Questionnaires, interviews and group seminars aren’t the only ways to discover your business processes. Consider what automated process discovery can do.
“How can we make our business more efficient?”
That’s the question occupying so many minds in board rooms and C-suites today. It’s important, but it’s not the first question commercial enterprises should be asking.
The question to start with is, “Do we know exactly how we do what we’re already doing?”
Shortcutting the time spent focusing on current practices may be tempting. After all, the goal is to do things differently, right? But until you’ve identified how things happen in your business correctly and completely, you run the risk of “solving” problems that may not exist, leaving real reasons for inefficiency unaddressed.
That’s why knowledgeable business process management companies (or BPM companies) work with clients on business process discovery as the first step toward streamlining and maximizing the value of their operations. Business process discovery methodically identifies and documents the actual ordered, repeatable sequences of events your staff follows to do their work. It’s time well spent if you want an accurate business process tool modeling how your enterprise works now that helps you optimize how your enterprise will work going forward.
Advantages of Automated Business Process Discovery
Business process discovery can be done manually. Detailed questionnaires, face-to-face interviews with employees, and workshops with the full staff or with specific stakeholder groups can and do all yield valuable information. Manual discovery can, for example, bring to light undocumented deviations from assumed processes—shortcuts or “workarounds” employees have discovered work better for them than “the way things are supposed to be done” does. It can also foster greater staff participation in the enterprise’s overall redevelopment work, since their input is being explicitly sought and valued.
Gartner Research says 80% of companies still use manual process discovery. But modern technology improves discovery in several ways. Automated business process discovery (ABPD) analyzes such electronic data as emails, audit trails, database interactions and other transactions in order to recognize patterns as work gets done and from those patterns build an “as-is” model of how your business works. In Gartner’s words, “It’s all about capturing what has happened in a real-life process.”
Knowledgeable business process management companies use ABPD because it offers several advantages over manual process discovery, including:
- Inherently objective – When you’re pursuing greater business efficiency, you must deal with factual information. Because it yields process models that emerge from workers’ actual electronic footprints, ABPD lets business management process companies plan changes with you that address your actual circumstances—not things as personnel wish they were or imagine them to be.
- Highly visual – ABPD easily represents your business’ processes in visual form, allowing stakeholders to see, at a glance, where chains of communication break down, where bottlenecks develop, where decision-making responsibility needs to be made more explicit, and so on. Accessible, graphic depictions of your company’s current workflows show you the most pressing pain points and let you improve them more readily.
- Notably time- and cost-effective – According to Gartner, ABPD “create[s] a business process model at a fraction of the time and cost involved in the traditional way.” You will still want to do some process discovery manually, in order to observe and document informal processes that don’t involve quantifiable data; however, think of the head start you will have after having completed automated discovery first.
What Differentiates Evoke from Other Business Process Management Companies
At Evoke Technologies, we bring over a decade’s worth of IT leadership to discovery, as well as to all other phases of BPM. Unlike some business process management companies, We begin by taking the time to know your business and your position within your industry as well as you do. Armed with this in-depth knowledge of your enterprise, our dedicated BPM consultants can provide custom connectors, Salesforce compatibility, document integration, KPI management, customizable UI and multiple other solutions based on what your business—not someone else’s, and not some textbook, theoretical case—demands.
It all begins with process discovery, and our ABPD services can and will equip you with the knowledge you need to make your business more efficient in the best possible ways. Pick up the phone today and call us at +1 (937) 202-4161 (select Option 2 for Sales), send an email to sales@evoketechnologies.com or connect with us online.
Let Evoke help you discover the processes your business needs to improve in order to achieve effective process management.
Related Tags: ABPD and Business Process Management Companies | Evoke Technologies
