Step #1 To Process Improvement Made Simple.
Discover & Visualize Business Processes – Automatically
When organizations embark on process improvement initiatives, the biggest challenge in getting started often lies in being able to articulate existing business processes. You cannot improve what you cannot see. Traditionally, in an effort to visualize business processes, companies have resorted to engaging external consultants and dedicated significant time and resources to map out how they do business. Very often, the outcome is delayed and riddled with inaccuracies. By the time companies complete this exercise, their processes have quite likely evolved making the results obsolete.
With the Fujitsu Automated Business Process Discovery & Visualization service, we aim to help solve one of the biggest challenges faced by companies embarking on a process improvement and governance initiative – illuminating the exposure to compliance failure, fraud, and other legal and efficiency issues lying hidden in their operational workflows. This new offering from Fujitsu labs eliminates months of time and labor-intensive exploration and lets organizations immediately discover what often remains invisible. No other company currently offers such a service.
Identify Business Process Bottlenecks. Eliminate Inefficiencies.
By leveraging state-of-the-art technology from Fujitsu, companies can achieve multiple goals in process improvement at once - identify process bottlenecks, detect unauthorized actions, determine best practices and, most importantly, jump-start their process improvement initiatives. Customers need only provide Fujitsu with the existing database logs for the business process they want to visualize. The Fujitsu software tool runs through the data and helps customers visualize their business processes while identifying potential areas for improvement.
The service delivers a clear view of typical processes as well as exceptions to the norm. This unique offering allows customers to view various reports that highlight:
- "Typical" process route – reports that indicate routes taken at 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, and 20% probabilities
- "Exception" process routes – reports that reflect routes taken by 1%, 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% of process instances and that clearly identify steps that are most frequently repeated
These reports help organizations determine whether the processes they have established are being followed. If not, it helps identify reasons for the deviations. Through the Process Visualization Service, customers can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their business processes and are then able to make improvements to better reflect their business needs (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Identify Process Bottlenecks
Reduce 'Outliers'. Refine Business Processes.
As an example, by leveraging this cutting-edge offering from Fujitsu, a global manufacturer was able to visualize the way it produced hard disk drives. After examining the database logs for the various applications that interface with the production process, the tool produced a diagram representing more than 8000 cases and over 18,000 routes taken by the process - automatically. Although the spaghetti-like diagram appears to be incomprehensible at first, the tool's unique capabilities allowed the manufacturer to "dial down" and focus on 40% of the most common cases, at which point a clearer picture emerged. The crucial events and bottlenecks in the process were easily identified and the emergent process served as a great starting point for discussions with key stakeholders involved with process improvement. Based on the findings, the company was able to scientifically allocate resources between areas that needed improvement and those that were fairly streamlined (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Identify Areas To Be Streamlined And Determine Resource Allocation
Compare Business Operations. Discover Best Practices.
In another situation, a customer piloted the process discovery services at two of its branch offices that reportedly followed the same processes to deliver the same product to their customers. Interestingly enough, the process diagrams that emerged as a result of the service indicated that one office had to place orders since half the items were out of stock; the other office always had inventory and shipped from stock. The process discovery and visualization service helped reveal the operational differences between these two offices, since they both reported following the corporate standard. The comparative process flow analysis between the two offices not only allowed the company to evaluate their respective performance, but it also provided actionable insight while promoting the development of corporate best practices over time (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Compare Business Operations
The benefit of visualizing your business process lies in the fact that it gives you a starting point for discussions around process improvement. The visualized process can be easily mapped in to a process modeling tool, such as the Interstage® BPM Studio environment (see Figure 4). The process can then be easily refined and made ready to be automated when required.
Figure 4: Process In Interstage BPM Studio
Service availability varies by region.
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