by Howard Smith Companies seek many benefits from process solutions, including increased efficiency, higher productivity, greater reliability, reduced resource utilization, lower costs, economies of scale, innovation, compliance, eradication of waste, shorter cycle times, quality enhancements, fewer errors, employee satisfaction, increased discipline, tighter coordination, tracking of important events, eradication of duplicate or manual tasks, the flexibility to respond to unexpected events, transparency in operations, and an ability to cope with customization, diversity, complexity, and rising workloads.

Even a cursory look at case studies shows the applicability of process solutions.

• Business at a global financial firm’s European division wasn’t growing enough to sustain the size of one its business units. But complex inquiries from the unit’s newly educated consumers was sharply increasing its workload. The firm used process automation to meet seemingly contradictory goals: reducing workforce in the business unit by 50 percent but doubling productivity by freeing staff to work on other products. The process automation and its ongoing, business-led optimization could have made 1,500 workers redundant. Instead, the skilled client relationship managers and administrative assistants released from the old unit were re-allocated to an under-resourced but growing area of the business. That’s innovation.
• A distributor of medical supplies transformed its IT infrastructure using a service-oriented architecture. But rather than just treating this as a cost, an IT modernization effort without business benefit, it linked the implementation to a “top down” process project. The company had considered installing ERP as a modernization strategy, but knew that replicating the custom business logic in its legacy systems would be a monstrous effort. Instead, the company used a code analyzer to expose key logic and generate new software components.

A process solution was used in an upper tier of the architecture, orchestrating the new components to provide a lever for reengineering. One new process entailed pulling expiring products from warehouses and returning them to manufacturers for credit. This eradicated many manual steps that warehouse staff would otherwise have to execute based on inventory information from the company’s standard supply chain package.

The company reported that a similar project without a process solution would have taken nine months to complete. The process solution provided the new process in three weeks.

• The innovative online subsidiary of a major bank used a BPM solution to create a flexible offset-banking offering in less than a year, fast enough to catch other banks offguard with the intention of capturing their customers. The strategy was one of extreme consumer centricity, requiring unique processes unavailable in any packaged banking solution.

Processes were deployed covering everything from replacing lost credit cards to changing overdraft limits. Each sub-process adhered to one of a small number of generic processes, each of which eliminated decision-making delays that often plague traditional banking operations, providing the proactive management of commitments made to customers for issues that matter to them, as opposed to those proscribed and scripted in advance by a standardized call center operation. Response times to the customer were reduced from several days to overnight. The strategy has been a business success, redefining benchmarks for the sector.

Instead of going for economies of scale, merging banks, selling more of the same, using fewer people, and running the operation more cheaply by standardizing everything, the productivity provided by the new processes has enabled a truly personalized service to be delivered. The process allows the bank, and its customers, to keep their promises. The service center is able to respond to customers’ unique requests. The bank uses the process system to watch for new types of requests, and uses the information as a source of competitive intelligence for the subsequent introduction of new products and services. As new products and services are made available, the bank simply adds a new process to support them.

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