In today's business world, optimizing processes is crucial to ensure maximum operational efficiency and increased competitiveness. But how do you know if your business processes are truly operating at their full potential? This is where process data comes into play. This post explores how analyzing process data can provide valuable insights to enhance business performance. By highlighting the possibilities offered by process automation coupled with in-depth data analysis, we examine how businesses can use these powerful tools to streamline their operations and achieve their business objectives. Read on to see more about how to fully harness the potential of process data to transform your business.
What does your process data tell you about business process performance?
And what can you learn from that data? With process automation coupled with the ability to analyze process data, business has a powerful set of tools at its fingertips.
Two key business process automation elements connected by a powerful link
From a “big picture” view, there are multiple important elements to implementing automation through “digital transformation” to get the best possible improvements to business processes. Zooming in, two of those elements are
- automating and managing processes using a BPM platform - well-designed automated processes should run smoothly and rapidly
- understanding what is happening inside those processes to modify, fine-tune, and continuously improve their performance to better meet business objectives
Understanding data from automated processes is the best way to accomplish this second element.
The route to “understanding data” depends on your means to:
- Obtain actual execution data from real past and current processes
- Put that data into a digestible format and offer it up visually
- See and interact with the visualized data
- Compare what you learn about process with the goals you want to meet
With a set of tools to find, see, and analyze your process data, it's possible to get the best performance out of those processes - to help you to fine tune and to maximize efficiency, to make data driven decisions and set up continuous improvement cycles. Process managers responsible for the business need to obtain the right information to ensure that performance is in line with what they are expecting - or is not, and why.
First, using the Bonita process automation platform to automate and manage business processes end-to-end provides the means to capture data from every instance or case of each process, whether it completes successfully or not. How to access and understand what that data can reveal? That’s what Bonita Process Insights is about - it offers the “missing link” between automation and actionable information.
Bonita Process Insights is the “missing link” between these two pieces
What can business process data reveal?
Consider these three common questions encountered by the manager who owns a business process:
- Are my processes aligned with my business goals?
- Are there bottlenecks? (For example, which are the tasks that consume the most resources?)
- What is the impact of changes to my automated processes? Is the latest version of my process, after I have made some modification, actually performing better than the previous version?
Here we can share an illustrative example from our recent webinar on What can your automated process’ data reveal?
We started with a fairly simple invoice validation process - a process widely used across many enterprises of all types and sizes - first modeled and then deployed on Bonita, and run multiple times in a demonstration environment. A collection of individual cases of invoice validation, with their process data, is then available to inspect.
A closer look at the data for the Invoice validation process
Two out-of-the-box dashboards in Bonita Process Insights display data in tables and graphs. The Process Overview dashboard provides a global view of any process automated with Bonita. It shows activity for this process- you can see all the cases that were completed over a selected period of time. This dashboard also shows that this invoice validation process has a defined goal - added by the process manager - to be completed within five minutes (for demonstration purposes, we kept it quick!)
Process Overview Dashboard
The Process Overview dashboard shows that 35 invoice validations were executed over the time span selected, and two of them failed to complete within the 5 minute goal. The data displayed also shows that these two cases overshot this time target on the same date.
Here is one clue for further analysis for What happened that led to a missed target? Perhaps there was an incident on this specific date that might have affected the normal process. Noted for possible further investigation.
By looking more closely at the paths taken by different cases in the invoice validation process, it’s also possible to discern that the 2 failed cases both have an extra step, a Level 2 validation, that the other in-spec cases did not have. Another clue for something to look at more closely!
And in fact a closer look at the data available shows that the time to complete the level one and level two validation steps took quite a bit more time to complete than the level one validation step alone, and there are two actors’ names associated with those steps (performed on the same day, as noted already).
So in a few minutes and less than a dozen clicks through the various visual presentations of the data in Process Overview, you have a first level of analysis with information to dig deeper into why 2 cases failed to meet the defined objective.
The second dashboard, Process Compare, is useful to compare the 2 “failed-the-business-goal” cases against other cases that completed within the time specified as a goal. A closer look at the process as defined shows that when an invoice is over 10K euros, there is a second level validation required. And indeed, in the two cases we are investigating, the invoice amount required a Level 2 validation, and this additional step pushed the time consumed by the process over the 5 minute goal.
Process Compare Dashboard
What can a process manager do with process data?
This examination results in information that the process manager can act on in a way that’s appropriate - change the goal, change the process, or change the validation amount limit, for example.
While this example is simple, the process of investigation using process data can be broadly applied to all processes automated with the Bonita platform.
Here’s what Business Process Insights offers right from the start:
- You now have visibility into process data…get it, see it
- Use that data to streamline and optimize processes for better performance - identify activities and flow that slow down or choke processes
- A means to manage automated processes according to specified objectives or goals
The whole business team can use information based on data from Bonita Process Insights to make informed, data-driven decisions about where and how to target changes to streamline, optimize, and continuously improve processes.
Summary
In the dynamic landscape of modern business, leveraging the power of data is important for staying competitive and achieving success. Bonita Process Insights offers businesses a comprehensive solution to unlock the potential of data inside their processes. By providing visibility into process data and empowering decision-makers to take informed actions, Bonita Process Insights enables organizations to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and drive continuous improvement. As businesses navigate the complexities of today's markets, tools like Bonita Process Insights become a strategic choice for sustainable growth and success. With the right insights at their fingertips, businesses can ensure process excellence, remaining agile, responsive, and resilient in an ever-evolving business environment.
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Bonitasoft reaffirms its commitment to innovation and continuous improvement, providing development teams with powerful tools to accelerate application development, and business users with actionable data to support process optimization. Contact us today if you want to know more about Bonita Process Insights.
