Over the last two years, we’ve seen many businesses quickly adapting to a Work-from-Home (WFH) approach for their teams, lifting and shifting their current processes from a centralized office into a decentralized world.
While this was achieved for most businesses to varying degrees of success, it begs the question: are their current processes still the best way to go?
Business owners continue to look for revenue growth opportunities or, at the very least, some way to maintain or reduce costs to deliver shareholder return.
So, now with the world seemingly settling into a “new normal,” how do businesses review and evaluate their transformation journeys?
Front Office: Always the Attention Getter
A lot of businesses have very experienced leaders within their ranks who know they need to “automate” at least some of their business practices. But, as always, funding is limited with multiple teams looking at projects and people to deliver on these aspirations.
Traditionally, businesses have continued to focus on their sales organizations’ needs to sell products and services effectively, without fully understanding the impact that can pose on the middle and back offices’ ability to deliver. Sales typically receive the lion’s share of a company’s overall project budget, leaving the operations team to work out how to implement the latest product offering, often with a smaller portion of the budget.
Mapping Out the “As-Is” vs. the “To Be”
Where the middle to back-office can find some wins is to engage in processing mining, a practice that effectively maps current business with a focus on understanding the time and effort (and hence costs) in the processing chain. Further, they can run a scenario-based analysis to determine the effects a change in volume places on people and processes.
It can be daunting to review the overall operating model, and businesses often vacillate between the options of “Should we do this in-house or use an external consultant?”
For larger organizations, this may be an easy answer, but for those that run on tight margins and limited resources, it can be a very difficult decision.
IT teams in the small to medium organizations usually step up to support the middle to back office by often creating bespoke point solutions to the immediate need and often, these are left to run. Where changes are required, due to regulatory needs, for example, it is often difficult to change these and harder to update code where there are global attacks (e.g., Log4j issue in December 2021), as the focus usually remains on delivering to the front office.
Implementing a market-leading intelligent automation solution enables more efficient processing on a common platform, eases the burden on the IT team in these businesses and gives them more capability to design end-to-end processes when looking at all the effects from the front office through to the middle and back-office functions, including sending information to external service providers.
Once operations teams can quantitatively prove value, it makes the presentation of business cases to transform from high-cost processes to more optimal and lower-cost processes much easier, moving them one step closer to actually reimagining their businesses and optimizing their value to their clients, while simultaneously improving their employees work satisfaction.
To learn more about process mining and how it can help your firm get on the right track to transformation, watch our “How to Avoid Costly Digital Transformation Failures” webinar.
