The variability confronting modern organizations has made the role of process owner both more strategic and complex: factors such as the race toward digitalization, the emergence of new business models, and stricter compliance and sustainability requirements necessitate constant process adaptation. Process owners need to facilitate these changes while keeping (and possibly increasing) efficiency and customer satisfaction. This is no small feat.
But can generative AI help process owners master this complexity? We believe it can. As described in our previous blog in this generative AI series, this disruptive technology is reshaping business process management (BPM) disciplines and unlocking a world of new opportunities for process experts.
Everyday challenges and the support of generative AI
Generative AI can be a powerful tool in the hands of process owners, helping them accelerate and simplify a number of daily tasks, as well as supporting them with decision-making. Here are some examples of how this can work:
- Process design: Process owners and modelers typically define the different steps of a process, the stakeholders involved, and the expected output in alignment with other process owners and the broader company strategy. Designing a new process can require months of stakeholder interviews and workshops, but generative AI can leverage large datasets and best practices to instantly deliver guided recommendations on the process models to adopt, which can be used “as is” or as a foundation that process owners can further perfect.
- Process implementation: Generative AI can help simulate different scenarios and test them in a virtual environment before bringing them to life, helping process owners identify possible bottlenecks, delays, and delivery issues before they occur, as well as the associated mitigation strategies. In this phase, process owners also need to provide different stakeholders with all the instructions they need to execute the process. Generative AI can help capture knowledge and generate assets such as operating procedures, manuals, reports, and custom training programs and tutorials with limited human intervention.
- Process monitoring and excellence: “If I am redesigning procure to pay, which are the metrics I should monitor? Suppliers’ lead times? Cost per invoice? Contract compliance rate? More? And at which point of the process should I track them?” Similar to producing process design recommendations and leveraging best practices and industry standards, generative AI can suggest the most relevant KPIs to be monitored at each phase of the process. Also, process owners equipped with generative AI can continuously analyze the process and get optimization suggestions – such as for procurement and delivery options, scheduling, or resource allocations – that can help optimize overall process efficiency.
SAP Signavio solutions: Generative AI for the process world
SAP has recently unveiled process AI for SAP Signavio solutions: a new collection of generative AI capabilities that will specifically benefit process owners.
First to launch in the next days will be a process recommender capability that provides AI-generated business process model recommendations, bypassing the need for lengthy consultation sessions. Process owners can type their questions in natural language and obtain ready-to-consume process model recommendations from a database of over 5,000 best practices. This gives process owners a great foundation they can interact with and further perfect.
Also delivered with the August release is a performance indicators recommender capability. Using the “same old process indicators” to monitor newly designed processes can lead to misleading decisions. Identifying key process metrics among a variety of options is critical to measuring success. This capability can recommend the most relevant indicators to assess the performance of a business process, helping process owners redefine their measurement strategy.
In addition, a prompt-based process mining feature is now available to a target user group in beta testing and it will then be released later this year. It will help users answer questions such as “Where is my biggest process problem procurement?” “Which plant performs the best?” and “How can I improve my cycle times?” Process owners will be able to interact with our process mining solution with a question-and-answer approach and quickly get much-needed insight into how they can streamline operations, reduce overheads, and ultimately improve customer experience.
The value of data
Obviously, the foundation of any AI algorithm is the data that it learns from – and this is where the combination of SAP’s 50+ years of accumulated knowledge and the process expertise that supports SAP Signavio solutions sets us apart when it comes to generative AI. In a recent interview SAP Signavio General Manager Dr. Gero Decker explained: “Your AI is only as good as your data, and at SAP we have a broad and diverse dataset. Our access to business data, our understanding of business processes, and our deep domain and industry expertise: these are major differentiators to our partners and customers. SAP is just a beautiful place to be, as the most exciting stuff for generative AI in the business context is happening here.”
Are you eager to learn more?
Join us for our upcoming webcast (Harnessing the Power of Generative AI for Business Process Transformation) to understand how SAP is using generative AI to craft next-generation BPM solutions.