have an idea on how it works for football, even if you’re not a fan, but how can we learn from sport and collaborate that for business.

If you’re running a business, whether that’s a bank, an insurance, or a retail company, you definitely do have processes you’re following to get a loan originated, a claim approved, or to get an invoice issued. All these processes, at least in paper, would go fast and smooth, but wouldn’t you want to know how those processes are currently behaving, what are the bottlenecks, how long does each of the processes take, what steps of these processes could be improved, and how much time and subsequently money you would save?

You can always try understanding the current state of the business by interviewing the employees involved. This manual method would undoubtedly be clouded with too many sticky notes, that would be subjective. What you really need is a day to day objective view and analysis of the processes you’re performing in your business landscape.

There is however an answer to meeting this challenge; it's called process mining. In football language, that would be the coach that analyzes the team on a daily basis, assesses each of the players, and decides on the best tactics to put in place to ultimately win the game.

Process mining captures information from transaction systems, and provides details on how the related processes are performing. It creates event logs as a loan origination is initiated, a claim is requested, or an invoice is issued. The logs make it clear, who did what, when, for how long, and how does that compare with the industry average for example. In essence, process mining helps enterprises learn whether they will be losing or winning the game.

Process mining is important, and figuring out the areas to improve is equally so. Analyzing how a process is performed, you could conclude that certain steps are simply repetitive and are a good fit for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). You could also deduce that certain decisions do not at all need human intervention and a clear set of rules would do the job. You could also conclude that your process is too complex and is worth simplifying.

The outcome of process mining is also a better comprehension, and sometimes appreciation of everyone’s role in the enterprise. It helps all realize, and often for the first time, a view on the end to end process. Process mining would also prove useful comparing what was planned and what was implemented, as many deviations and exceptions could arise with the day to day running of the business. Process mining also provides visual dashboards that would surely help executives better examine any challenges, and the opportunities to enhance the current condition.

Process mining is a new capability now available within the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation. It is clearly differentiated as it is an all encompassing solution with all the required tools and capabilities to automate business processes. Through process mining, enterprises are able to get a view on how their processes are performing in order to identify inefficiencies. Once the improvement areas are identified, an organization can utilize RPA, decision management, or business automation workflow capabilities, which all are offered in one platform, with full flexibility to be run either on-premise or off-premise.

In football or any sport for that matter, game tactics are very important. In business, process mining provides the coaching insights, but the players are the ones whom have the skills and capabilities and ultimately execute . We rely on them for the added value; they are the ones who make the difference; they are the ones who score the goals.

Visit the IBM Cloud Learn Hub for more information about process mining, a method of applying specialized algorithms to event log data to identify trends, patterns and details of how a process unfolds.