GUEST VIEW by Irina Lunin

Guest View

BY IRINA LUNIN Insights from business process analytics

Irina Lunin is the vice president of Research and Development at Blueprint Software Systems. Linking a better understanding of business processes to reduced costs and improved efficiency may not be new, but the concept has attracted renewed interest in the aftermath of COVID-19 and its repercussions on the labor market.

Since spring 2021, some 33 million Americans have quit their jobs. Businesses have been left to deal with yet another challenge as experienced employees have opted to walk out the door, often taking with them the institutional knowledge about how work gets done and how that work is linked to the company ’ s higher-level business objectives. It has also left those same businesses struggling to train new employees since their deeper understanding of business processes existed only in the minds of those now-departed employees.

This potential recipe for disaster is at the heart of the renewed interest so many companies are showing in business processes and, more specifically, business process analysis (BPA), a discipline that focuses on documenting and analyzing business processes to make them better, and improve efficiency and value delivery. More holistic than the slightly outdated business process management approach, BPA relies on data to find business processes and identify ways to optimize them through alignment with the organization ’ s business objectives and goals. Doing so allows BPA to continuously reduce costs, increase efficiency, and drive higher value by identifying which processes contribute to that, which don ’t, and what changes can be made to rectify misaligned or poor processes.

Properly implemented, BPA can generate a wide range of benefits, from increasing time-to-value for product applications and identifying capacity limits and potential improvements — an essential consideration for scaling — to exposing labor redundancies, communications gaps, and compliance issues.

Just as important in the face of labor shortages, BPA and the subsequent automation it is likely to bring about will mitigate the impact of high employee turnover. By shifting the dependency of mechanical process execution from the worker to an always-on automation, businesses can protect themselves from employee departures and keep

that process knowledge in-house. Further, BPA breathes new life into the company culture, generating an improved employee experience and better engagement for internal processes. This is particularly important in accommodating the needs of many younger employees, who want to be involved in engaging, mission-critical work. While most current BPA solutions allow businesses to mine event logs and identify the steps involved in a process such as customer engagement, few offer the context which enables the user to determine where there are downturns, blocks, or unexpectedly low conversions. Similarly, most fail to show how those steps are related to ongoing customer relations, retention, attrition, and other processes related to the customer journey. As a result, related processes cannot be analyzed and improvements that will optimize all customerMostbusinesseshave related activiti All of this es are unable suggests that to be from made. a technical perthousandsofprocesses spective, contextual capabilities are among the wherewaste, inefficiencies, enhancements the not-too-dis most likely tant future. to be included in BPA in Doing so will elicit even andmoneybeinglost more intelligence which, in turn, will allow for arehidden. more proces ins ses ight and with how res they pect rela to te to an eac organizati h other. on ’ s Look too for BPA to add the simulation and analysis capabilities to show where an organization ’ s processes can be improved in order to drive greater efficiencies and higher quality, while reducing costs. No-code/low-code platforms that use visual development environments featuring drag-and-drop and pre-made elements also seem likely to gain prominence in the near-term. In the face of mounting challenges and a dynamic and increasingly global business landscape, the question facing most companies with regard to implementing BPA shouldn ’t be when or why, but how soon. Most businesses have thousands of processes where waste, inefficiencies, and money being lost are hidden. They are, in short, struggling to understand how their businesses operate, often in the face of seeing vital institutional knowledge walk out the door when key employees quit. BPA is the vehicle which enables that understanding to happen and with it, the ability to make better business decisions which reduce costs, increase efficiency, and maintain competitiveness. z