What Role Does The Cloud Play In Continuous Process Optimization to Create Agile Operations?

Companies are under constant pressure to keep up with changing customer expectations, intensify competition, improve employee experience, and stay up-to-date with regulatory changes, factors that carry additional administrative overhead.

This pressure has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed business continuity challenges in legacy business models, which rely heavily on manual operations. It has also become clear that organizations that are more advanced in digital transformation have been quicker to respond to the disruption caused by the coronavirus.

Consequently, according to experts, the pandemic has amplified the need to switch to a digital business with agile operations.

Why Is A Continuous Process Optimization (OCP) Solution Needed?

Building a digital business requires companies to adopt a comprehensive solution that ensures rapid and continuous delivery of value throughout the transformation and helps them adapt to changing market dynamics. Therefore, an OCP solution that drives superior business value is required to:

1) Overcome The Limitations Of An Independent Automation Approach

While automation can generate some quick costs and operational gains, a stand-alone automation approach can amplify inefficient processes and provide less value by automating non-standard processes. The automation of tasks versus processes makes it very difficult to manage the human + machine environment.

2) Ensure An Agile Value Delivery

In companies’ digital transformation processes, continuity is the key objective. This should be considered as a series of many steps in which each one generates a certain value and ROI (return on investment). While a combination of multiple digital levers could provide immense potential to help companies transform their operations, it is key to explore multiple interim target states to create an agile roadmap for transformation.

3) Adaptation To Constantly Changing Market Dynamics (Such As Regulations)

Resilience and adaptability are the key traits for the survival of a business. While companies cannot avoid volatility and uncertainty in the external business environment, they can, and should, take specific steps to incorporate resilience into their value chains. To do this, they need to continually monitor and develop a better understanding of value chain flexibility, the reasons for any rigidity, and know where to direct their efforts to become more adaptable and resilient.

How An OCP Solution Helps Get Superior Business Results

A continuous process optimization solution encompasses: process discovery and intelligence; process optimization and automation; planning the human, digital and system workflow; and, continuous monitoring of processes to identify more opportunities for optimization and automation.

What Combination Of Digital Levers Enables An OCP Solution?

1) Process Analysis

These technologies allow the OCP to help companies understand current processes and identify potential opportunities for optimization and automation. These are tools that help enable a continuous feedback mechanism by monitoring processes throughout the digital transformation process to identify the next level of optimization opportunities and potential gaps that may arise with changing external factors and constraints.

2) Smart Automation

Combining robotic process automation (RPA) with AI technologies enables a greater degree of automation of tasks involving all types of data, including unstructured data. These tools help organizations automate both front-office and back-office processes, resulting in faster, more resilient operations. Digital workers also leave footprints that organizations can regularly analyze to identify gaps and new optimization opportunities.

3) Process Planner

Business process planning technologies coordinate workflow across multiple systems, digital workers, and the human workforce to carry out the entire process. They also allow control of the flow in the process and in the routing of work for the best employee (human or robot) depending on the nature, type and difficulty of the task and helps to harmonize the human + machine dynamics.

4) Cloud And Mobility

Cloud and mobile apps streamline processes by centralizing company data for remote access, allowing employees to work remotely and collaboratively with coworkers at other locations.

Having all the information and data in one accessible place enables employees to analyze collective ideas, leading to better business decisions. Cloud infrastructure is more flexible, allowing speed and agility to adapt to market changes and quickly implement process improvement initiatives.

In conclusion, the combination of these digital levers in a continuous process optimization solution that helps companies transform their operations and guarantee agile value delivery, by driving continuous improvement and building resilient and adaptive business models.