In the past few years, business process management (BPM) has received considerable attention due to its potential to increase productivity and significantly reduce costs. Backing this up, the market is expected to reach a value of USD 4.78 billion by 2026. With BMP gaining momentum, business leaders are increasingly turning towards process discovery tools like SurfaceAI to answer a few critical questions before investing in the technology and change programs. Here are the top 5 questions process discovery helps you answer:
Question #1: How do your current business processes look?
This is the first question you need to ask to understand the current state mapping of processes and analyze the workflows that create an end-to-end business process. This includes understanding how work activities are performed across people and technology. Understanding “AS-IS” processes provide the lens to identify gaps and business systems requirements from many different perspectives.
Question #2: What are you currently doing that is not needed?
Enterprises run on zillion processes and activities that have low or no value from a business or customer perspective but consume significant resource time and effort to perform. Most of these processes are legacy in nature or have been created to fix a one-off exception: remember creating multiple roundabout workflows to ensure a customer that a process will never break again? Also, a few processes that were created to comply with an internal or regulatory mandate continue to exist even after the rules have changed or even turned void. Process discovery helps to identify such unnecessary processes. If a process doesn’t add real value – don’t waste time improving it – simply eliminate it!
Question #3: What are you currently doing that can be improved?
Business processes are more complex than we think. There are thousands of interdependent tasks, activities, and workflows. The efficiency of these processes can be greatly improved by consolidation and standardization. With automated process discovery, business leaders gain insights into what processes follow similar workflows, share supporting information technology, and adhere to the same business policies and procedures.
Question #4: What is it that you should be doing but not doing?
Most business leaders are aware of the gaps in their processes, improvement opportunities that can drive value and improve efficiency. Though most of them would like to implement the changes, they lack the right tools or are constrained by legacy policies, procedures, and supporting technology. Process discovery helps to evaluate the cross-functional impact and the need for new functionality within existing systems to implement change programs across enterprises without compromising on the quality.
Question #5: What is it that you are not doing because you don’t know?
This is a forward-looking analysis. The answer to this question helps to change business policies, procedures, processes and/or information technology to support the newly discovered opportunities. Effective process discovery helps to identify the processes that an organization is not yet implementing, but needs to be executing going forward. It surfaces opportunities that business leaders are not yet even aware of. This advances process analysis beyond the realm of “order-taking” and deeply into proactive change management. Business leaders and subject matter experts can draw out many potential forward-facing requirements via facilitated discussions with internal and external business subject matter experts.
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