The enormous investments in digital transformation and the need for agility to sense and respond to changes quickly highlight the key role that process management plays in successful process transformation. In the previous blog posts of this series, we have addressed a multitude of necessary steps for successful journey-to-process analytics such as better modeling customer journeys and process models, the identification of metrics to be monitored, and the mapping of journeys to processes. All this work comes to nothing if we don’t enact the identified changes. As a result of the data analysis, start making real improvements to your processes, customer journeys, or even organizational structure.
While stability and control are crucial in process management, so are flexibility, leanness, and continuity. For Journey-to-Process analytics and ultimately, for process transformations and journey model improvements to be successful, organizations need agility to deal with continuous and significant changes.
The process of process change comprises necessary steps to be conducted before, while, and after the actual change takes place. A successful rollout of changes requires:
Well-defined processes – quick and accurate
SAP Signavio is enabling organizations to model their journeys and processes collaboratively and manage their process repositories in a cloud-based environment. These capabilities specifically support having clear process definitions and enabling collaboration while supporting the shared understanding of processes across the units (read more about process modeling here). Reducing time to capture knowledge throughout the organization and modeling the as-is process is an important element in enabling timely understanding and analysis that is required to identify and evaluate changes.
Process and journey modeling should not be limited to those who understand or are comfortable with specific modeling notations. It is also important to have in mind that processes are not only in the minds of process modeling experts. Many business users are running the processes and are carrying them out in multiple ways thus capturing their knowledge is crucial. In addition, the adoption of changes is more sustainable and significantly higher when all relevant stakeholders are involved in shaping the changes. Quick modeling capability enables process modeling for everyone and process owners can leverage this capability to capture the knowledge of every process collaborator within the organization.
Utilizing the available process data in source systems is another way of boosting the speed of modeling and enabling continuity in capturing accurate process models as they are executed in reality. SAP Signavio Process Intelligence enables process owners to automatically capture process models, such as in BPMN format, along with a range of attributes and context needed in the process model (e.g., IT systems used during execution of the process).
By using experience-driven process mining you gain visibility into the different ways your processes run in your organization and identify which ones end up leading to higher or lower experience metrics. Imagine here a process variant where the quality checks have not been executed; this may lead to unhappier customers who receive bad quality products. The aim for companies that want to balance efficiency and satisfied customers is to identify the best process variants that balance the two dimensions of process and experience.
Analytical and collaborative capabilities to identify and evaluate change opportunities
After documentation and understanding of the current state of processes, it is time to identify change opportunities based on the insights gathered by experience-driven process mining initiatives, evaluate the impact of the identified changes, and collaboratively design the desired state or the so-called to-be process.
On the one hand, analytical and data-driven capabilities such as simulation, process comparison, attributes visualization, reporting, and process mining are supporting process owners, journey modelers, and analysts to identify change opportunities and evaluate their impact on their processes. For instance, simulation capabilities enable analysts to estimate the impact of changes (e.g., resource utilization, automation, process flow optimizations) before costly implementations. A range of process reports also provide insights into the usage and analysis of processes required for changes. For instance, process cost analysis and resource consumption reports help process analysts and owners to estimate the impact of changes on overall time and cost of processes.
Once insights are gathered on how and when the experience is hurting and the impact of potential solutions are analyzed, you may need to change your processes or journeys in order to address the issues.
On the other hand, process models can be accessed easily by everyone, and no matter the modeling expertise, the collaboration functionality can be leveraged to build a change management muscle and contribute to process changes such as by definition of the to-be process and commenting on process, activity, and other modeling elements to (1) increase clarity of changes needed in processes and journeys and (2) involve every stakeholder required for the implementation of changes.
Furthermore, when processes are executed in the SAP ecosystem, changes required in IT systems can be tested via the capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager in order to evaluate implications before any deployments.
Organizational setup and corporate culture
The success of rolling out changes depends on effective communication among stakeholders and having full transparency in the organization. A corporate culture that has “change” in its DNA has four attributes.
You can read more about organizational setup in our previously published blog.
Summary
Managing process change is the core of achieving process transformation’s strategic and operational objectives. One of these objectives is “experience” that journey-to-process analytics aims to address. It´s important to identify where the experience of customers, employees or other stakeholders is hurting and naturally after gaining insights and detecting reasons behind bad experience, it´s important to have the right setup, culture, and tools to adapt processes and journeys and roll out necessary changes.
Organizations must pay attention to a multitude of factors while dealing with rolling-out of changes such as proper involvement of stakeholders, governance models, change management issues (e.g., resistance to change), common understanding of processes as well as strategic objectives of changes while meeting expectations of people interacting with processes, and utilize the available technology and tools at hand to best address necessary steps for change.
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We´ll finalize this series with a new topic, covering the topic of governance. Stay tuned!
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While stability and control are crucial in process management, so are flexibility, leanness, and continuity. For Journey-to-Process analytics and ultimately, for process transformations and journey model improvements to be successful, organizations need agility to deal with continuous and significant changes.
The process of process change comprises necessary steps to be conducted before, while, and after the actual change takes place. A successful rollout of changes requires:
- well-defined processes and journeys across organizational units that are captured quickly and accurately by modeling capabilities as well as utilization of process data obtained from the live source systems,
- analytical and collaborative capabilities in identifying and evaluating change opportunities, and
- embracing an appropriate organizational setup and a corporate culture that has “change” in its DNA. In the following, more details of these three aspects are explained.
Well-defined processes – quick and accurate
SAP Signavio is enabling organizations to model their journeys and processes collaboratively and manage their process repositories in a cloud-based environment. These capabilities specifically support having clear process definitions and enabling collaboration while supporting the shared understanding of processes across the units (read more about process modeling here). Reducing time to capture knowledge throughout the organization and modeling the as-is process is an important element in enabling timely understanding and analysis that is required to identify and evaluate changes.
Process and journey modeling should not be limited to those who understand or are comfortable with specific modeling notations. It is also important to have in mind that processes are not only in the minds of process modeling experts. Many business users are running the processes and are carrying them out in multiple ways thus capturing their knowledge is crucial. In addition, the adoption of changes is more sustainable and significantly higher when all relevant stakeholders are involved in shaping the changes. Quick modeling capability enables process modeling for everyone and process owners can leverage this capability to capture the knowledge of every process collaborator within the organization.
SAP Signavio Process Manager – Quick Modeling capability and automatic BPMN creation out of text
Utilizing the available process data in source systems is another way of boosting the speed of modeling and enabling continuity in capturing accurate process models as they are executed in reality. SAP Signavio Process Intelligence enables process owners to automatically capture process models, such as in BPMN format, along with a range of attributes and context needed in the process model (e.g., IT systems used during execution of the process).
By using experience-driven process mining you gain visibility into the different ways your processes run in your organization and identify which ones end up leading to higher or lower experience metrics. Imagine here a process variant where the quality checks have not been executed; this may lead to unhappier customers who receive bad quality products. The aim for companies that want to balance efficiency and satisfied customers is to identify the best process variants that balance the two dimensions of process and experience.
SAP Signavio Process Intelligence – automatic BPMN creation out of discovered process variants
Analytical and collaborative capabilities to identify and evaluate change opportunities
After documentation and understanding of the current state of processes, it is time to identify change opportunities based on the insights gathered by experience-driven process mining initiatives, evaluate the impact of the identified changes, and collaboratively design the desired state or the so-called to-be process.
On the one hand, analytical and data-driven capabilities such as simulation, process comparison, attributes visualization, reporting, and process mining are supporting process owners, journey modelers, and analysts to identify change opportunities and evaluate their impact on their processes. For instance, simulation capabilities enable analysts to estimate the impact of changes (e.g., resource utilization, automation, process flow optimizations) before costly implementations. A range of process reports also provide insights into the usage and analysis of processes required for changes. For instance, process cost analysis and resource consumption reports help process analysts and owners to estimate the impact of changes on overall time and cost of processes.
Once insights are gathered on how and when the experience is hurting and the impact of potential solutions are analyzed, you may need to change your processes or journeys in order to address the issues.
SAP Signavio Process Manager – Simulation capability to estimate the impact of changes
On the other hand, process models can be accessed easily by everyone, and no matter the modeling expertise, the collaboration functionality can be leveraged to build a change management muscle and contribute to process changes such as by definition of the to-be process and commenting on process, activity, and other modeling elements to (1) increase clarity of changes needed in processes and journeys and (2) involve every stakeholder required for the implementation of changes.
Furthermore, when processes are executed in the SAP ecosystem, changes required in IT systems can be tested via the capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager in order to evaluate implications before any deployments.
SAP Signavio Process Manager – Commenting capability to involve and align with all stakeholders
Organizational setup and corporate culture
The success of rolling out changes depends on effective communication among stakeholders and having full transparency in the organization. A corporate culture that has “change” in its DNA has four attributes.
- First, it sees processes as one-out-of-many possibilities meaning that there is always an opportunity to change, improve or innovate. Every process worker in the organization should be keen on continuous improvement and search for corresponding opportunities (e.g., potentials for automation).
- Second, it utilizes new technologies for managing processes and looking into better ways of process execution.
- Third, it enables flexible process change and continuous decision making by training people who are executing processes to be ready to unlearn the established ways of performing things and learn the new ways.
- Fourth, it never stops learning. Business environments are changing constantly, leading to a constant stream of unanticipated challenges and opportunities. Keeping an open mind and will to experiment and change while being committed to the integration of changes is crucial for the successful roll-out of changes.
You can read more about organizational setup in our previously published blog.
Summary
Managing process change is the core of achieving process transformation’s strategic and operational objectives. One of these objectives is “experience” that journey-to-process analytics aims to address. It´s important to identify where the experience of customers, employees or other stakeholders is hurting and naturally after gaining insights and detecting reasons behind bad experience, it´s important to have the right setup, culture, and tools to adapt processes and journeys and roll out necessary changes.
Organizations must pay attention to a multitude of factors while dealing with rolling-out of changes such as proper involvement of stakeholders, governance models, change management issues (e.g., resistance to change), common understanding of processes as well as strategic objectives of changes while meeting expectations of people interacting with processes, and utilize the available technology and tools at hand to best address necessary steps for change.
___
We´ll finalize this series with a new topic, covering the topic of governance. Stay tuned!
- Visit our journey to process analytics landing page.
- Check out our journey to process analytics Community page
- Join the Early Adopter Care program (EAC) and become one of our first customers to enjoy the full journey to process analytics capabilities.
- Learn more about journey to process analytics by watching our webinar series recordings.
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