Building Process Transparency

Businesses are struggling to understand their workflows after a surge in remote work and digital transformation. Process transparency, a key benefit of process intelligence, helps create a clear picture of current processes. This includes mapping variations, measuring performance metrics, and assessing the impact of changes. With this understanding, businesses can optimize operations for the "new normal."

Welcome to part 4 of an ongoing series of blog posts demystifying “process intelligence” - the terms, the technologies, and how and why process intelligence can help improve your business. In our previous blog post we discussed task mining's strengths over other process discovery methods such as process mining and its own set of challenges - including difficulty identifying end-to-end processes over long periods of time. As we dig deeper into how process intelligence can help, it's important to take a look at some of the most common use cases. One use case is process transparency, which we will cover in this blog.

As always, you can learn more about this and related topics by reading the Skan Process Intelligence Playbook here.

What is Process Transparency?

Process transparency focuses on building an initial view of a process and work. For our fourth blog post in this series, we will be looking at how you can build process transparency, how it can help improve your business, and a process transparency use case that shows that it is important to understand the current baseline of how a process is accomplished before improving it.

Why Process Transparency is Important

According to Deloitte’s 2021 State of Process Mining report, the second most common expectation of process mining is “process transparency,” leaping ahead of even common optimization-focused outcomes such as cost reduction, digital transformation, automation, and even process re-design.

“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security…”
 - Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

In reality, this focus on building process transparency should come as no surprise.

2020 and 2021 resulted in a historically unprecedented acceleration of digital transformation, in many cases completely changing the way enterprises get work done. In particular, employees and work have increasingly shifted to remote scenarios in the last 18 months. According to research by Gallup, the percentage of full-time remote workers rose from 33% to 61% during March 2020. Although that number came down later that year, Upwork research from December 2020 found that 41.8% of American workers still worked from home nine months into the pandemic.

In this new era of remote workforces, digital tools became necessary. Employees began collaborating through new online tools, and steps in a process that previously involved paper quickly shifted to a digital format.

A result of this high pace of transformation is that organizations’ knowledge of their processes has fallen behind. Standard operating procedures have become obsolete, process steps and workflows have fundamentally changed, and existing performance metrics have become outdated and inaccurate.

When asked about what the impacts of growing levels of collaboration, communication, and connectivity mean to the future of work, 48% of C-suite executives responding to Deloitte’s Transitioning to the Future of Work and the Workplace report cited increasing rates of innovation as a key impact.

As operations and business leaders start evaluating opportunities for optimizing their operations and processes in 2022 and beyond, they first need to build an updated understanding of the new baseline of work in their organizations.

Here are ways that Process Intelligence can help business leaders understand the 'new normal' of work in their organizations:

• Building accurate, detailed process maps to reflect the new digital reality of processes and work, including process variations and permutations.
• Creating a data-driven baseline of key process metrics such as utilization and throughput, to understand the exact time and effort involved in completing a process, even across different variations.
• Assessing the impact of interventions and implemented changes to processes, such as process redesign and automation: Quantifying the impact which changes to their processes have had on KPIs and efficiency metrics.

Can process intelligence tools bring process transparency? Research seems to suggest that they can. When asked about the value that process mining delivered, “process transparency for as-is processes” ranked highest among responses given to Deloitte for its 2021 State of Process Mining report.

Ready to learn more? Read the Process Intelligence Playbook

Modern process optimization requires a data-driven approach. That means considering all the technologies that can help you do that.

Wondering where to get started?

Skan’s actionable Process Intelligence Playbook explains approaches to process discovery, how to get started with process intelligence, and illustrates process intelligence in action through real-world applications.

Ready to learn more? Get the Skan Process Intelligence Playbook today.