Co-author: Pravesh Gosain
It’s been a year since the global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every facet of society, business and personal lives. In coping with this change, we’ve all faced new challenges which have given us the experience necessary to innovate and reimagine the future. One of the key lessons in this regard comes from how global industries have adapted their operational business models to this new reality. From finance and logistics to manufacturing and healthcare— nearly all (93%) industries have transitioned to either a remote working model or a socially-distanced, PPE-dependent working environment.
However, this shift isn’t transitional. It will potentially become a mainstay of modern operations as this new model and environment are the only viable options for business continuity. This comes with new challenges, mainly, the critical need of asserting operational control and workflow management over granulated business processes and functions.
Control and Management Challenges of Business Operations in the New Normal
As quarterly audits and year-end reviews approach ever closer, even hesitant business leaders have realized the importance of workflow visibility and management. This offers added insights into deeper business functions to improve overall efficiency. Here, emerging enterprise digitalization solutions play a key role in ensuring business success.
The rapid digitalization solutions to support remote work has already pushed leaders into a tight spot of choosing between operations observability and management. In the beginning of the new normal, gaps between operations and enterprise IT made it difficult to monitor each task and accurately measure business KPIs. This left managers worried over the visibility into the employees’ workflows causing them to pass the anxiety on to their team members. Gartner found 76% of HR leaders agreeing to these employee concerns over remote working productivity and engagement.
Most of these problems typically arise from operational redundancies and siloed monitoring efforts in the remote working environment. Business process and workflow management inaccuracies and the lack of effectively designed IT/OT infrastructure also severely affects efficiency. Enabling better operational control and workflow management necessitate leaders to implement a proactive observability and management system across the organization targeting business outcomes. An end-to-end analytics-driven process and performance management solution can be a favorable tool to unify silos and optimize processes.
Advantages of an Analytics-Driven Business Process Management Framework
For enterprise-wide process optimization and better customer experience, the current dynamic business ecosystem requires technology tools to observe and manage both internal and external risks. From internal workflows to supply chain end-to-end process visibility, organizations need business process intelligence with real-time observability stretching over workflows to enable holistic and continuous process improvement. Such a robust mechanism is only possible after integrating a workflow reengineering and management platform having automation capabilities with a predictive analytics-enabled process performance observability solution.
The combination of these functionalities creates a framework that provides enterprises with a three-dimensional coverage to provide a 360-degree view of operations. To be precise, business process observability, which is a key component of this framework, brings insights on functional execution for critical business outcomes. Measuring the performance and health of business processes with respect to associated business KPIs allows tagging most relevant technical data to back the decisions needed for either remediation or observation
This enhanced access enables businesses to ensure continuous workflow optimization and reengineering along with process observability and predictive analytics in real-time. However, as these two solutions work in tandem, an organization achieves the highest effective outcomes from case management, business rule management, holistic process observability, reporting, and master data management. In fact, this is further improved with supporting IT and operation teams in prioritizing workflows, delivering client SLAs and/or products, managing the end-to-end SLA chain, and automating manual routine tasks. But most solutions do not offer this kind of functional synergy.
iControl and Toscana: Experience the Value of Combining Forces
At HCLTech, we’ve designed solutions that leverage this feature and deliver better results by enabling solutions synergy at the design and execution level. HCLTech’s DRYiCE iControl enables business process intelligence with process flow monitoring and 360° process visualization. This allows businesses to gain real-time insights into the processes and take a proactive stance in their management strategy. They can overcome any associated enterprise-wide challenge and identify potential gap areas to take preventative action using predictive analytics.
A future-forward process observability solution, iControl helps leaders to view the business and technology operations together, enabling the business to achieve its goals effectively. While eliminating the siloed monitoring efforts, the unified view enables managers to accurately measure business KPIs in real-time. iControl also promotes informed process optimization decision-making on the part of the business owners by leveraging data intelligence.
While iControl takes care of the systemic controls, Toscana’s configurable and flexible integrated solution which helps decision makers manage their business processes with a range of controls. Toscana places advanced tools for content integration and dynamic case management directly in the hands of the users and even simplifies complex tasks related to process orchestration, enterprise mobility, and workplace collaboration as well. As a result, Toscana can drive enterprise-wide business process intelligence with advanced process improvements that can eliminate redundancies across the operational pipeline and help improve productivity and efficiency.
Together, Toscana empowers business stakeholders to manage risks and perform actions based on the insights generated from iControl flow monitoring. The collective advantages go far beyond their individual benefits with features such as:
- Contextual insights and real-time KPI monitoring help enterprises optimize processes effectively
- A collaborative environment for process design enables enterprise architecture modeling
- Complete visibility of data and intelligent analytics help enhance customer experience and engagement
- Identification of next-best-action on the basis of historic trends
- Dynamic process data mapping with the help of real-time notifications and alerts
- Holistic integration of ERP systems, CRM, reporting tools, and legacy systems
- Deployment flexibility of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments
While iControl and Toscana are two separate platforms, they possess immense power for the enterprise when deployed together. With complementary features, they offer a mélange of solutions that can directly impact operations and outcomes. These not only align with business objectives but also streamline and optimize crucial processes. In general, they work together to address the four key areas of business process observability, business operational intelligence, business workflow exception management, and business workflow controllability.
Using these pillars, business gain key capabilities of:
- Predictive deep insights
- Robust critical operations management
- Business impact predictions
- Manual process automation
- Near zero-touch operations
- Proactive problem identification
- Faster defect resolution rates
- Meeting compliances and regulations
- Business workflow reengineering
Reengineering Innovation for Current and Future Needs
The market landscape of the future is fraught with uncertainty and volatility. For any modern enterprise to be prepared, it is imperative for business leaders to continually evolve and reimagine their business processes. More importantly, they need to adopt new solutions that help them redefine their fundamental approaches in rapid response to changing conditions.
This is the only way to sustain and thrive their business operations in an ever changing market. Now the achievement of business goals lies squarely on the ability to make the right decision at the right time with the right combination of digital tools and technology. A combination of iControl and Toscana are the definitive step forward in helping any organization achieve a future-ready posture for their business process operations.
