Written by Stuart Chambers, Head of Business Improvement & Process Excellence, Chrome Consulting
Are Your Business Processes Critical?
Business processes form the lifeline of any organisation. Every organisation, in every part of the world, runs on them. They are a series of actions or steps taken to achieve a particular outcome. But technology advances and rapid changes in market conditions are forcing many leaders to make a choice, compete in a digital world using data and AI to drive process effectiveness or let process friction define the future.
Imagine if your organisation had real-time control over every process input that leads to a business outcome or customer experience? Full visibility of the flow of data and the interactions between your people, systems, machines and partners. What would happen? Would your organisation be more efficient, sustainable or competitive? Could you get more out of your latest transformation investment? What would you focus on now?
In medical terms, you would use an X-ray or an MRI to look at an injury, get the data points you need to diagnose the issue and build a remediation plan. In business, we use process mining to get a rapid diagnosis of the health of your processes and to unlock their full potential.
What Is Process Mining?
Conceptually, Process Mining is the next evolution of traditional business process improvement activities. Powered by data, and advanced by AI, its fundamental mission is to optimise business outcomes. Removing inefficiency whilst adding automation and intelligence to critical workflows.
But what is driving inefficiency? More than ever, organisations are consolidating, acquiring and scaling. They are investing in new technology and decommissioning the old. They are developing new products and services and entering new markets. What used to be done in person, is now done remotely. Unchecked, the natural evolution of an enterprise, introduces process friction and is often accepted as an unconscious cost of doing business – in reality, the friction is value leaking from the organisation.
“The scale and complexity of the modern process environment has quickly accelerated beyond the capabilities of traditional tools. Process mapping software, business intelligence initiatives—or worse, whiteboards and post-it notes—just can’t deliver the real-time insight and control that continuous process excellence demands.”
The Ultimate Guide to Process Mining
With every change in direction, market or operating environment, the supporting process environment needs to evolve rapidly. Without an end-to-end view of how the process interactions are connected, and how they are actually being performed, the complexity of the modern enterprise has made it extremely difficult to optimise a core process for effect. Process mapping software and process improvement consultants can no longer keep up with the pace of change needed.
That’s why Process Mining is now coming of age. Its providing organisations with the rapid intelligence required to optimise end-to-end process performance. Delivering significant operational improvement, financial benefits and extraordinary experiences in a very short period of time.
“Process Mining isn’t just about resolving the mountain of complexity and friction that most organisations have unconsciously accepted as the cost of doing business. Its true value is in connecting granular operational performance to high-level business outcomes on a continuous basis.”
The Ultimate Guide to Process Mining
The key to unlocking benefits with Process Mining is that it has been designed to thrive in the data driven, complex and dynamic modern economy. With visibility into the impacts even the most minute process steps have on the strategic objectives of an organisation over time, it becomes possible not only to remove any unconscious costs, but realistic to compete on process performance.
How is Process Mining Impacting the SAP Market in ANZ?
We are observing several common themes emerging locally that are underpinning the demand for Process Mining.
- Organisations are under pressure to deliver improvement. Leaders know where to focus but are struggling to gather the data needed to articulate their instinct. Building a compelling business case in the current economic climate is challenging.
Process Mining is being used to deliver rapid, low-risk proof of value projects. The findings are objective (based on existing process-related data), provide detailed root cause analysis, and measurable benefits that can be realised. The initiative is expected to produce a self-funding roadmap for the embedment of Process Mining.
- Transformation initiatives are lacking a sophisticated method to protect the value that they are expected to deliver. Real transformation initiatives (not software upgrades) are including digital asset maintenance plans that go beyond uptime and activity throughput. They are contracting process performance and its impact on strategic objectives.
Celonis Process Mining by SAP is not only supporting post-go-live stabilisation activities, it’s also being used to baseline and continuously monitor organisational capability uplift. Organisations now have real-time visibility into user adoption and process conformance, with the ability to act prior to issues impacting downstream activities. Metrics are in place to ensure value is protected in real-time, and AI is being used to advance process excellence.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has delivered benefits where automation is the leading value driver. Beyond this, organisations are now striving to elevate their focus beyond the ‘low hanging fruit’ to intelligent process interactions. Complementing human intelligence with AI ensures process interactions are meaningful and prioritised for impact.
The Celonis Action Engine is supporting organisations with AI-powered process assistance. It continually analyses all data relevant to a process. Once an opportunity to improve has been identified, it sends a signal to the right person to take an improvement or corrective action or can is configured to complete the action automatically.
Removing your unconscious cost
At Chrome, we have been supporting customers across ANZ to improve their processes with information management since 2014. We believe process mining to be a natural extension of our expertise, and are proud to be partnering with Celonis and SAP to bring this solution to market in ANZ.
If improving your current processes, sustaining the value of your change efforts and increasing the use of automation and AI is important to your organisation, I encourage you to download the Ultimate Guide to Process Mining.
It is a deep dive into the what, why and how of Process Mining—its origin, the critical steps, and most importantly, the results it delivers. You already have the data, what have you got to lose?
This article is sponsored by Chrome Consulting
