Driving Excellence in Shared Services with Process Intelligence
Updated: Mar 8, 2022
Shared services executives face the challenges of driving operational excellence and execution in a complex work-from-home setting. Additionally, in the age of the great resignation, managers need to keep staff engaged and motivated. There is the added pressure of year-on-year service efficiency targets to attain and after many years of continuous improvements, the options for how to achieve them may seem depleted. This is where process intelligence comes in to help executives see the full picture:
How complex work gets done across the organisation and how to simplify it
Where the greatest value is generated
What can be improved and what the business case for it is
Aiming for improvements without this information is like driving in the dark with your car lights turned off. With process intelligence opportunities can be identified with pin-point accuracy in a matter of weeks. In one real life example, a contact centre operator discovered opportunities for reducing work-from home absenteeism, shift optimisation and automation amounting to $791,000 of cost savings.
In one real life example, a contact centre operator discovered opportunities for reducing work-from home absenteeism, shift optimisation and automation amounting to $791,000 of cost savings.
Reducing process complexity
Process intelligence can provide the information that you need to simplify workflows, boost capacity for value adding activities, increase process standardisation and scale up automation.
One organisation applied the technology to its finance, supply chain and HR processes. The objective was to achieve efficiency while increasing transparency of end-to-end processes across 4000 applications. In one area they found that staff were spending a third of their time cutting and pasting information into Excel. This was not the work that they had expected their skilled graduates to be doing. The intelligence is enabling the organisation to address the problem.
In one area they found that staff were spending a third of their time cutting and pasting information into Excel.
In another example, where employees were required to update different tracking systems with the same set of information, several of those systems were found to be obsolete and no longer used. Yet for years the employees had continued to update them with data, wasting valuable time and effort.
Since deploying process intelligence, the organisation has achieved a number of benefits including:
Fully automated Value Stream Mapping (VSM) that identifies value-adding activities versus others
Increased process optimisation and standardization
Increased levels of automation including the best-fit deployment of an Intelligent Content solution for Supply Chain and Accounts Payable, and more RPA, leading to increases in process efficiency of 90% and 14% respectively
Understand team capacity better based on patterns of productive time versus passive or idle time
Identification of underused applications to rationalise the software portfolio to save on licensing costs
Improved understanding of customer specific metrics
An Intelligent Content solution for Supply Chain and Accounts Payable, and more RPA, led to increased efficiency of 90% and 14% respectively
Finding where the greatest value is generated
Process intelligence can help you see both the bigger picture of how workflows through different teams and within the teams. It allows you to see the effect of shift patterns and work allocations and levels of collaboration in an organisational context and how these can be improved.
It can find the sources of problems such as slow systems and the need to add staff augmentation capabilities such as knowledge-hubs and best-answers.
It can find your high performers, the heroes that you didn’t know you had, and who regularly deliver higher volumes of work than others. Then not only can you reward them, but you can learn from them and template their approach to help others do better as well.
Seeing the full picture of what can be improved and how
Next-gen process mining can provide unexpected insights and help shared services managers see the full picture. One example is the real-life case of a contact centre operator that found high-levels of absenteeism among some of its work-from home staff. The level was far higher than it expected and it has since been able to address the problem. Additionally, the contact centre operator got to see customer demand patterns better and consequently optimised shifts, and spread the workload among its team members more equally. The process intelligence allowed it to automate parts of its chat operations to free staff from having to answer repetitive and frequently asked questions. The opportunities identified amounted to $791,000 of savings together.
The company is exploring further opportunities for efficiencies including augmenting manual work with real-time and in-context help, and more process optimisation and automation.
Process intelligence software can provide deep insights fast to allow shared services managers to accurately pinpoint opportunities to improve operations and increase employee engagement and job satisfaction. It can create a continuous improvement cycle that builds on efficiency year on year, relieving shared services executives from the burden of having to find the opportunities. In short, it saves them time and money.
To set up a meeting with Sarah Burnett and for more information about KYP.ai please contact us on info@kyp.ai or call us on +49 221 16 920 909.