2024 is the Year for Your AI-Powered Process Revolution

Traditional process mapping struggles to provide real-time visibility into complex operations. This creates a blind spot hindering transformation efforts. Process Intelligence emerges as a game-changer, offering a digital replica of your operations for continuous monitoring and data-driven decision making. Generative AI takes process intelligence a step further by translating observed activities into clear insights for everyone in your organization. Together, these technologies empower businesses to achieve their transformation goals with unparalleled efficiency.

It was a warm week in Miami, sizzling with hot new ideas at the 25th OPEX Week: Business Transformation World Summit. Vinay Mummigatti, EVP Strategy and Customer Transformation with Skan, took the stage to chat with over 500+ attendees about the practical perspectives of the AI-Powered Process Revolution. Mummigatti was joined by Lokesh Venugopal, Senior Director of Business Transformation & Process Engineering at Dell Technologies. Together, they talked about the facts and myths of Process Intelligence and Generative AI to share how organizations are really using the technologies today. 

The Operations Black Box: We know what comes out, but rarely understand what goes in

Landing an airplane, like piloting a transformation, requires a balance of factors, like wind direction, barometric pressure, altitude, and most importantly, a clear line of sight of the runway. Here’s why most transformation efforts fail to land on the desired runway—there’s no line of sight between tactics and outcomes or KPIs. 

This poor visibility routes decision-making to incorrect findings. Your grand transformation ends up swirling in the vexing mystery of the Bermuda Triangle rather than making a soft landing at the foot of your goals. 

Why have operations become so complex, creating such an enigmatic black box? Vinay Mummigatti, EVP Strategy and Customer Transformation with Skan pointed to mergers and acquisitions, more sophisticated tech stacks, a distributed workforce, product line expansions and more. “We have lost track of what really goes on in that black box,” he explained.

With Process Intelligence, every transformation ‘begins with an end,’ providing a clear pathway between your baseline and desired outcomes. 

Process Intelligence: Not Just Generating More Data

Vinay Mummigatti explained the evolution of process discovery and showed how conventional solutions still leave blind spots. Organizations need to pursue solutions that eliminate these hurdles in order to connect procedures, controls, data sources, and KPIs. Most are overloaded with discrete point solutions that solve small, localized problems, but lack visibility into the bigger picture. “But fundamentally, the ability to map what humans do, or the inability to do so, is the missing link in the transformation journey,” explained Mummigatti.

For example, process mining worked well historically, when organizations conducted much of their operations within a single platform. It excelled when operations centered in a single application where data was defined in specifically formatted ways. 

Task mining entered the conversation as a way to uncover the roles humans played, mainly to reveal opportunities for robotic process automation (RPA). These tools had a one-track-mind strategy, focused on turning tasks performed by an individual operator into strict rules software could execute. 

Enter Process Intelligence to close these important gaps. Using it, organizations have real-time visibility into their processes, workforce, and technologies. With zero integrations, it doesn’t matter what format system event logs are in, or what apps or software make up your tech stack. Process Intelligence is ‘always-on’, performing continuous monitoring of your operations, so recommendations and insights are always up to date. 

How Digital Twins let you see inside the Operations Black Box

Vinay Mummigatti showcased how Skan creates a replica—a digital twin—of your operational black box. It’s one thing to admire it from the outside, like a completed LEGO castle or Millenium Falcon. But how is it made? With Skan, you can dismantle the black box and have a look at each individual building block to finally see what’s inside. The renewed visibility gives you unparalleled access to data, models, analytics, and simulation opportunities. 

“Skan is able to represent the entire black box in the form of a digital replica, not just of your process, but of your workforce, of your technology, bringing together all these elements as data models, analytics, simulations. And something that you can really see what is happening in real time, make sense out of it, and then go back and control your processes to deliver the desired outcomes.” - Vinay Mummigatti, EVP Strategy and Customer Transformation, Skan

Skan introduces a new source of intelligence—the ‘telemetry of work’—a data-centric view of touch points across operations. 

Generative AI and Process Intelligence

Generative AI turns Process Intelligence’s new level of visibility into action. By autonomously observing thousands of operators, data becomes more viable. 

Perhaps you’ve asked a Generative AI tool like ChatGPT to explain a puzzling meme or suggest a dinner recipe based on a photo of what’s in your fridge. AI-powered Process Intelligence has the potential to harnesses this skill to observe and understand the context of team members’ interactions with computer systems. As Mummigatti explains, you could “generate more conversation-based information from the insights we are generating.” 

Through the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), you can translate observed activities into intelligence digestible by not just by machines or data scientists, but by a broader base of team members. 

Why Dell Technologies loves Skan’s Process Intelligence Platform

Lokesh Venugopal, Senior Director of Business Transformation & Process Engineering at Dell Technologies, joined the conversation to elucidate how his company is using Process Intelligence. 

As Venugopal explains, most organizations excel at the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of process transformation. They can organize a project timeline and pinpoint objectives. Most come to the table with a solid understanding of what they want to transform based on what their customers are looking for. 

But, organizations miss the third ingredient: How? Of all the methods to get between point A and point B—how can we decide which strategy produces the most effective transformation? 

Venugopal outlines their Process Intelligence journey, and how they use digital twins to simulate outcomes before finalizing a strategy. Observing processes to see how they’re functioning, how reality diverges from the hypothesis, and what ad hoc adjustments need to be made. At Dell Technologies, they don’t automate just to automate. They want to be more selective, and make sure a chosen automation delivers value to customers by analyzing the potential outcomes of each opportunity. 

They’re using Process Intelligence to simulate automated tools in their support department and see which one best: 

• Reduces cycle time 
• Improves utilization of skill sets
• Finds training opportunities
• Boosts resolution accuracy 

Process Intelligence provides Dell with a real-time view into how processes are running, and recommends proactive, mid-flight course corrections. 

Watch the Full Keynote Session OnDemand

Process Intelligence helps you make decisions based on data—and not just a point-in-time data, but through a continuous tracing of the data. Fortune 500 companies, like Dell Technologies, are using this technology to: 

• Establish a real-time line of sight to outcomes, not through outdated process maps drawn months or years ago, but real-time process maps 
• Uncover the root-cause of issues and bottlenecks 
• Make data-driven transformation decisions based on data, not on heuristics 

Watch the full presentation for an inside peek at Dell Technology’s Process Intelligence initiatives and how you can start a similar journey.