Jim Sinur

While I believe that business process modeling is a core business competency because allows business folks to identify quick saving hits and design higher productivity processes, it doesn’t have to be just manual. One can leverage Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) in parallel with manual process modeling efforts or as a sole stand alone activity. However, ABPD does not have to be only involved with the up front design activity.

ABPD is not only helpful during initial process design by collecting process related information from existing system sources (bespoke applications and/or packages) and previous BPM implementations, ABPD can play a key role in optimizing processes on a continuous basis. The problem is that very few organizations are familiar with what ABPD offers and why it will become crucial over time.

ABPD is Visual:

One of the major deliverables is a process map with actual paths mapped with activity major process threads highlighted and bolstered by activity counts. Not only can ABPD identify exceptions to the happy path(s), but common exceptional paths and costly outlying paths of process activity. The happy paths are those that keep the costs low, the time to completion low, the rework low and the number of errors low. As we all know, not every process instance will follow the optimized path(s), so changes have to be made to round up expected and unexpected exceptions and figure out how to get them on the happy path. This may mean adding rules on the happy path(s) to deal with these exceptions or changing upstream activities or just changing peoples habits. Some of the cool ABPD tools can animate the processes as well.

ABPD Mines Process Intelligence

There is to more than just “eye balling” problems in “end to end” processes. In most cases, the next level of analysis drives to information collected in the context of process activity. This is pretty focused around performance and outcomes and does not usually require a lot of trail and error like I have seen in BI, but experimenting is also part of ABPD. Various analytical capabilities can be leveraged here as well. For instance, one could simulate the results of a rule change and visualize the out comes through an ABPD tool. There is certainly a gold mine of information for business folks to analyze.

ABPD Delivers

Early ABPD efforts have delivered significant benefits totaling in the millions of dollars. Some of the early benefits include:

Cost reduction

Identifying standard best practices

Better leverage of resources

Avoiding errors and redos

Reduction in delays

Early detection of outlying conditions that threaten the process

Ability to jump on problems early

Unique insights to help in cause and effect analysis

Avoiding missed SLA’s

Improved accountability

Inventory pileups

Inaccurate reporting

Going forward, I expect to see the ROI’s piling up, so that I can project expected benefits soon. More and more companies are turning to ABPD to augment modeling and continuous process improvement

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation     Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules, Optimization, Simulation

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