Increasing competitiveness in tough industry markets with process intelligence
By Michael McLaughlin, VP Cloud Alliances & Channel SS&C Blue Prism
As the business landscape grows increasingly competitive, businesses have to constantly develop their strategies and make smart choices to keep up with their competitors. By implementing process automation and leveraging data-driven insights, organisations can optimise, manage, and automate work processes which are key to gaining a competitive advantage.
By utilising advanced data analysis, process intelligence can help to identify what processes are most suitable for automation. Not only does this eliminate the guesswork, but it also enables organisations to make informed decisions when it comes to improving business value.
There are several ways process intelligence tools can be used to become more agile and responsive to the changing market conditions. These tools provide flexibility which allows for a speedier adaptation to new, emerging opportunities and helps increase speed to value.
Using automation to its full potential
With the increased adoption of automation, companies can collect and analyse vast amounts of data. Figuring out how to best integrate this information to streamline business processes is the challenge. Process intelligence is the key to unlocking the potential of automation right across the enterprise. It helps you improve processes end-to-end, regardless of complexity, through its ability to extract data from almost any system, including legacy ones. This big-picture approach gives the insights and accuracy needed to understand how processes work, where they can be improved and how to optimise them to increase your organisation’s return on investment (ROI).
Traditional methods of gathering insight about processes can be time-consuming and eat up in-house resources. And, once in production, it’s hard to know whether these process automations are meeting service level agreements (SLAs), delivering results, and doing so in a compliant and cost-effective fashion.
Process intelligence automates the process, collecting data from various sources in real-time. You get a 360-degree view of operations, systems and your people. This enhanced visibility allows you to understand how different components interact and where bottlenecks occur.
By analysing processes and associated data, these tools identify areas where automation can deliver the highest return on investment (ROI). This allows you to focus your automation efforts on end-to-end processes that will have the most impact on efficiency, cost reduction and overall performance.
Understanding the outcomes of compliance and cost-efficiency
In the financial world, it is easy to let critical operations grow in complexity due to regulatory demands across multiple regions. As more banking customers switch to digital and real-time apps, offering greater and more flexible ways to access their money, financial service providers are using smarter analytics to stay competitive.
While digital transformation is great for the customer, it also supports risk and regulatory compliance priorities. Understanding processes and tasks at a macro and micro level can reveal unnecessarily complex or sub-optimised processes that add time and cost to routine tasks and obstruct customer service.
Using process intelligence, you can analyse system log file data in near real time. This allows you to detect where things are going wrong and how to significantly improve them. These enhancements boost customer service, increase accuracy in reporting and compliance, improve efficiency and eliminate wasteful reworks.
A financial services firm, for example, with more than $1 trillion under management and five million clients, came to us with a conformity issue. The firm’s goal was 100% compliance of investor onboarding to mitigate regulatory risk, compliance violation, and exposure from fines.
It soon became clear that the team could only monitor 15% of the processes, leaving them open to possible litigation and risk. Using process intelligence, compliance is now 100% checked with a fifth of the resources, which saves the firm $2 million a year.
When regulatory fines for compliance violations are measured in tens or hundreds of millions, or an interest rate change makes products uncompetitive, the faster teams can analyse customer data or products, the faster they can identify issues and solve them. By creating a simple automatic baseline with key criteria, challenges can be analysed immediately and upgraded, allowing people, processes, and systems to be set in place.
Improving the customer experience
The global healthcare sector must balance patient experience with compliance risks. Intelligent process mapping is essential to understanding which areas of treatment are working well and where improvements can be made. In the healthcare industry, one of the biggest issues is the management of patient and health insurance data, requiring huge amounts of budget and personnel.
In the case of an 11-hospital health group that was re-processing patient insurance claims, they were able to streamline processes and compliance for employees and make cost savings. Process visualisations provided an accurate image of the flow of work through each process stage, identifying any delays and bottlenecks and analysing process performance. By improving the quality of information collected by staff during patient procedures and appointments, process intelligence has supported and streamlined end-to-end decision-making.
In a matter of hours, for instance, the process intelligence solution was able to identify and eliminate wasteful duplicate insurance processes and significantly improve compliance rates from 40% to 87%. With the team now monitoring 100% of all scheduled interactions with patients – up from just five percent – the group has transformed its revenue cycle by identifying $5.5 million in potential cost savings.
Increasing value with automation
In most cases, unified intelligent automation is able to streamline decision-making through the use of everything from chatbots to digital workers, monitoring and predicting outcomes that are faster and more focused.
In rapidly changing markets where competitive differentiators are critical, advances in process intelligence technology mean greater efficiencies are possible by weaving AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation into any organisation – all facilitated through digital workers. But implementing digital workers effectively requires preparation and planning. Developing an automation implementation strategy will help you realise your best business value. Process intelligence helps you make optimal use of your robotic process automation (RPA) and IA, so your business goals stay a top priority.
By assessing end-to-end process performance and identifying inefficiencies and automation opportunities, process intelligence has the ability to optimise business operations, and day-to-day activities, that are vital to improving customer experience, cost reduction and building a competitive advantage.
Customers are now able to interact better with their brands, which has led to more focused data-led operations over time. Organisations should look at their existing platforms when looking to digitally transform and make process intelligence a greater part of their infrastructure roadmap.
Jesse Pitts has been with the Global Banking & Finance Review since 2016, serving in various capacities, including Graphic Designer, Content Publisher, and Editorial Assistant. As the sole graphic designer for the company, Jesse plays a crucial role in shaping the visual identity of Global Banking & Finance Review. Additionally, Jesse manages the publishing of content across multiple platforms, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune.