A business process is a series of steps performed by a group of stakeholders to achieve a concrete goal. Each step denotes a task that is assigned to a participant, who is responsible to keep running the flow until it is ended.
Business Process Analytics
Business processes are a lifeline of any organization, it enables real-time gain and end-to-end visibility into complex business processes. Once organizations have this visibility they can understand and handle bottlenecks, throughput and performance issues about these specific processes and as result you can take actions to optimize and solve it.
Benefits of Process Analytics
- Discover special cases, which are invisible on some reports and might be a large contributor to high costs and frustrated customers;
- Visualize the workflow through the process stages and catch delays, bottlenecks, and outliers;
- Measure how much time each part of process takes to be done;
- Calculate time related costs. Once the time is measured, it may calculate the costs and tie the cost to the specific business process or customer;
- Find patterns based on filters;
- Have control about process issues or violations right after it happens.
Business Process Analysis
Business Process Analysis (BPA) is a methodology for the analysis of a business with a view to understanding the processes and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. It’s a specialized method within the broader context of business process management to analyze whether the current processes are achieving their goal. It describes the processes involved, parties participating, information exchanged and documents produced, it is applied by major companies in various consulting and implementation solutions.
Benefits of using Business Process Analysis
- Document implicit knowledge, capture and record manual and non-documented processes;
- Clean documentation of the process, robust data on how the process is performing and greater understanding;
- Identify obstacles that cause delays to processes, such as unnecessary forms, documents and repetitive data elements. Without a proper analysis, your team will waste a lot of time and effort solving the wrong problems or switching from one software to another;
- Identify which user actions are hindering the process and where inefficiencies are;
- Identify opportunities for improvements, such as reducing the number of trade documents and minimizing data requirements.
When Business Process Analysis should be applied
- Unidentified issues such as regular delays or increased customer complaints;
- Process stakeholders are unclear about to carry out a process;
- The team wants to replace the process to a new version.
How to analyse a Business Process
1. Identify the Process
The first step is to choose the ‘as-is’ process to be analyzed and identify the stakeholders who handle it. Be sure to have a clear starting and stopping point for the process.
2. Collect Process Information
Then, gather as much information about the process as possible to understand the issues it faces, the objectives, the scope of improvement, and other goals of the analysis.
3. Analyze As-Is Process
Implement a business process analysis plan. Get to the bottom of the identified process, define the process in flowcharts and other diagrams, and measure its effectiveness. You can read the article about Five Steps For Process Mapping (AS IS) to aid you in your analysis.
4. Develop To-Be Plan
Finally, use the analysis to make recommendations how a ‘to-be’ process should look. Point out the requirements, suggest resources and changes, define a timeline, etc.
Techniques used in Business Process Analysis
Some of the popular Business Process Analysis techniques that are used in most of the business:
- Gap Analysis: Find out what information you’re missing about the process;
- Value-added Analysis: Find if each and every activity in your process adds value to the process and organization;
- Root Cause Analysis: Find the core reasons for a problem and analyze what can be done to fix it;
- Observation: Observe the process in action, see if it works as intended or not.
Conclusion
Business Process Analysis and Business Process Analytics are important to organizations and should be applied when it is possible. In this article you have seen its benefits and why it is effective. Organizations can have more control and productivity over their processes and better manage their process workflows.
With Fusion Platform, you are able to create processes, manage it and make analysis, generating graphs to be easily and clearly analyzed. You can read What is Business Process Management (BPM) and what are its benefits to have more informations how Fusion might be useful for you company.