Agile collaboration
This unprecedented situation is disrupting the habits and daily lives of millions of people around the world. You can find more details of Signavio’s response on our dedicated COVID-19 page, and we have already covered 5 ways process management helps your business in a crisis. Now, let’s focus on why digital transformation is an effective crisis response.
In a nutshell, digital transformation offers a way to keep your business operationally healthy, while ensuring you maintain communication and collaboration within teams and across all areas of your organization. For more detail, read on...
4 reasons why digital transformation is an effective crisis response
At a time when travel is limited, and most (if not all) employees are working remotely, your business needs to adapt and be agile to ensure business continuity. The following reasons why digital transformation is an effective crisis response are based on embracing this flexibility in the short-term, and building a clear picture of your process framework to embed long-term gains.
Understanding and modeling business processes
In a crisis situation, many processes within an organization will slow down or stop altogether. Others, usually mission-critical ones, may be streamlined in new ways. Business process modeling plays a pivotal role in enabling processes to be cut back to essentials, by ensuring organizations have:
- A clear understanding and overview of the order and sequencing of different activities;
- Clarity on areas of handover and/or conflict between the different people in charge;
- A solid foundation to consider future scaled-down processes, while respecting key issues such as compliance, ISO standards, quality assurance, and customer experience.
By understanding the end-to-end operation of your processes and having reliable, efficient and documented modeling, you have clear access to all the steps and roles specific to each of your processes. This allows you to react quickly and with full knowledge of the facts to scale-down essential processes.
Take it a step further: if the information you have about a process in your supply chain seems to be inconsistent, for example,, process mining technology can help you. The technology will trace your process as it is, based on data stored in your IT systems, and access its end-to-end modeling. Process mining can also highlight variations in your current process and reveal the most efficient and cost-effective path, meaning you can quickly and easily apply the appropriate process changes to support process excellence.
Using simulation for informed decisions
Your processes are well established. They are triggered daily and in some cases, repeatedly. Those responsible for the processes know how they work from start to finish. But if something unforeseen happens, your processes often need to be reviewed. After all, in a crisis situation, it is very often necessary for companies to scale down processes as a result of falling/increasing demands and fewer staff.
The objective of a simulation is to test the operationality of the scenarios and to ensure the efficiency of an organization, even in a scaled-down mode. With process simulation, get an informed view of the impact scaling down your processes will have on your value chain: from supply logistics to manufacturing to marketing. This information will allow you to identify the most efficient allocation of your resources and/or the most impactful process changes to implement with the resources you have available.
Keeping business on track with process mining
At this very moment, many, if not all, of a company's employees are working from home, at some distance from each other. The interactions that used to exist within the office between employees and management have shifted to applications such as Slack or GoToMeeting, making the collaborative aspect of work 100% digital.
There is a high risk that processes will break down due to a general lack of frequent communication, poor company knowledge of the process as a whole, or information being lost along the way. At the enterprise level, this could have repercussions like:
- Loss of performance
- New bottlenecks
- Loss of compliance
- Processing delays
Process mining is the ideal solution to meet these challenges. Process discovery provides both visibility and understanding of the current state of your processes and operations by automatically applying the most advanced process mining algorithms. Process mining provides a clear and transparent visualization of your operational reality and allows you to identify drifts, non-compliant behaviors and bottlenecks, vital when crisis situations require rapid changes to ‘business as usual’.
Keeping your teams in the loop with workflows
As mentioned above, distance working disrupts inter-team collaborations, meaning maintaining a high level of consistency and efficiency throughout your organization takes on a new, digital dimension. To monitor processes point by point and ensure their end-to-end execution, turn your business process models into standardised workflows that can be deployed throughout your organisation and executed in the same way, no matter where staff are located.
Workflows go beyond task and ticket management systems, allowing you to capture, connect and communicate how work is done simply and quickly, with 100% transparent tracking and integration of all key players in the loop. After all, in a crisis situation, it is fundamental to move forward together to face the challenges, and to keep in mind that collaboration is one of the keys to success.
Facing the crisis with Signavio
Signavio is well aware of the difficulties that companies are currently facing; these reasons why digital transformation is an effective crisis response are the beginning of the story, not the end. The SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite is a powerful software solution that takes into account all the critical aspects you have to face in a crisis situation.
For more information, you can visit our dedicated COVID-19 response page, or contact us directly at info@signavio.com. In the meantime, you can still subscribe to our free 30-day trial to implement the changes necessary to maintain your business, in the current situation and beyond.