Are your processes intelligent enough?

Maintaining a competitive business edge in an uncertain global market is a constant challenge. Deglobalization, regulation, supply chain insecurity, plus pressure to add new technology and business models (essential in the fight for competitive advantage) are all compelling businesses to improve efficiency and keep costs down.   

No wonder C-level executives today are highly motivated to tackle business process efficiency head-on, increasingly aware that the success of their organization depends on their processes. Dimension Data says 81% of organizations reported that business process management (BPM) is a competitive differentiator.¹

Effective process management plays an important part in helping businesses to build an agile and future-ready enterprise that can adapt quickly in an ever-evolving landscape. But getting a complete picture of an organization’s siloed, fragmented processes gets more complex by the day. Technology advancement gives companies the tools to boost productivity and operations performance, but there is a dark side.

While companies get the tools they need, oftentimes individual technology solutions are implemented to cater only to specific departments. This results in a loss of visibility across all IT systems within the organization. Combined with the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence as a catch-all solution, it leads to increased disorganization and disruption.

This paper will demonstrate that the key to a high-performing enterprise is creating a holistic, end-to-end view of your entire business landscape. And, that this is best achieved by using a unified suite to ensure process intelligence flows across your entire organization—giving you the power to not just transform your processes but also optimize and control them.  

This is easier said than done: For businesses trying to understand their process reality and uncover opportunities for improvement, there are some organizational barriers that can block the path to creating an end-to-end process flow.

Executing a single process can involve multiple systems, applications, people and steps. Often, businesses are tempted to add separate process management tools across several departments to solve specific problems, creating a patchwork of solutions (often from different vendors.) For example, a business unit using a process design tool in HR for employee onboarding, also adding process mining for warehouse management, or a compliance solution for finance, will soon find it has created siloed operations sustained by pockets of intelligence.

This inevitably leads to three organizational challenges:
 

1. Information blind spots: Without clear visibility into all processes—from people to analysis, and modelling to execution and data—it is almost impossible to identify areas for strategic improvement. This creates a major roadblock in the path to transformation. Why?
   
   Without transparency, a business will struggle to track each step of every process to detect performance issues that can impact product or service quality. It will not easily see interdependencies between important services and critical processes and systems to optimize them for speed, resilience and efficiency. And it will be hard to determine actionable insights to drive better decision-making and achieve strategic goals.
   
   For enterprises today, the key to boosting productivity lies in understanding how their business actually operates—and what they can do to improve it now. And then TRANSFORM around that reality.
   
   
2. Inconsistent customer experience: Performance issues can impact product or service quality, compliance, productivity and operational excellence—and limit the ability to deliver on an exceptional customer experience. If a business cannot respond quickly to market changes and opportunities, it can lead to customer dissatisfaction or churn—directly impacting revenue. But brands offering an outstanding customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue than competitors who fall behind.²
   
   For enterprises today, the key to outperforming the competition is the ability to OPTIMIZE all processes with the goal to continuously improve them. That responsiveness helps them to deliver excellent customer experiences.
   
   
3. Constant vulnerability: The increased risk of cyber threats and the need for foolproof data protection added to ever-changing regulations can mean unexpected disruptions or external audits. This creates a constant state of vigilance and anxiety: 74% of organizations report that compliance is a burden.³
   
   Strong access controls are needed for process management systems, particularly if they deal with compliance and risk, to reduce the risk of breaches and enhance trust. Cybersecurity breaches and data leaks, in particular, can have devastating effects on a company's financial health and brand trust. According to Accenture, 31% of companies take over 120 days to recover from disruption.⁴
   
   For enterprises today, the key to avoiding penalties and reputational damage, as well as keeping control of operational performance, is to understand their risks. By analyzing process data and related operational KPIs, you gain the CONTROL needed to ensure compliance, and business resilience.  

Streamlining processes optimizes resources, improves operational efficiency, and can substantially reduce costs. Studies say that business process transformation can cut indirect costs by as much as 15-20% within 18 months.⁵

By mapping and redesigning processes end to end, a business has the blueprint to give all stakeholders the ability to see, model and maintain them in a central place. This provides a democratized, single source of truth, where a common understanding can be built to communicate, collaborate and continuously improve processes. It also provides the foundation for thorough analysis, key to identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks to make changes to minimize impact and maximize ROI. Adding process intelligence helps to identify and implement best practices for a better future performance.

For example, Aiwu, a popular provider of healthy snack food stores across China, was keen to add more imported items to the shelves, but related compliance and employee training issues were taking too long. It deployed a unified process intelligence platform that made quick work of documenting and mapping existing processes. It then swiftly identified bottlenecks and processes—many that differed by retail location and region—and merged them. It also rolled out a unified process for gathering and implementing customer feedback and set up a centralized online employee training platform fed by new workflows—increasing worker efficiency by 70%. Finally, the company mapped and streamlined innovation cycles to shorten the time from idea to launch by 30%.
 

Fostering a culture of operational excellence allows a business to understand the customer’s point of view, optimize their journey for a great experience, and gain a competitive edge.

By pinpointing inefficiencies such as bottlenecks, corrective measures can be implemented and processes automated. This provides a blueprint to execute operations, integrating IT systems and automate effectively by replacing repetitive tasks and reducing manual efforts.

It gives a business the agility to identify best practices and communicate them to other organizational units. They can then standardize processes to ensure maximum efficiency, consistent quality and great service for customers. Organizations that implement process optimization can realize efficiency improvements of up to 30-50%.⁶

A good example is ÖBB, a railway technology company looking to optimize operational efficiency and save money, while also improving customer experience. User acceptance of a unified process intelligence platform was phenomenal, with around 72,000 internal and external users gaining an overview of 2,500 process chains, 2,500 applications and 1,800 employee roles. With process intelligence, it increased train punctuality to 95% and the railway is also now well-positioned to meet its goal of saving 30 million euros in the course of digitalization.

In past years, there have been instances where processes failed to detect compliance issues, from banking scandals to fraud at car manufacturers, making the headlines in a negative way. Having control over critical processes such as risk and cybersecurity involves having deep insights to ensure processes are really executed as intended and execution can be measured and controlled in the future. That way a business can avoid compliance or performance issues (and avoid fines).⁷

But keeping the balance between maintaining enough control and ensuring efficient business performance is a challenge, so it is important to weave risks and compliance requirements into all processes. A process-driven approach helps minimize risk while improving performance at the same time.

Here is an example of the value of control: European bank Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG (OeKB) wanted better oversight and management of its risks from end to end. By integrating processes, risks and controls into a central, integrated management system for a single source of truth, the bank now has complete overview.

Associated business aspects such as risk controls and responsibilities are visible on the process model level. Thanks to the user-friendliness and transparency of the solution, risks for the entire enterprise can be displayed centrally via dashboards. Users everywhere can now easily capture and evaluate their own risks, without needing specialized knowledge of the tool.

Your processes define your business—who you are, what you do and how you do it. Together they create the unique company that your customers enjoy, and your competitors yearn to be. You must understand your processes thoroughly, nurture and optimize them constantly, and stick to them consistently. Your company’s success depends on this. Unfortunately, most process management or mining solutions only focus on one part of the winning formula.

It is critical to have intelligent process management across all disciplines over the complete lifecycle for an end-to-end view of the entire business landscape. And increasingly companies are achieving this by using a unified suite that ensures process intelligence flows across every part of the organization.  

Global users from the world’s largest banks, manufacturers, retail, and more use the ARIS suite. ARIS is a fully integrated suite—all underpinned with AI—that includes:  

• Business process analysis for continuous improvement and rollout of processes.
• Process mining for deep business insights and informed decisions.
• Risk and compliance for ensuring secure compliance and resilience.
• Process automation for reaching operational excellence. 
  

ARIS helps them transform, optimize and control operations with a process-centric view that connects everything.

These are described below:

1. Business process analysis: Business process analysis (BPA) includes the design and documentation of process information for monitoring and analyzing processes and their performance. BPA enables an organization to communicate and optimize processes throughout the organization. As part of the whole ARIS suite, BPA helps you achieve operational excellence, increase competitiveness by improving overall business performance, manage the enterprise with full visibility, and align your organization from end to end.
2. Process mining: Process mining supports in-depth analysis, discovery, monitoring and enhancement of business processes. It allows a business to capture process data and quickly analyze it, providing a comprehensive understanding of how its business runs. ARIS’s intuitive tools for process mining can help you identify areas where processes are hindering progress and uncover opportunities for improvement, giving you the ability to design, implement and control more efficient processes with greater agility.
3. Automation: Automation streamlines and enhances your business operations to increase efficiency, decrease costs, improve accuracy and ensure scalability. Examples include robotic process automation (RPA), which uses software bots to automate routine, repetitive tasks—reducing human error and freeing up valuable resources for more strategic initiatives. And end-to-end workflow management within a unified platform defines, manages and optimizes processes to ensure consistency and reliability at every stage of your operational workflows, and many more.
4. Risk and compliance: Effective risk and compliance management (often referred to as governance, risk and compliance management (GRC)) ensures adherence to relevant laws, regulations and standards. This helps to avoid legal and financial penalties, protects reputations and minimizes operational risks—it is critical for ensuring that organizations operate in a responsible and sustainable manner. In combination with process mining (compliance checks), you can identify and address potential risks before they become major issues.
   
5. Accessibility and democratization: Thanks to AI, process intelligence is becoming far more accessible to everyone in an organization, not just process experts. AI lowers the barrier to entry, allowing more users across the enterprise to contribute by simply writing an enquiry in natural language to model a process or enhancing the analysis of insights derived from data generated in process mining.

With ARIS, your business can start gaining insights and driving efficiency right away. You will have the strongest modeling capability in the market with built-in process mining, process automation and risk and compliance functionality—serving multiple process-related use-cases in one single suite.  

There are enough challenges in the business world from digitalization, regulation, supply chain insecurity and compliance without adding BPM to the list. Yet, a lack of process visibility combined with an ever-changing IT and compliance environment remains one of the biggest barriers to process efficiency. Poor process management can lead to financial and reputational damage to your company. In turn this can cause a direct loss of revenues—anywhere from 20-30% per annum.

Processes are the lifeblood of your organization. Companies and CEOs are increasingly realizing that to tackle business process efficiency head-on they need one, unified tool that can manage the entire lifecycle. A complete suite of capabilities that can help them build an agile and future-ready enterprise that can adapt quickly in an ever-evolving landscape is required.

Your company needs to see a fluid flow of process intelligence across the organization. It cannot be solved with bolt-on solutions—these only complicate the picture. You can see from the above examples that there are some top organizations using ARIS to get the right flow of process intelligence across their entire organization. They are increasing productivity (saving time, money, resources), improving customer responsiveness, and boosting revenues.

They know that their competitors (more than two-thirds of them) are now competing primarily on the basis of customer experience—and that those that lead outperform the stragglers by about 80%.^{8, 9}

But what about you? Are YOUR processes intelligent enough to beat your competition?