The right process intelligence toolset must enable decision-makers to build awareness and understanding, action and traceability, community engagement, and enterprise-wide alignment, says J-M Erlendson, chief evangelist at ARIS.
Enterprises today must be agencies of change. Those with agile operations are more likely to win and retain customers, boost performance, comply with regulations, and innovate faster.
Processes are the fulcrum of that change. But in the race to streamline and adapt, companies face a catalogue of process-related challenges. Automation requires total visibility over business and IT. Intelligence is invariably siloed. Data from task mining has the possibility to overwhelm. And AI-driven technology—there to ease the pressure—causes mounting shadow IT. Companies trying to address each problem often end up with myriad solutions delivering pockets of success yet also feeding IT sprawl.
In this environment, McKinsey & Company encourages organizations to reconnect with next-generation operational excellence—by revisiting its very foundations. Operational excellence is a strategic approach that focuses on continuously improving business operations to achieve superior performance. Its core principles don’t lie in cost reduction and problem elimination but in uniting an organization around a shared mission to create real value. And here are six essentials that decision-makers need to do just that.
Awareness and understanding
A fundamental challenge for all decision-makers is knowing how to meaningfully move the needle. What insights are needed? What outcomes are wanted? And does the organization have the capabilities to assess either?
To achieve this requires a harmonized view of key performance indicators (KPIs) for shared awareness. Teams must be able to work together to assess these KPIs, agree on the ones to pursue, collaborate, and share successes. Empowered by this, they need to be able to scrutinize facts and tie data into causes for better understanding. Where processes are concerned, this is only possible with process-based aggregation and complex root cause analysis. And the ideal toolset should be AI-powered to mobilize as many nonexperts as possible.
Action and traceability
Once decision-makers have this window into performance, they need a mechanism to optimize how processes work and take action. AI-powered process platforms, accessible blueprinting for meaningful change, will help them build a universal language for automation and people transformation. Decision-makers will also need access to simulation results to predict and accommodate how the identified changes will impact the wider enterprise. This calls for a high level of traceability—ensuring a clear and verifiable connection between all phases of the process. This will also enable leaders to conduct powerful impact analysis across the full lifecycle.
Community and alignment
Making a successful process change requires everyone to unite behind it. Decision-makers need a system that facilitates communication, promotes cross-divisional collaboration, and fosters peer-to-peer knowledge transfer. This system should unite a community behind a seamless, end-to-end process lifecycle—with its foundations in best practices. It should also encourage buy-in by providing visibility into engineering in ways that everyone can engage with.
It is possible to find solutions that enable some, but not all, of these essentials. But to make sustained impact, process intelligence must flow across the full process lifecycle. Only in this way can decision-makers be sure to get alignment across the entire enterprise. What does this mean, exactly? In order to create real value, organizations need to be able to run these six essentials on a single platform.
Turn process intelligence into value with ARIS
There are plenty of challenges in the business world—from digitalization to regulation to disruption and customer expectation—without adding business process management to the list. That’s why the mission to achieve operational excellence is often reactive: A problem arises, and a point solution fixes it. Great for vendors. Bad for strategic growth.
But with considerable value on the table, now is the time for decision-makers to recalibrate around the founding principle of operational excellence: to unlock the hidden potential in their operations. The right toolset must enable them to build awareness and understanding, action and traceability, community engagement, and enterprise-wide alignment.
ARIS, the market leader, enables all six.
Equally powerful in process modelling and mining, ARIS is a fully integrated process intelligence suite—underpinned by AI. It provides decision-makers and process leaders with business process analysis for continuous improvement and rollout, process mining for deep business insights and informed decisions, risk and compliance for governance and resilience, and process automation to deliver operational excellence at scale. These four core modules—in one platform—enable decision-makers to transform their organizations to deliver better results to their customers and shareholders.
Interested in learning how you can turn process intelligence into value? Read the Are your processes intelligent enough? guide from ARIS.
Note: This article was created by ARIS.