If you’ve started your Robotic Process Automation (RPA) journey, then you’ve most likely turned toward process discovery to identify potential automatable processes and prioritize RPA initiatives. After all, when you start your RPA project with process discovery, you can reduce 40% cost.
But if you’re not leveraging process discovery beyond identifying process automation opportunities, then you’re missing out on making the most out of it. The COVID-19 outbreak has shown businesses that they cannot spend weeks understanding how their processes work. They need process insights in real-time to course-correct as quickly as required. Also, because most of the processes use some sort of technology and they leave digital traces that are critical for achieving effective business transformation.
Here are three ways you can leverage process discovery to improve your business efficiency:
Business Process Improvement
Business processes are more dynamic than you think, are spaghetti-like, and involve several variations that human eyes usually fail to catch. As such, it becomes almost impossible to find process improvement opportunities manually. And the inefficient processes often manifest in the form of inadequate business performance, customer dissatisfaction, and employee frustration.
With automated process discovery, businesses can easily visualize their “AS-IS” processes and leverage the insights to create “TO BE” processes. Deeper visibility into your business processes helps you to standardize processes that follow similar patterns, eliminate frequent manual errors, control poorly structured workflows, and eliminate unnecessary steps in the process. Capturing details down to task-level helps to uncover hidden bottlenecks, deviations, and exceptions in the day-to-day process workflows.
Compliance and conformance checking:
Enterprises across all sectors need to meet process audit and compliance requirements. When the compliance officers and risk managers conduct auditing in isolation, chances are that they are missing to connect processes end-to-end and discover variations. As a result, they fail to recognize non-compliant processes and risks which could attract severe penalties.
With intelligent process discovery, compliance teams can get true visibility into how work gets done across people, processes, and technologies. With a 100% accurate visibility into processes with all their variations, the compliance team can quickly map the actual steps of processes and compare this with the expected steps of processes and documented standards to meet regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA, PCI DSS, SMCR, and CASS. For non-conforming processes, you can leverage the insights to perform root-cause analysis for identifying business anomalies and trigger events that are causing deviations. Since the audit trail is generated automatically and without any bias, it can be used to report to the leadership teams and external regulators.
Training team members:
For enterprises working in a dynamic environment, employees need to quickly adapt to the changing roles and responsibilities. To ensure operational efficiency, businesses need to train their employees regularly on how to perform a process in the best way. Also, in the new normal, employees working can follow their own ways to execute processes, without getting flagged by the managers.
Intelligent process discovery helps managers understand how their top-performing team members are getting work done. They can use this insight to train the rest of the team members to emulate the best practices for achieving efficiency. The process maps, detailed documentation, and video recordings help managers to train their teams and streamline new member onboarding.
Unleash the power of process discovery with SurfaceAI
SurfaceAI is an advanced process discovery platform that provides unbiased, data-driven insights into your business processes. The auto-generated SOPs, BPMN process flows, and process execution videos enable managers to identify potential process improvements beyond RPA. Talk to our experts today to understand how SurfaceAI can help your business.