Partner Article

Re-writing the rules of the process game

Disruptive forces suddenly re-define business landscapes, with a knock-on effect on the strategies businesses need to remain afloat and, more importantly, to remain profitable. As the world swerves into a more digital age of where analytical modelling is relied on for business decisions, delivering tangible results can be harder than ever before.

Look at profitability – something affected by various factors. Profitability today is not just about earnings and expenses in isolation. Profitability relies upon customer satisfaction and loyalty, committed investors, wise investments, innovative products and services. The one thing that can have a bigger impact on it than anything else though, is applying a disruptive strategy.

When competing against disruptive forces, the usual management approaches will only serve to maintain the status quo. To not only compete, but to win, it’s essential to embrace disruption and innovation.

The science of business process management (BPM) is based on disruptions and innovations that make a tangible impact on results. It focuses on the building blocks of businesses – where novel ideas can have a huge impact on the overall performance of a company.

For instance, given the enormous number of customers and agents that insurance companies have to deal with at any given time, their management information systems are often inefficient. This lack of efficiency frequently stems from a reliance on manual data collection, use of disparate measuring systems and inconsistent data, which can lead to inaccurate insights. This inefficiency in turn can cause poor results as well as dissatisfied customers and employees alike.

A standard management response would probably be to focus on bringing uniformity into the measuring systems alone, without really considering other factors that can affect performance. In contrast, a more sophisticated approach would concentrate on delivering standardisation and efficiency gains across the business by consolidating services and introducing a combination of technology and analytics. This kind of approach looks at every nuance of every process that a business has and delivers multiple benefits including: reduced operating costs, enhanced efficiency, more informed management decisions, better customer satisfaction and, ultimately, revenue growth.

At the core of this approach are three key principles – using the right technology, introducing analytical modelling and strong understanding of business processes.

This approach is an intensive process, as it involves a thorough focus on all key processes of an organisation. Every function in an organisation typically has multiple processes. For instance, finance and accounting has processes like procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, record-to-report; treasury; cash flow management; and financial modelling; HR has processes like recruitment, payroll, workforce management, and compensation & benefits. Each organisation also has multiple industry-specific processes such as premium collections and reconciliations in insurance; fare filing and PNR servicing in the airline industry and so on. If the list is added up, the number of processes for a single organisation is in the hundreds, or perhaps thousands for a large business.

For companies to adopt the BPM approach by themselves, across the organisation is, perhaps, an unrealistic goal. Many global organisations are therefore turning to specialist partners that have built the ability to scale operations and the capability over the years to drive improvements and innovations in the form of alternate revenue streams, effective analytical models for informed decision making and deliver technology that will have an impact on business. Global companies in association with their partners are re-writing the rules of the game, be it saving millions of dollars from bringing in efficiencies within a process, or hitting bull’s eye by targeting the right set of customers with sophisticated analytics.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Keshav Murugesh .