SAP Process Design

Role of Process Design in Process Transformation

Process transformation is becoming an essential component of digital transformation initiatives. As organizations embark on their digital transformation journey, they realize that process transformation will play a key role. This is also reflected in the importance placed on process transformation in the RISE with SAP offering from SAP. A key component of process transformation is process design or re-design. When organizations plan to leverage advanced automation tools, one of the best practices that they adopt is to make sure that the process design is optimal. A suboptimal process will not extract maximum value from any investment in digital tools like robotic process automation. Process intelligence plays a key role in helping organizations understand how to best design or re-design their processes.

Role of Process Design in Process Transformation

Process transformation is becoming an essential component of digital transformation initiatives. As organizations embark on their digital transformation journey, they realize that process transformation will play a key role. This is also reflected in the importance placed on process transformation in the RISE with SAP offering from SAP. A key component of process transformation is process design or re-design. When organizations plan to leverage advanced automation tools, one of the best practices that they adopt is to make sure that the process design is optimal. A suboptimal process will not extract maximum value from any investment in digital tools like robotic process automation. Process intelligence plays a key role in helping organizations understand how to best design or re-design their processes.

What Is Process Design?

Process design is about identifying the most optimal way to run a process and then structuring or re-structuring the process accordingly. And the starting point of understanding the opportunities to improve and re-engineer processes is by analyzing the data from the current state. This is where process intelligence comes into the picture. Process intelligence, derived through process mining, helps capture current state data and insights. This data can then be leveraged to understand the bottlenecks in the current state, optimal flows, and opportunities to re-engineer segments of the process or the entire end-to-end process. SAPinsider Process Automation SOM research report covers this aspect in detail.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

Map and understand process interdependencies. Even when the focus is on designing a specific process, it is critical to understand process interdependencies. Comprehensive business process mapping on key processes needs to occur simultaneously to understand their interdependencies. Build swim-lane-style process maps that clearly illustrate how each process interacts with the other. Leverage best-in-class process mapping and design methodologies like SIPOC diagrams.

Formulate a process visibility strategy. Process visibility remains a key aspect of any process design or redesign. It is also one of the foundational pillars of process intelligence, a tool widely leveraged to identify opportunities for process design or re-design. However, it is important to realistically define what is the desired level of process visibility and evaluate the feasibility of attaining that level of visibility.

Embrace intelligent automation. While many organizations design or re-design processes prior to automation, processes need to be subjected to continuous improvements and analyzed continuously. Technology today allows us to take process automation beyond merely automating manual, non-value-adding tasks. Automation enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning allows you to stretch the boundaries of process enhancement and move towards building a true intelligent enterprise of the future.