Introduction
COVID-19 has impacted businesses across all sectors, thus leading to changes, in not only the way businesses function, but also working conditions of employees, and customer behavior, among others. This situation has necessitated a deep understanding of current “operations framework” and “service models”. Here Process Discovery plays a vital role.
Process Discovery is a technique used to define, map, analyze, and assess business processes. Irrespective of the nature of business, a well-designed business process is the need of the hour to deliver your product and services efficiently and effectively to your customers.
Earlier, the methodology used in Process Discovery was manual, time-consuming, and expensive. It caused disruptions in business operations, and often resulted in incomplete or incorrect data collection. Today there exists a better, automated way of capturing process information, that enables better quality of captured data and minimal disruption to business operations.
NxtWorx- Discover-Nxt
NxtWorx has designed a simple and efficient Process Discovery service which is implemented remotely and with minimal human interaction. It combines powerful data capture and analysis tools with data cleansing &enrichment capabilities. Also, it uses a methodology that enables extensive, complete, and accurate Process Discovery.
The phases are
- Initial Assessment –defining objectives and assessing process characteristics.
- Plan – Creates an activity plan and identifies SME’s within scope.
- Capture & Upload – Captures all activities done by the SME’s until process discovery is complete
- Process Discovery – Discovers processes using the Process Discovery Engine
- Reports & Validation – Generates SOPs, Process Flows, and other documentations, after validation with SME’s
Figure 1: The Discover-Nxt Methodology
As shown in the flow above:
- An initial assessment of the process is done using any existing documentation, to capture high-level process characteristics.
- The scope of the Process Discovery is defined, the team identified, and applications configured in the Process Discovery Engine. This configuration activity enables better event processing.
- The SME’s will then use the capture tools to record activities for a defined period, until all activities, exceptions and variations are captured.
- The Process discovery engine analyzes the captured data, accumulates it under different process definitions. Events that cannot be identified are highlighted as “exceptions”, for resolution by process analysts.
- Process Analysts resolve exceptions reported by the Process Discovery engine, and re-initiates the Process Discovery steps.
- The entire process is repeated each day until the process discovery engine can perform a complete analysis of the daily capture file. This typically takes 3-5 days.
Benefits:
Fully Remote execution: All activities are implemented remotely and are automated.
Extensive process data capture: The methodology allows a sizeable number of SME’s to be included in the scope, over a sufficiently long duration, for data capture, to make sure all facets of the process execution, including variations and exceptions are captured. It enables accurate metrics that is later useful for analysis.
Secure Data capture: The capture tools do not capture “input data “or personal information. Certain applications can be isolated from data capture activities.
Process Identification: Accurate and detailed process maps covering every aspect of the process (data inputs& outputs, steps in the process, application accessed), are created by the tools.
Process Repository: Process repository delivers multiple assets, to be re-used during Business Transformation projects. These include AS-IS mapping, TO-BE definition, Modelling, Happy path, variations, exception flows for processes understanding, Screen mapping for Automation, etc. It can also be accessed by external applications via an API.
This is a permanent resource for any further analysis and assessment required in the future(like value stream mapping, feasibility studies for Business transformation initiatives, ROI calculations, etc.)
Conclusion:
Enterprises, today, face a challenge to re-design their strategy and goals to adjust to the realities of the world. They adapt by understanding these challenges to bring value to customers (by continuing to implement their vision with minimal risk and disruption. The Process Discovery service by “DiscoverNxt”, thus provides a unique solution in addressing these challenges.
