Key Drivers Of Digital Transformation

The Covid pandemic shook businesses to their core and put them to face a very raw reality – if businesses want to survive the changing ecosystem, they must change with it or perish in a highly competitive market, unable to meet the demands of the customers.

As the world turned to digital means to survive in the pandemic, it was plain that a complete digital transformation had arrived and any business that would not incorporate it into the business model wouldn’t come out on the other side of the pandemic. Becoming digital, getting software tools, and having an online presence was no more a choice if any company, from small to large, wished to stay afloat amidst Covid.

Have classic methods of process improvement become saturated?

Disruption in the business world is nothing new. The corporate world keeps changing and bringing in new ways of working and improving the outcomes. The traditional methods of improving business processes such as Lean Six Sigma and BPMN 2.0 have become saturated. The value provided by these techniques is coming to a halt in the current changing environment.

The corporate world needs better ways of process improvement urgently. The customers are becoming smarter by the day. They have access to the digital world, can evaluate multiple options at once, and choose only the best. With easy access, their demands are on the rise as customers are accepting nothing less than a personalized digital experience of buying a product or service where they are the focus. And businesses need to step up to evolve with the demands of the customer and the market if they intend to hold their ground.

Moreover, there is an ever-increasing cost pressure in the financial sector such as in banks. As more options for products and services are taking up space, the price competition is increasing with varied choices available to the customer.. Digital transformation provides a feasible way to achieve those cost cuts and survive in the market of competitive prices.

How Are Businesses Responding To the acceleration of thisDigital Era?

These key drivers of digital transformations have made it inevitable for businesses to consider focal changes in how they work and carry out processes. There are several functionalities in the workplace already taking place that help in improving businesses development and processes such as creating a standard process, minimizing cost, and improving the speed of producing the outcome.

However, in keeping with the latest revolution in business setups, these technical challenges are not the only ones that need to be addressed. There are more challenges for the firms today. For example, how to improve customer response time, lead time, and increase customer satisfaction. Challenges have always been present in business. Organizations should be able to tackle challenges and adapt to changes at a faster rate.

Several businesses are steering in a new direction to tackle the challenges of digital transformation. Companies are turning towards business process management again to address these new challenges. However, BPM alone would not be able to create a significant dent unless the business can take help from useful market and customer insights via data analytics and similar methods. Development of processes is not enough in the world today. Processes need to be broken down to the last straw, analyzed, and improved.

Process Mining – The Innovative Step Towards Business Development

Process mining is a new-age way to analyze what’s wrong with the way things are working based on solid facts. By extracting the process flows out of data, it enables us to change them for better performance, again based on hard facts. This phenomenon brings in the latest technological advancements to revitalize process management and improvement..

Process mining combines techniques such as data mining, data analytics, AI, machine learning and sequence mining,  to help businesses capture information and take measures based on data driven facts. In traditional process management, organizations focus on directly going for the improvement of the process, taking notes, brainstorming among the employees, and interviews of experts.

While these can all be effective methodologies, they are based on the limited knowledge and brainpower of a small pool of employees. It may have expert opinion on how to improve a process in general but no pointers on improving the specific process at hand. To improve a certain process, it needs to be broken down, understood, and analyzed before it could be improved. Process mining does all that by collecting data at each point of the process. The data is analyzed to give fact-based suggestions.

Process mining increases return on investment. You pay a price upfront but by bringing significant improvement to the processes that deliver products and services, process mining returns value through improved business operations.. In process mining, the previous process already going on in the organization will be automatically reconstructed based on the KPIs fed into the system.

For proper process mining, you will have to group snippets of process traces that are required for the flow of the process:

  • a process ID which identifies and relates to a unique process
  • a function name which identifies a process activity
  • a timestamp helps sort process cut-outs to their actual order of execution

With all such information at hand, you can get data-driven insights for your business from process mining quickly. Besides such process discovery based on facts, you can also benefit from process conformance checking where the real-time process execution is compared against the underlying process definitions.

As digital transformation for an organization is critical, data is one of the significant drivers of bringing that change. In the environment today, most businesses don’t have a choice to adopt the digitalization but they have a choice on how they go about handling it. There is no doubt that data is a key factor  that distinguishes successful businesses from the rest of the market. Process mining can aid in using that data to provide insights on improving the standard of a business process. Through process mining, businesses can gain information from raw data, such as identifying faults in an operation, and put it to use for problem-solving and decision-making.

Tell us how you are managing this new era for your business in the comments and stay tuned for the next part of this article.