When business leaders think about process transformation, they traditionally turn towards manual discovery approaches to get insights. The thought is – an external expert brings new perspectives to redesign processes. The independent evaluation of processes helps to get an unbiased view that can be used to improve workflows to meet business objectives.
But is a manual approach enough to get end-to-end visibility into global processes? Does it work when businesses have remote and hybrid workforces?
Short answer – no, manual process discovery does not cut it. Continue reading to learn why.
What we know is always more than what we express
The manual discovery process involves external consultants interviewing employees to understand how a task is executed. However, this is the biggest limitation. Humans are most likely to miss details when they translate their thoughts to words. Also, when consultants interview employees in isolation, they get islands of information and miss the bigger picture of the whole process. Also, since every minute of an interview is time not spent on executing the process itself, employees feel the pressure of budgets, deadlines, and answering questions, making them share only high-level information.
Humans are not perfect reporters. People identify red flags and deal with situations differently from person to person. For instance, describing how a customer service representative calms an angry customer is tough as everyone perceives the situation differently. In addition, the process steps are driven by both intuition and conversation with customers, and the representative may struggle to explain why they chose to perform certain actions. As a result, consultants conducting manual process discovery have incomplete details.
Challenges with scope
Business processes are spread over several business functions and applications. Consultants talk to one worker to understand her/his role and how they execute their part of a process and then talk to another to understand how another part of the process is executed. For instance, let’s consider the insurance underwriting process. To complete the entire process, one person collects the risk submission, another person enters the risk data into the system, and another analyzes the risks for further processing.
Different people conduct every step of the process, and there are a few undocumented steps in between too. There’s exception handling and variations that creep in overtime. Every worker would describe their own version of executing a process. As a result, consultants may fail to record on process variants among workers performing the same job.
Furthermore, the scale of the business and process makes it incredibly difficult to capture every detail manually. Consultants only get a walk-through, and due to time constraints, they interview only a few employees, getting limited insights. Since this consulting job would easily take a few months, new variations would have crept in by the time all analysis is done.
Automated process discovery is the way to go
An automated process discovery tool like SurfaceAI accelerates discovery at scale. Coupled with AI and other advanced technology, SurfaceAI gives complete visibility into “AS-IS” processes for business leaders to make informed decisions.
Ready to explore how SurfaceAI can supercharge your process discovery effort? Talk to our solution experts today.