By Amaresh Tripathy, Global Analytics Business Leader, Genpact
Today, in a digitally enabled economy, organizations are battling with a vast multitude of technical and process complexities. To succeed, enterprises must have efficient operations internally. Examining processes manually is no longer the solve. Data needs to be at the very core of transformation. In view of this, Process Intelligence has emerged as a new technology that enables organizations to gather and analyze data to measure their processes. It acts as a catalyst for business transformation by giving the organization complete transparency into their processes.
As per a recent HFS’ Pulse survey, process mining and discovery have emerged as the leading technology investments made by Global 2000 enterprises among other emerging technologies like AI, cybersecurity, and automation. Simply put, process mining is the science of collecting enterprise operations data and existing process models and applying data mining and data science techniques to reveal the current state of process standardization. Whereas process discovery is observing how individual employees and teams work at the user level. Process Intelligence which is a combination of mining and discovery, has been steadily gaining momentum and the technology is clearly having its moment in the sun. The versatility of the process mining and discovery tools have made enterprises choose to invest in process intelligence over other emerging technologies. They can observe, modify, and monitor any number of business processes, applications, and functions.
We’ve observed that highest demand for process intelligence comes from two business areas – Finance & Accounting (F&A) and IT/digital teams. In recent years, enterprise leaders have realized that F&A must be at the core of their business. The CFO’s office is now increasingly becoming a strategic advisor to the business, influencing both the top and bottom lines. This evolution has prompted companies to transition toward data-driven finance that can critically influence corporate strategy and help businesses win in their markets.
Process Intelligence Adoption
In large transformation programs, the biggest challenge isn’t the technology or the project management, it’s making the change stick. Breaking massive change into actionable, bite-sized chunks allows you to take a more agile approach. It also means rethinking and redesigning existing processes and models around the employee and user experience. Both technical and non-technical skill sets will be required for organizations to make headway with process intelligence. The biggest talent needs for any organization today are data analysis and analytical modeling, experience in process analysis and improvement, communication and storytelling, and data integration, manipulation, visualization, and dashboarding.
The high-tech industry sees process intelligence adoption driven by IT departments more than others. And larger organizations see more demand coming from their IT and digital teams with annual revenues greater than $10 billion. As larger organizations have complex technology landscapes, they must carefully think through and assess their ERP modernization journeys and digital investments, and these technologies can help. Moreover, digital departments in the research industry increasingly consider process intelligence tools as the starting point for evaluating digital transformation opportunities, making them the companion of digital initiatives that could help enterprises get a sense of process performance and plan for new pilots and deployments of automation, AI, workflow, and other technological interventions. As businesses explore new digital technologies, process intelligence’s role also increases.
With process intelligence products in high demand, enterprises are serious about tackling their technical and process challenges. However, process intelligence is still a relatively new technology, albeit with huge potential. I believe its usage is likely to creep into the wider organization, spiking a further increase in adoption in the coming future.