Continuous Process Optimization – Beyond Process Automation Alone – Is the Key to Creating Resilient and Agile Operations

Enterprises are under constant pressure to keep pace with evolving customer expectations, intensifying competition, the need to improve employee experience, and regulatory changes – all of which also results in additional administrative expenses. The pressure has been further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed business continuity challenges in legacy business models that rely heavily on manual operations. It has also become clear that organizations that are more advanced in their digital transformation journeys were quicker to respond to the disruption caused. Consequently, the pandemic has amplified the need for change to a digital-first business with lean, agile, and resilient operations.

The need for a Continuous Process Optimization (CPO) solution  

Creating a digital-first business requires enterprises to adopt a holistic solution that ensures accelerated and continuous value delivery throughout the transformation journey and helps them to adapt quickly to changing market dynamics. Hence, the need for a CPO solution that drives superior business value by:

• Overcoming the limitations of a standalone automation approach – While automation can result in some quick cost and operational wins, a standalone automation approach can amplify the inefficiencies when automating broken or inefficient processes, lower value realization when automating non-standardized processes, result in the automation of tasks versus processes, create difficulties in maintaining a strong automation pipeline, and make it very difficult to manage the human+machine environment.
• Ensuring agile value delivery – In the enterprises’ digital transformation journeys, continuity is the key objective. The journey should be thought of as a series of many steps, instead of a big bang, with each step driving some value and ROI. While a combination of various digital levers could provide immense potential to help enterprises transform their operations, it is imperative to explore various interim target states to create an agile roadmap for transformation.
• Adapting to ever changing market dynamics (such as regulations) – Resilience and adaptability are the key traits for survival. While enterprises can’t avoid volatility and uncertainty in the external business environment, they can – and should – take specific actions to build resilience into their value chains. For this, they need to continuously monitor and develop a better understanding of value-chain flexibility, underlying reasons for any rigidity, and where to target their efforts to become more adaptable and resilient. 

How a CPO solution helps realize superior business outcomes

A CPO solution encompasses: process discovery and intelligence; process optimization and automation; end-to-end orchestration of the human, digital, and system workflow; and, continuous process monitoring to identify further optimization and automation opportunities.

A CPO solution is enabled by a combination of digital levers:

• Process mining and analytics – These technologies enable CPO by helping enterprises understand as-is processes and identify potential optimization and automation opportunities. These tools also help enable a continuous feedback mechanism by monitoring processes throughout the transformation journey to identify the next level of optimization opportunities and potential gaps that might arise with changing external factors and constraints.
• Intelligent automation – The combination of RPA with AI technologies enables a higher degree of automation of tasks involving all types of data including unstructured data. These tools help organizations automate both front- and back-office processes, resulting in lean and more resilient operations. Digital workers also leave footprints – logs and the audit trails – which organizations can regularly analyze to identify gaps and new optimization opportunities.
• Process orchestrator / BPM – Enterprise process orchestration technologies coordinate the flow of work across multiple systems, digital workers, and the human workforce to carry out an end-to-end process. They also enable process flow governance and work routing to the best worker (human or robot) based on the nature, type, and criticality of the task and helps harmonize human+machine dynamics.
• Cloud and mobility – Cloud and mobile apps streamline processes by centralizing company data for remote access, allowing employees to work remotely and collaboratively with co-workers in other locations. Having all information and data in one accessible place allows employees to analyze collective insights, which can drive better business decisions. Cloud infrastructure is leaner and enables speed and agility to adapt to market changes and rapidly implement process improvement initiatives.

The interplay of these digital levers in a CPO solution helps enterprises transform their operations and ensure agile value delivery by fuelling continuous improvement and building resilient and adaptive business models.