The Key to Managing a Crisis: Your Enterprise Data

Business processes at every organization are being stress-tested, and many are failing under the pressure.

Recently, an airline call center was hit with a tsunami of irate customers, demanding to redeem their frequent flyer miles. The airline did not have enough staff to deal with this scenario, and hurried layoffs left them with no option to manage customer calls, never mind the resulting PR crisis.

But how could the airline have possibly imagined what would happen?

The answer is Enterprise data. Organizations know far more than they realize about how to manage through this crisis, but few are properly set up to access it.

The crisis has heightened the urgency of becoming an Intelligent Organization

By now every organization fully understands the importance of data.  Yet this crisis has revealed the risks of taking a too-slow approach.

Hindsight, of course, is always perfect. Still, imagine how much stronger any given organization would have been if they had data to help them define critical vs. non-critical activities, predict the impact of the crisis, automate tasks that could run even without human intervention, and prevent disorganized mass layoffs that inevitably mean losing some of the organization’s best talent. Insights on past performance, system utilization, best practices and more could have helped businesses improve methods of working and make better decisions on automation, digitalization, and more.

If we imagine a perfectly intelligent organization with 5 years’ worth of data - on thousands of employees and what they do every day – a simple process mining tool could have helped almost instantly highlight workable automation possibilities.

Steps you can take today

1. Move beyond structured data.

In our practice, we see that even organizations well on their automation journey prefer to automate using structured data. The reluctance to embrace OCR and AI leads to unstructured data being underutilized in inefficient processes and workflows. That’s almost 80% of organizational data that’s being underutilized!

The perceived safety of limiting automation to structured data has higher downstream costs than people realize. For example, in a recent discussion with a client, it was clear that while they had made great progress – automating 40 processes in a single year using RPA –  it was equally clear that initiative would have delivered stronger results had the unstructured data been included in the automation journey. By the time they realized that AI could have helped automate unstructured data, they had already lost most of it and diluted the remaining.

Concerns about unstructured data use is one reason globally, less than 10% of organizations have been able to make the most of AI. Organizations can, and should, do better.

2. Leverage process mining tools

Even if you haven’t utilized your data to the fullest in the past, it’s not too late to install process mining tools. In as little as three days, data mining tools can monitor employee activity to generate detailed process maps highlighting each keystroke and collect enough data to identify automation opportunities. This will help solve business challenges, as well as help people, improve their productivity by taking away efforts in redundant and repetitive tasks. 

At Wipro, we are working with our clients to help them identify how to best use their data to reduce costs and improve efficiencies with our Enterprise Operations Transformation (EOT) framework. For instance, with one of our US clients, we automated a highly complex process within 7 days - all remotely – helping them run their order management, customer /supplier MDM, and sales/revenue processes. This ensured business continuity while saving up to $4Mn in costs.

Now is the moment to get future-ready

Naturally, everyone hopes this will be the last pandemic, and the last crisis. But hope is not a strategy. To prepare for every eventuality, organizations need data. It will even help businesses prepare for the aftermath of this crisis – taking right decisions to support recovery. While capturing data is the need of the hour, what organizations do with this data will play a crucial role in how they perform over the next 2-3 years.

To learn more about how to leverage your business data, connect with me at  mayur.khatwani@wipro.com