Process Simulation, Flexible Configuration and Execution
A large business process is a chain of several day-to-day small business tasks. So it is important to document and simulate before we change large processes, as any of those dependent small tasks might impact the larger business objective.
While assessing your needs, we need to look out for the nature of data, the source of data, people engagement needs, channels, responsiveness, scalability, and intelligence. Businesses also need to look out for ‘exceptions management’ and ‘configurable business rules’ which can relate to real-world issues instead of the plain vanilla process defined by software vendors.
Design Thinking
User Experience centric design is increasingly becoming critical to operations transformation as it seeks to deliver a stronger emotional impact that helps realize strategic goals of the company. While it brings usability at the core, the focus is on adoption and decreased repulsion by key stakeholders. Personalization driven by insights and business experience is the key to adoption.
Therefore, both process and content have to adapt per user-experience demand.
Knowledge Management
Digital process management applications have to be capable enough to provide knowledge and information across the company. This feature offers quick answers for bringing key organization data; and consequently brings in a better sustainability situation. To enable efficiency, your process orchestrator should be able to bring knowledge with context, content, behavior and business rules to the very instant of process orchestration.
Mobility
For connected and motivated people engagement, mobility is the expectation of both customers as well as the employee. The development of smartphones and tablets has cast a spell on both personal and the expert being. The DPA software should have a mobile-friendly interface, easily extendible to modern IOT devices.
Team collaboration
An inter-departmental ideology is so real to make a new service or product; that collaboration is now an almost unavoidable norm. Collaboration has become an effective tool to bring different thoughts from several departments throughout the organization so the company plan can be implemented effectively, and business goals can be attained. Basic functions like ‘chatter on audit log’ is ensuring real-time decisioning across teams.
Security
A perfect DPA should offer encryption of ‘data at rest’ and ‘data in motion’. With the enforcement of GDPR laws, customer data compliance needs are now paramount. Cybersecurity must be the very first priority of Digital Process Management software. It should provide certified compliance standards and efficient, unhindered disaster recovery.
Technical Compatibility
Technical compatibility refers to the scenario where DPA applications must be harmonious enough to deliver information as demanded by business stakeholders like customers, partners as well as the employee natural ecosystem. There is an increasing trend of low-code and no-code DPA solutions. We need to look out for established players for mission-critical processes. It should be noted that even Open source DPA vendors are pretty set now and can deliver huge scalability and reliability.
Futuristic
For a decade, most of the structured processes were taken care of by the BPM suite of products. Now, with DPA, even the most unstructured processes should be brought into the core process. New capabilities of cognition, OCR and Robotic Process Automation can even automate most unstructured processes and deliver hyper-automation. Some of these tools can also call external AI-powered APIs to bring in the right intelligence to enable human-like intelligence and decision-making.
Cost
There is a variety of reliable software available at a well-optimized cost. We don't want to hire a DPA provider who runs the stock exchange, to run your small invoice management processes. An optimal cost-based automation ROI calculation is key for decision-making. There are also multiple options for a similar SaaS or BPaaS solution for price and time-sensitive enterprises.
Fast and Agile
As all organizations are moving towards a substantial consolidated market in the future; everyone wants to stay agile, modernize their core and let the best of their ideas be delivered in a very short span of time. DPA is a huge business enabler in this agility era. So, we need to focus and pick only the technologies which can be configured and deployed quickly on the development environment and subsequently to testing and production environments. Its deployment approach is also critical to the employee experience, those who are hard at work innovating on a daily basis to get us the right output as needed.
Product Support
Responsiveness and localization of product support is always a better idea. So, we need to choose the software provider based on the product support they're prepared to provide. Vendors who provide immediate customer support are ideal. A thorough search of the product skill base inside the organization and external resource pool is always crucial for smooth growth and reliability.
Anand Sagar is a Digital Transformation Partner with Wipro Ltd. He brings more than a decade of experience in Customer Experience, Business Process Management and Commerce Consulting. Anand is also a certified Commerce, CRM and Robotics Automation Solution Architect. He is currently part of the Wipro Modern Application Services Consulting Business Unit and has held lead consulting positions as Transformation Leader in multiple Fortune 100 companies, in the US and Europe.
Contact: Anand.sagar@wipro.com