On the 20th anniversary of Lord of the Ring movie, insights to eliminate the orcs in your processes

We talk about gremlins in machinery causing havoc but perhaps on the 20th anniversary of the first movie of the Lord of the Ring trilogy, “The Fellowship of the Ring”, we should talk about orcs popping up everywhere: the bottlenecks and the old processes that slow down your business, the poorly designed user interfaces and incomplete deployments that cause problems for your staff and hamper performance, and the unknowns – those crafty orcs that hide to strike the business unexpectedly, the ones that catch you by surprise.

When it comes to process optimisation and automation, the orcs can join forces to become a powerful adversary. It is through informed decision-making and action by heads of automation working collaboratively with business units that we can get rid of them. This is about making sure the mix of people, processes and technology is optimised with data providing the necessary information and deeper insights.

Inspired by Harvard Business Review’s Essential Components of Digital Transformation, Figure 1 illustrates the path along the journey to become a data-centric organisation.

Figure 1: The Essential Components of Digital Transformation (ampproject.org)

Next-gen process mining and intelligence can play a big part in all the above. It can help you:

• 1- Know your people: e.g. your employees and how they battle with the orcs in your processes - what impedes their performance and best practice

• 2 and 3 - Know your processes: see if they are free from orcs by capturing and maintaining process data to analyse for insights on what you run and how. Assess them to see if they are optimised and if the workflows are still relevant and add value. It is the meaningful interpretations that allow you to make informed decisions and act on the findings

• 4 - Know your potential: learn how to defeat the orcs based on the insights, then plan to implement change such as process enhancements, digitisation and automation. Act to make the most of the discovered opportunities e.g. what can be modernised, automated and refreshed through innovation? What untapped capacity you have?

• 5- Quantify and build the business case for your plans, estimate the returns and the impact to navigate the change. Go back to 2 to review, refine and re-do as needed

At a more detailed level, the insights can provide answers to heads of automations’ questions such as:

• What opportunities exist for more automation based on the pattern of enterprise app usage

• What the business case is for automation and how to measure the return on investment

• If new technology is needed or if the opportunity can be fulfilled utilizing automation features of existing platforms

• If the processes are correctly documented for optimisation and automation

• How the processes and control flows come together and what the impact of change and automation would be downstream

• Can the value generated post deployment be proven to ensure future funding, and keep stakeholders engaged, informed and on-board

With process intelligence you gain visibility into operations to clearly see the issues and address them. This allows you to get rid of those orcs that for too long have hampered performance and slowed down processes. It is the appliance of data science and technology that helps you win the battle. No magic required.

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.