Intro:
Customers are becoming more and more spoiled. For example, companies such as Amazon, for which customer satisfaction is paramount, are obsessed with providing their customers with better and better products and services. As a result, customers have quickly become accustomed to seamless availability, fast delivery, personalized treatment, and a high consistency level. Most customers now expect companies to offer this level of experience too. However, not every company is up to the task—customers whose expectations will migrate without mercy if their expectations are not met.
Advantages
To meet today's requirements, it is therefore enormously important to continually optimize business processes. In addition to customer satisfaction, companies with definite process management benefit from lower costs and better control, thus offering more competitive products and prices.
A study by BPMO and BearingPoint confirms these statements. Among the companies surveyed, 81% consider process management a critical issue, partly because it is the only way to achieve strategic goals. Most companies start process management initiatives to save costs, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction.
These goals are achieved primarily through the digitization of processes. Through digitization, companies succeed in understanding their in-house operations and can thus optimize them.
Approach:
Before digitizing, it is necessary to tidy up. To reap digitization and automation benefits, processes must first be documented, optimized, and finally, standardized. In some cases, however, it is also worth looking beyond existing processes and "reinventing" the business process. A process should be goal-oriented and always pay attention to value creation. Many of the steps required in the past are questioned and can be reduced/optimized in most cases. Just because it has always been done this way does not mean it is right. It may well happen that organizational structures and roles need redefining.
Once processes are defined and all inefficiencies eliminated as best as possible, the digitization can start. Even after digitization, it may well be that the target and the actual diverge. The good thing is, these discrepancies or even correction entries are detected in the ERP system, for example. Because here, the event logs can be read out and analyzed by process mining tools like Celonis. This way, even the last inefficiencies are eliminated.
Conclusion:
Everyone is talking about digitalization (digitization and automation of business processes). Even though the new world promises many advantages, it is fundamental to start with "classic" process management. Only if the processes are efficiently developed, standardized, and meticulously documented can a company digitize them. Regardless of all the technology, good leadership is never out of fashion since human factors still need to be understood.
