Methodologies and tools to discover and analyze business process efficiencies and identify needs for redesign and implementation to improve business performance.

Overview

Determining what systems and processes to integrate and automate is vital to the success of an organization's automation strategy. Business leaders often need help understanding the complexities of their business processes or identifying the activities required to complete an end-to-end business process. The lack of understanding of how current processes operate can lead to significant issues:

• Process owners are constrained by functional boundaries leading to siloed considerations.
• Improvements to one aspect of the end-to-end process may cause undue stress on another part of the end-to-end process. 
• Lack of visibility if the business processes are performing as designed and where the friction is in the end-to-end processes.
• Insufficient data to make informed decisions.
• Inability to scale the automation initiatives from a few projects to multiple business areas.

For a successful and scalable Enterprise Automation initiative, it is imperative to discover and maintain a consistent pipeline of potential automation opportunities. Automation discovery helps identify and document the steps involved in a business process. Automation discovery aims to accurately represent business processes to uncover inefficiencies and bottlenecks, which can be used to improve efficiency and compliance, reduce costs, and identify areas for improvement.

Measuring overall performance and identifying the barriers and process breakdowns as the work flows through the end-to-end process is a powerful way to drive continuous improvement so that an organization can meet the needs of its customers and its internal operation. The goals of automation discovery can be very concrete, e.g. achieving a cost reduction of 10% for a given process, or more abstract, e.g. obtaining valuable insights regarding the performance of several processes. Through the methodology, these goals are translated into a concrete understanding of the business process, resulting in findings that are the basis of improvement ideas for the selected process.

Automation discovery can often require multiple roles to come together across the teams or organization. The most important roles are the business owners, who are in charge of the business processes, and process analysts, who are skilled in analyzing processes and applying automation discovery techniques. Their collaboration is essential to evaluate the analysis findings and to ensure that the results are relevant and usable.

Automation discovery uses several tools and techniques to determine the steps involved in a business process. It could be done manually by process analysts observing how the work is being carried out and documenting the workflow in the form of flowcharts, process maps and models. Or it can be automated using tools such as Automated Business Process Discovery (ABPD) and Process Mining techniques. These techniques automatically discover process models, check the conformance of process models to reality, and extend or improve process models using data from actual process executions across different business systems.

The outcome of the automation discovery can help organizations identify new processes that can be automated and determine what parts of the existing process should be optimized to become more efficient. This allows organizations to improve the performance of processes or an organization's compliance with regulatory requirements, delivering value quickly and continuously.

Automation Discovery equips organizations with an effective means to establish a data-driven, strategic decision-making framework for continuous improvements. It provides a macro perspective of an organization's process, enabling leaders to define a strategic automation roadmap for the business processes instead of investing in tactical enhancements.