Process intelligence for radical operational efficiency and excellence

While businesses are increasingly investing in automation to drive efficiencies and create more value-driven organizations, they often don’t know where to start or what needs to be automated. The first step for any business transformation is to recognize what needs to transform and when.

While many organizations aspire to make process improvements and run automation initiatives, they lack visibility into their business processes. Deploying automation in pre- and post-production environments requires a deep understanding of business processes. With 46 percent of organizations stating that knowing which processes to automate is one of the biggest roadblocks to implementing automation for S/4HANA¹, the need to identify and understand business processes is heightened. Especially for those considering a move to SAP S/4HANA, knowing what to move to the cloud is critical, which necessitates assessing where they stand in terms of process maturity levels.

A lack of business process transparency and visibility often derails transformation ambitions or forces organizations to stop their transformation initiatives midway. Even if organizations document and map their processes, ongoing maintenance is often challenging, and gaps and risks are never fully identified. Most often, organizations cannot recognize how applications or solutions integrate and interact with data in real time.

While the conventionally used methods of understanding business processes like process mapping, process mining, test automation, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are efficient, they do not provide data insights in real time. Such solutions provide information about process execution only for a given time and generate siloed data. For example, while process mining uncovers the granularity of processes, it does not give visibility into the human steps involved that make up the data. Task mining, on the other hand, captures the human-driven discrepancies, but it does not expose the pain points and other system inadequacies. Similarly, while test automation validates the developmental stability of an application, it still requires extensive and continual support and maintenance in the production environment.

So, how can organizations get a holistic view of how their processes work? How can organizations identify the gaps between the aspired process excellence and reality? The answer is process intelligence.

Process Intelligence - Key to Radical Operational Transparency

Process intelligence goes beyond process mining and mapping. It provides fact-based analysis of an organization’s process landscape and renders an end-to-end view of the business processes including how external or internal factors influence processes.

Process Intelligence combines process analytics, process capture, process mining, and process documentation to benefit from process automation at speed and scale. The knowledge generated from process discovery, test automation, and multiple other sources creates process visibility and enables organizations to view the frequency, challenges, and impact of automations.

Process Intelligence identifies the factors that affect process execution and enables organizations to determine strategic next steps for their processes.

As noted by Lawrence Rankin, Head of Product, Worksoft,

“Process intelligence is often synonymously used with process mining, which is essentially capturing information about system execution. But at Worksoft, we think about process intelligence differently. We believe that for a holistic view of a business process within an organization, it is crucial to get data from multiple sources. This data can come from process mining, which is key for getting into the granularity of business processes; it can come from task mining, which captures the user interaction data to assess the efficiencies of process workflows; and it can come from test automation, which assesses the development stability of the current state of software. But all this data is not in the active state. Capturing processes in real-time quite often reflects a different view. When the data from process mining and task mining is overlayed with test automation, pre- or post-production and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) data, you get a 360-degree view of your processes from multiple angles.”

However, organizations often are not aware of their process maturity levels. “Within our client base, we see a few variations in process maturity. While some organizations have good process understanding of their process maturity levels, others don’t, or they have process maturity in only a few functional areas. We see different maturity levels depending on the organizations and the different functions we work with,” said Rankin.

Thus, it is essential to have a holistic insight into processes, which can be achieved by ingesting data derived from multiple sources of truth into a centralized database and aligning those data sets using artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms. Process Intelligence facilitates this.

Knowing Where to Begin with S/4

The biggest question that organizations face during their transformation journeys is knowing where and how to start.

According to Rankin, “Organizations, depending on their maturity levels, can bring business process understanding and automation in at any stage, but the earlier the better. With over 40 percent of S/4 customers stating they underestimated the complexity of shifting to S/4, we recommend deploying process discovery via our process capture early to obtain a clear picture of their as-is business processes and get immediate visibility into how the business actually runs.

“They can also use process mining solutions like Celonis or SAP Signavio to capture data from a process mining perspective and augment that data with our process discovery data for an even more comprehensive view of how their organizations operate. Organizations can also start with their test data if they are testing their processes daily or multiple times a day based on code releases.”

S4/HANA has brought the business process agenda to the forefront. And with the current and looming cost pressures, particularly for large-scale transformation projects such as the move to the cloud, organizations are under pressure to drive productivity and efficiency improvements. Functions need to justify their value to their organizations and customers, internal or external.

When mobilizing new transformation initiatives, organizations need to recognize that having visibility and a clear understanding of their current processes is instrumental for confidently accelerating their transformation journeys.

Traditional SAP customers have had heavily customized processes, and the move to the cloud has forced them to reevaluate their custom processes and standardizations, elevating the discussions on process intelligence adoption.

Rankin cites the example of Applied Materials:

“When Applied Materials, a leader in semiconductor and materials engineering solutions, decided to move to SAP S/4HANA, they realized the need for a full understanding of their cross-application business processes that were heavily siloed. They chose Worksoft to engage process intelligence expertise to capture processes and define testing objects before migration, reducing risk and driving efficiency. Worksoft’s Process Intelligence enabled Applied Materials to automate with unprecedented insight, providing advanced process discovery, documentation, and analysis to support effective test automation and RPA.”

However, many organizations contemplate taking a lift and shift approach, which often creates another large-scale transformation on the back end of the current transformation program.

Identifying Multiple Sources of Truth

The core issue for many organizations is about identifying and recognizing the real-time day-to-day influences that affect business processes and their outcomes. Such influences can be in the form of changing business and compliance regulations or evolving operational structures that can affect process outcomes.

Process intelligence goes beyond process execution and documentation. It factors the internal and external influences on processes and renders visibility that allows organizations to streamline, optimize and standardize processes, and easily move them to a future state. Knowing such multiple sources of truth and influences makes it easier for organizations to map their activities and drill down to the smallest departmental processes. This not only enables them to generate insights into what directly affects or influences processes, but it also highlights where process improvements are required.

Achieving Process Intelligence with Worksoft

Worksoft’s Process Intelligence delivers insights by combining data from process discovery and test automation and aligns multiple data sources to deliver analytics to generate a holistic view of processes. It generates actionable insights that drive process and business optimization.

When organizations mobilize process intelligence adoption, they enable process excellence and create intelligent processes. Worksoft’s Process Intelligence provides the following benefits to organizations:²

Real-Time Results: The Process Intelligence dashboard allows projections on the potential benefits of automation and process optimization, including tracking realized value and tangible ROI by department.

Process Improvements: The solution allows maximum visibility and uses AI to combine multiple data sources into a single view to uncover process inefficiencies, challenges, and root causes.

Accelerated RPA Strategies: The solution enables companies to achieve the most ROI from robotic process automation by providing inputs like real-time data, comparisons, and valuation for building an RPA roadmap with clearly defined process targets.

Automation at Scale: Deep process understanding empowers organizations to choose what to automate and when.

Building Test Automation: The solution enables to create test automation faster using comprehensive discovery data.

Uninterrupted Digital Transformation: Digital transformation initiatives and moves to the cloud like SAP S/4HANA can be carried out seamlessly with clarity and understanding.

Conclusion

Worksoft’s Process Intelligence draws from multiple data sources and delivers a comprehensive view of the business processes, no matter how complex they are. The solution combines data from multiple sources of truth in real time and calculates the value of process automation and optimization.

As Rankin states, “Worksoft is a codeless connective automation platform. No programming skills are required for it. Functional experts can easily adopt Worksoft’s process and create automation. However, defining the process is the most crucial piece. Process intelligence allows organizations to uplevel their people and get people out of some of the repetitive work to do higher value work.”

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¹ 2021 SAP Users Survey

² Worksoft