Process-driven AI can greatly help organizations enable operational resilience, reduce financial and operational risks, catalyze automation, and enhance digital transformations.
But what are the organization’s biggest process challenges?
Here are some of the biggest challenges that companies face around process
Limited visibility into the details of their processes and lack methods for tracking conformance against true processes thereby reducing operational resilience and increasing reliance upon tribal knowledge to execute tasks
Operational Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have historically been indirect, disjointed measures when correlating initiatives from “top floor to shop floor”
Difficultly in the ability to trend and view key activities at a system-level to determine which attributes are the root cause of rework, bottlenecks, and deviations
Lack of analytical framework and tools in today’s business transformation suites that can provide that holistic view of processes
Delays in necessary, but costly, digital transformation initiatives as ERP implementations
Ambiguous ROI and value delivery on automation opportunities that do not always deliver on their promised value due to upstream effects
How can process-driven AI can help to overcome challenges and deliver value?
Process mining (a part of process-driven AI) can help organizations overcome their most pressing operational challenges. Gartner codifies five specific use cases for process mining: Business Process Improvement, Auditing and Compliance, Process Automation, Digital Transformation, and IT Operations.1
Every organization undergoes business process improvement initiatives. A culture of continuous improvement is imperative in today’s dynamic landscape. Process discovery enables enhanced governance and oversight through unprecedented quality and speed to insights. Initiatives are no longer burdened by bias supporting visibility and RT feedback on as-is processes.
Operational resiliency is vital at both the process and systems level. Beyond adaptability, organizations need the appropriate guard rails to mitigate operational and financial risk of their most critical activities. Process mining conformance techniques help auditing and compliance initiatives through complexity reduction, enhancement of organizational capabilities, and KPI development by comparing as-is processes to the intended design. This allows the organization to understand how well they can handle disruptions to their process.
As we work amidst a global pandemic, digital transformations are at the forefront of enabling key strategic initiatives and, frankly, survival. Employees and consumers alike have adjusted to remote work and life. Process discovery enhances the impact of digital transformations by reducing implementation delays and risks due to misunderstood processes, manual routing, and process gaps.
Process mining enhancement techniques assess the value of process automation because they create visibility and understanding of hotspots where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and task automation will deliver the most value. According to QBR, using process mining during RPA implementation can increase the business value by 40% while reducing implementation time by 50% and project risk by 60%.2
Use-case: how process mining helps deliver value for Medical Equipment services provider
Process AI helps organizations reduce time to insight. Historically, process improvement engagement activities included interviews, process mapping sessions, and supplemental quantitative analysis. Therefore, processes are induced based on qualitative interviews, inputs are biased, and mapping sessions serve as the primary process discovery mechanism.
The medical equipment services provider looked for a diagnostic session to validate their maturity and assess potential improvements. The company experienced significant increase in the time to insights through process discovery prior to the interview process. Below are some of the results obtained from process mining.
Assessing process improvement readiness
The organization, first and foremost, must determine if they have sufficient internal process mining and data cleansing capabilities. According to PwC, top challenges preventing the adoption of process mining are unavailability of process mining tooling or expertise (52%), limited focus due to a missing process function (33%), and a complex IT landscape (30%). According to Gartner, 80% of the efforts and time are spent on locating, selecting, extracting, and transforming the process data. The time needed to apply process mining is short when the data are there.
Assuming your organization has sufficient process mining and data cleaning capabilities, it is important to determine the maturity across business processes and supporting systems. Mature business processes mean the organization has standardized and documented processes that serve as the benchmark for conformance with clear inputs, outputs, and metrics. Mature systems mean the organization has technology that support and track all activities. Measuring your organization along each scale will help dictate how ready the organization is for process mining insights or tools. Insights leverage process mining as an analysis tool to drive actionable value.
Tools are solutions from process AI software providers that can be implemented across functions or at scale. Leverage a process improvement framework to help organizations assess their readiness. It naturally follows the three primary use cases (business process improvement, audit and conformance, process automation) across the three techniques (discovery, conformance, and enhancements). The italicized text in the figure below represents the activities required to move from low to high across process and systems maturity.
Find out more on how Process Driven AI can improve your business.
It is important to note that process AI initiatives do not require the adoption of process mining software. Process mining is simply a tool that enables operational insights, better and faster. Many vendors leverage process mining techniques to guide development of real-time operational dashboards providing provide visibility and guardrails for key stakeholders within the organization’s ERPs and CRMs. Dashboards tracked queues, bottlenecks, and key deviations for intervention.
Bottomline, we can help no matter where you are in your process mining journey.
Please reach out to our experts in the ProcessTribes community to find out more.