The year 2020 has been a challenging year for CFOs – unprecedented business environment, unexpected cash flow issues, more cost concerns, and remote workforce conundrums. Fortunately, CFO’s can turn to process discovery to solve most of the pressing concerns, including cost savings, enhanced accuracy, scalability, and increased compliance.
Here are 3 challenges that keep CFOs up at night and how process discovery can help them get a better night’s rest:
1. Inefficient processes: Inefficient processes waste nearly a third of employees’ time. Manual tasks, redundant steps, process bottlenecks, and rework – all translate to money lost to process inefficiencies.
Over time, variations and inefficiencies creep into once efficient processes. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) get outdated or employees might deviate from SOPs. A process discovery like SurfaceAI helps to identify these process deviations and potential process improvements. For instance, SurfaceAI process discovery highlights process variants that are taking up time and driving up costs. The detailed SOPs and process flow diagrams show bottlenecks, unnecessary detours, or where compliance issues may arise. CFO’s can use this insight to drive relevant change management programs within the company to improve revenue.
2. RPA failure: Robotic process automation (RPA) is the hottest technology that promises cost saving through the automation of rule-based manual processes. Businesses show no sign of slowing down investments in RPA. According to Forrester, the RPA market will hit $7.7 billion next year and will continue growing to $12 billion by 2023. The stakes are high.
But did you know 30% – 50% of initial RPA projects fail to realize the expected results? The most common reason for the failure – not having clearly defined processes. Automating inefficient, broken, and sub-par processes will allow you to reap less to no benefits from RPA. It’s just garbage in, garbage out.
An effective process discovery tool such as Surface Insight guides your RPA efforts by showing you the right processes to automate for maximizing the value. SurfaceAI lets you discover end-to-end “AS-IS” process flows with variations in real-time. It even gives you a ready-to-use workflow diagram, each step of which represents a specific user action with a UI screenshot attached. With this insight you can not only identify process bottlenecks and other inefficiencies, but also identify which processes are best fit for your automation efforts.
3. Non-compliant processes: In highly regulated industries such as banking, insurance and other financial services, changing government and industry regulations demand stringent process compliance. Non-compliance can potentially invite lawsuits costing millions and even billions of dollars. There are several hidden processes that make compliance checks hard.
This is where process discovery comes in. A tool like SurfaceAI gives full visibility into the end-to-end process to help you understand how processes actually run and to check whether they are in compliance with their expected behavior. Identifying non-compliant deviations as early as possible enables course-correction – reducing or eliminating potential risks.
Understand your processes like never before
Knowing how your business processes happen in the real world is at the core of all change programs. Whether you want to automate rule-based repetitive tasks, or eliminate out-dated process steps, or consolidate related processes to achieve greater efficiency, Surface Insight’s process discovery capabilities give all the visibility and insights. Want to learn how SurfaceInsight can improve your process discovery initiatives? Get in touch with us.