It might sound like the start to a Paul Daniels magic trick, but in today's digital world business processes are more intelligent than they've ever been.
The rise of automation brings huge potential for organisations, not just to better manage the many processes that run their business, but to truly transform and thrive in the digital economy. So where do you start?
Well, identifying key processes can be a useful start. But before we dive in it’s important for us to understand and consider the full range of capabilities that a modern process automation platform provides and how these might align to our own processes. At Synergi, we partner with global process automation experts, Nintex, for this exact reason. The Nintex platform brings together five key process management features that scale gracefully, enabling us to help smaller regional organisations as well as national and global companies achieve process excellence.
Process Mapping: In my April column I wrote about how creating process maps allows complex workflows to be presented as a simple, visual map, helping all participants to understand processes. Much of the value in process mapping is understanding the current state of processes and how they connect and relate to each other, building a foundation from which we can illuminate the effects of change and successfully plan for a streamlined and effective future process. Process mapping enables visibility, accountability and collaboration – three essential ingredients for developing a culture of process excellence.
Automated Workflow: Whilst many organisations are digitising manual or paper-based processes, this doesn’t always mean that they are as efficient or effective as they could be, especially when it comes to elements like approval tasks which are often manual and cause delays. Graphical low/nocode process design empowers full automation of processes but using tools that process owners and business users are comfortable with.
Robotic Process Automation: Often, once a workflow has completed, there are high-volume, manual, repetitive steps which are required. For example, updating systems of record. The Nintex platform extends into RPA, enabling ‘bots’ to be created and managed (once again in a low/no code designer) that automate these steps, interacting with applications through their own interfaces and removing the need for humans to re-key data or complete repetitive tasks.
Document Generation: Eliminating paper-based processes is all well and good but often we need documents to be a key output of our process, whether that’s contracts, letters, reports, orders etc. Manually creating these each time is often hugely time consuming. Document Generation automates and streamlines these outputs as a seamless part of the workflow, including the ability to obtain legally binding digital signatures along the way.
Process Intelligence: Once our processes are automated and efficient, they become the equivalent of our body’s nervous system to the business and the ability to track, visualise and analyse how processes are running over time becomes critical to understanding the health, performance and efficiency of our processes, highlighting or alerting any anomalies or risks. Organisations investing in process management platforms can bring these five key elements together, not just to keep up with competitors but to overtake them; to differentiate themselves within their markets and drive innovation. Contact me directly at justin.short@synergi.it if you’d like to chat more about how your organisation can achieve process excellence with Nintex (in the words of another great magician)”just like that”.