I am in awe of the adaptability of humans. Even though the pandemic has altered our lives, we continue to thrive by changing the way we work, conduct business, and even the way we live at home. I have had the pleasure of working with businesses that have exhibited a strong urge to achieve business resilience during these uncertain times and have acted accordingly. And a key part of this recovery has been from the early adopters of digital, who have demonstrated the vital role it plays in ensuring business continuity.
Automation Driving Resilience
The pandemic brought businesses to a screeching halt leaving them shut down for weeks. Critical business processes had to be postponed and even cancelled before enterprises realized that they needed to transform their business models through rapid digitalization. Today, organizations are understanding the need for digital tools which has been acknowledged widely across industries and geographies, especially as key differentiators ensuring survival and innovation alike.
There are numerous examples of industries leveraging digital tools to overcome the challenges of a pandemic-stricken world. But the one that stands out for me is the use of cloud, analytics, and automation by organizations to optimize their operations. In one instance, a bank in Europe leveraged these technologies to migrate over 38 million customer records from six locations, across three countries, in just four weeks.
Automation enabled the bank to handle over 10,000 bank requests for more than 20 bank activities, each day. In another case, a global gaming company utilized the functionalities of analytics, automation, and cloud to process over 300,000 invoices in more than 40 currencies, each month. These technologies played a key role in developing a self-service portal for the company’s 200-plus vendors.
Although the two cases are starkly different, their use of the intelligent business process management suite (BPMS) and automation remains common. BPMS has been a useful tool for enterprise-wide integration and process management for over a decade. But today, BPMS utility has increased multifold to enable work from anywhere. It enables organizations to strategically model their business to monitor improvements and optimize processes through automation. However, designing such a roadmap is an arduous process and requires expertise and experience.
The lack of standardized governance inhibits enterprises from adding new or changing existing functionalities. A communication gap between the technical and strategic business levels further exacerbates the issues, leading to operational difficulties in integration and collaboration. To counter these problems, enterprises need to adopt a business process management automation solution— one that resolves these challenges and also provides them with a sustainable and resilient business environment.
Adopting BPMS Automation for Work from Anywhere
An effective BPMS automation solution provides the tools for teams to be accountable for their tasks and enterprises to innovate and iteratively improve processes. In such an environment, an integrated framework that can seamlessly manage content, workflow, and communication with all stakeholders is ideal.
The business process management framework would begin with digitalizing, refining, and classifying data and information. The next step is to develop a process model that standardizes the workflow and enables automation. Finally, simulation, orchestration, and analysis of the process workflow ensures consistency across the complete framework.
Another key objective of the BPMS automation tool is enabling various aspects of the workflow management such as team collaboration, data visualization, and issue resolution to enable process adaptability. In the end, options such as personalization, distribution, and monitoring allow higher engagement between teams.
Adding cloud and analytics to the integrated framework can allow it to scale as well as generate deeper insights from the data. A business process automation solution with these capabilities can enhance enterprise productivity and performance. Using a BPMS tool, like HCLTech’s Toscana which is supported on Red Hat Middleware, can be a major step toward building business resilience.
BPMS Automation in Action
To illustrate Toscana‘s functionalities and benefits, let me share with you the story of a recent project we worked on. The increasing number of coronavirus cases had prompted the need for improving disaster management efforts in India. The state of Tamil Nadu took the initiative and partnered with us to create a Disaster Management Data Analytics Center to manage the situation. The project’s objectives were to strengthen the first-level response efforts with real-time information, report and monitor all quarantine cases, and support communication between patients and doctors.
At HCLTech, we were aware of the time-sensitive nature of the project. So through our rapid implementation approach, we established a COVID-19 response command center in just two weeks. To do this, we leveraged our Toscana BPMS Automation and Analytics solution. The business process automation framework involves four basic stages of implementation– digitalize, process, adapt, and engage. Using our unique omni-integrated BPMS tool suite and agile approach, we quickly streamlined the processes.
The highly configurable and flexible nature of the BPMS tool platform helped us set up real-time dashboards, custom alerts, service-level agreement (SLA) monitoring, and an automated call distribution system in very little time. With real-time dashboards, we captured the data trends from all districts of the state. The customized alerts provided updates to top government officials. With automatic call routing to different government departments, query resolution became faster and easier. The SLA monitoring tracked the addressing and closure of the requests within the timeline.
Our business process automation solution helped the government’s efforts to manage the coronavirus pandemic. The real-time data simplified the management and tracking of a large influx of requests. Data analytics allowed the government to make critical decisions, such as for resource allocation amidst rising confirmed cases. The easy data capture and auto segregation functionality of Toscana helped doctors focus on critical cases.
While this example is from the government sector, it serves to prove my point and demonstrates the potential Toscana has to be a game-changer in business resilience for global enterprises across industries. It is high time that enterprises adopt technologies such as business process automation to navigate in the new normal and build resilience for future growth and sustenance.
If you are interested to know more about Toscana, please click here!
