As a service delivery representative, I recently had to collaborate with the global in-house centers (GICs) of one of my customers. By definition, GICs are the offshore centers that perform designated functions for large organizations to minimize overall costs, enable access to better talent, and help operate their business smoothly.
The customer’s GICs were established across different regions, including Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and North America/Latin America (NA/LA). Having their GICs spread across various regions, they lacked a unified view of business transactions. This pushed their management team to take an enterprise-wide decision to merge the Middle East and Asia Pacific GICs. The resulting accounting groups were Asia Pacific/Middle East (APME) and Europe/Africa (EA).
What got them stuck?
The middle eastern currencies were not getting mapped to the new APME centers while performing order fulfillment/realization and incident management (internal processes). The decision-makers couldn’t see the amounts being entered in the system. The business owner, who was working from the NA/LA region, did not flag the process properly, and so the issue lasted almost a month after the quarter closure, stalling the company’s complete accounting closure.
The organization faced some major challenges, including the lack of visibility and communication gap amongst users. Additionally, the IT infrastructure of the organization, which was set up in such a way that the order management/realization process and the incident management process were hosted in two different applications with no linking interface—thereby turning the processes opaque.
Plugging the gap!
In order to combat such challenges, a low code automation platform, integrated with intelligent digital automation (BPM) capabilities comes to rescue.
In practice, a better solution to the above-stated case would have been the implementation of a tracking mechanism, which could monitor the flow of orders in the middle eastern currencies at the APME GIC systems. In case any orders/revenue was not being processed in those currencies, the system would have proactively raised an alarm to the right stakeholders, requesting them to log an incident using the same platform.
As BPM brings together all the tools and technologies to help break through silos and connect organizational resources better, it helps in enabling a holistic process experience. This is one of the major reasons why the BPM industry thrives today. The emerging trends of 2019 in the BPM space highlight the inclusion of intelligent process modeling—essentially, leveraging a data-driven, process modeling approach to build a process seamlessly and across departments, interfaces, and geographical space.
In a commissioned study by Forrester on procurement transformation, one of the strategic objectives for the chief experience officers (CXOs) was to support better decision making by improving data analysis and insights. Further, the same study highlighted that insight-driven firms were more likely to report year over year revenue growth of at least 15%.
Another survey by KPMG & Harvey Nash highlighted that nearly 60% of digital leaders could not effectively analyze the data available to them without the right tools. Intelligent analytics, embedded into their processes, shed more light on process analysis and bottleneck detection, enabling CXOs to make informed and data-driven decisions.
Insight-driven platform to maximize operational excellence
While investment into an integrated management approach is a step in the right direction, enterprise resource planning is not able to deliver the levels of omniscience and value it promises in the context of business processes. At least not alone.
This is largely because of the conventional drill down/postmortem identification of issues. However, a comprehensive platform, coupled with data-driven insights, drives an alert-up approach while helping users take proactive measures.
The value of process insights is based on the macroeconomic concept—time value of money. The insight-driven platform not only reflects the existing process discrepancies, but it also involves a continuous learning module to aid informed decision making.
In conclusion
In the past, CXOs were unaware of the process inefficiencies bogging down their companies at the elementary level. However, with an insight-driven platform, they can know-it-all, from the very beginning. A robust platform, complemented by a data insight module, would be a game-changer in bridging silos, increasing organization-wide visibility, and maximizing operational effectiveness for companies of all sizes.
Source: https://newgensoft.com/blog/time-to-switch-to-a-single-digital-platform-to-enhance-operational-excellence/
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