Whether it’s a customer account or a business needing to onboard a new recruit, any such action involves at least one underlying process.
The management of these processes holds great importance in ultimately furthering digital transformation strategies. While direct digital transformation investment is expected to reach $7.1 trillion by 2023, a study by McKinsey found that 70% of all digital transformations fail.
For large enterprises on a perilous digital transformation journey, management of these processes could number in the thousands, and CIOs and other business leaders may not be aware of their ability in enabling greater streamlining capabilities and efficiency.
The journey towards increased cost savings, faster time-to- market and improved customer experience can also be perilous, perhaps due to the manual onboarding of new employees being too time-consuming, or a customer being kept on the phone for ten minutes longer than needed.
Process Orchestration
If a company is looking to automate the onboarding process behind a new user joining the business, it will require actions such as adding them to the email system, applying security policies and facilitating access to the office premises.
The IT department may map out these processes but find resistance from the wider business once implemented.
A first step is bringing the departments together to agree how these actions will be completed in the most efficient manner.
With the software as the base, this is where BP3 comes in to provide additional value via process orchestration, which involves the arrangement of those automated processes as per the needs of the business.
BP3 can help enable the best practice strategy of starting with a small use case and applying an
application to one specific process with the agreement of IT and the business. A showcase pilot can even be integrated at this early stage to enable a small number of people from the business to see how it would work.
Once a process has been orchestrated, the next part of the BP3 value proposition is process mapping, the method to achieving optimisation. Take for example a car insurance company. For applications that need more information before approval or rejection, these may need checking over manually by an employee, which can be very time-consuming.
Process mapping can utilise a heat map to highlight this bottleneck, with the business able to incorporate a solution to fix it.
The solution could be an extra question in the process to ensure approval or rejection earlier on, or employing more people in the department to share the workload of checking pending applications.
The solution could be an extra question in the process to ensure approval or rejection earlier on, or employing more people in the department to share the workload of checking pending applications.
NonTangible Benefits
Many of the benefits of process improvement made possible by orchestration may not be immediately tangible, but that doesn’t take away from the value it provides. A perfect example of this is the customer experience. Almost eight-in-ten (79%) of website visitors will now leave a site if content isn’t optimised.
In the context of banking, many consumers have become accustomed to checking their accounts online and completing transactions via applications, with these solutions taking on a new sense of relevance as high street branches continue to close.
Efficient processes can encourage quicker deployment and happier customers in a competitive market, and banks need to embrace technology to match consumer expectations, save on costs and encourage innovation.
Where organisations such as Retail, operate on tight margins, process orchestration helps to tackle the big cost bottlenecks.
For other businesses, it can even assist with the design of marketing processes, with customisation layers allowing employees to complete complex tasks with a simple interface, ensuring that profitable campaigns can be brought to market quicker.
Process orchestration also doesn’t need to replace endpoints or IoT devices within an organisation. Supporting software can be added as a layer on top of existing technologies, even if it’s legacy equipment. This gives businesses the freedom to replace parts of the system with up-to-date cloud technologies to slowly transform the infrastructure at a pace that suits them.
Orchestration gives businesses the ability to confidently utilise microservices. A microservices architecture is made up of independent services that can be moved or replicated at any time. A key advantage is easier application scaling, meeting a major challenge for businesses in the era of online services. Faster development time, quicker release cycles and elimination of reliance on large legacy systems allows for even greater efficiency.
More organisations are adopting microservices platforms to move into a new wave of transformation. Post-pandemic, Virgin Australia has shifted to such platforms, with a new mobile app and website under a new technology stack to overcome its legacy debt. With this new deployment, the firm is able to identify any issues before customers or guests do, or previously unknown device compatibility issues experienced by users.
Getting Started
Supporting software that encourages automation is key to enabling change. For example, RPA can effectively save time by automating tasks, particularly where software emulates human actions. It can be used to reduce friction, representing a high ROI opportunity.
Starting with a flexible and scalable cloudbased platform such as Camunda 8, with pro-code capabilities and absence of restrictive vendor lock-in, can provide the foundation for end-to-end process automation and optimisation.
However, solely investing in such technology without any knowledge of how best to apply it will mean the value can’t truly be leveraged.
To draw on an analogy, picture this software being an Excel spreadsheet. While there are numerous ways this technology can be used, it requires specialist knowledge for it to be utilised for specific use cases, such as completing a tax return. Process orchestration capabilities provide the answer.
