Process automation technologies have increasingly evolved into strategic solutions during the last few years. While the focus in the initial years of process automation adoption was primarily on achieving cost reduction, process visibility and employee productivity have increasingly become important objectives for deploying process automation solutions. The need for supply chain resiliency and agility have emerged as prominent drivers in many of SAPinsider's recent research reports like Supply Chain Planning in The Cloud. In the same report, SAPinsiders also highlighted supply chain visibility and data integration as key foundational aspects of supply chain agility and resiliency.
Process automation solutions are critical in helping organizations build visibility into their processes, digitalize end-to-end processes, and eliminate data silos. It is therefore not surprising that process automation was cited among the top focus areas by CIO’s in our recent CIO report. As shown in figure 1, supply chain processes emerged prominently among the top focus area processes for process automation in our Process Automation and SAP S/4HANA research report as well. We are therefore publishing a focused research report, Process Automation in Supply Chain, in September 2022. You can participate in the research by taking the research survey.
Figure 1: Top focus area processes for process automation
Source: SAPinsider research, April 2022
Why Process Automation Can Help Build Foundation for Supply Chain Resiliency?
Supply chain process automation touches upon many critical aspects that help build process resiliency and eventually translate into supply chain resiliency.
Improving visibility: A key imperative for agility is end-to-end visibility and insights. This end-to-end capability can only be attained by automating key processes and attaining visibility across functions. Process automation, specifically automation capabilities that span across processes and/or functions, brings the level of visibility needed for supply chain agility. A simple example is order management automation, which can help highlight potential concerns with fulfilling a certain order if the solution is integrated with inventory data management automation. And obviously, getting this insight in time helps avoid potential disruptions or issues, thereby helping build agility in the supply chain.
Improving efficiency and productivity of processes: Manual touchpoints in processes induce opportunities for errors. Also, the majority of these manual tasks do not need human intervention. By leveraging process automation, you can not only build visibility into your process data but also eliminate opportunities for error and improve process quality and overall process efficiency. Productivity of those working in the process also improves, which helps create more focus on improving quality in the supply chain. Improved quality of supply chain processes eventually translates into more agile supply chains.
Innovation and enhanced customer experience: An organization is as effective as its employees who work within its business processes. These employees are also at the forefront of delivering customer experience. Organizations need to upskill and empower their employees to enhance employee experience, morale, and productivity and build products and services that will take the customer experience to a new level. This empowerment need is at the core of building data-driven organizations. And helping to eliminate manual tasks so that employees can focus on creativity and productive tasks can help generate innovation.
Digital Twins through process intelligence: Process intelligence, a niche technology that falls within process automation technology portfolio is essentially an additional layer to the foundation core process automation technologies help build for supply chain resiliency. Process intelligence helps you mine and build digital versions of your processes that you can leverage for a plethora of purposes, beyond visibility as well. And many of those applications, like building a digital twin of a supply chain process, directly contribute to supply chain resiliency.
All leading process automation solution providers, including
SAP Process automation, SAP Signavio,
Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere,
Precisely and Esker provide the capabilities described above that can help build supply chain agility foundation. But the key is to think beyond the technology. A good approach is to start documenting the levers for building a resilient supply chain and work backwards to document the granular requirements, similar to the DART methodology we use at SAPinsider for research. Once you have the requirements, split each requirement into people, processes and technology aspect. This will not only help you see how process automation technology can play a key role but will also help you understand why people and processes are essential ingredient as well.
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