Most businesspeople would be surprised (to say the least) if they walked into a Finance department and found staff entering data into leather-bound ledgers with fountain pens or discovered the sales force using a Rolodex to manage their contacts. Or saw a logistics manager using a wall calendar to schedule shipments. So why don’t they bat an eye when they walk into the project office of a digital transformation program and find a wall covered with Visio printouts and Post-it Notes?
Isn’t it odd that, even though you live in a digital world, managing your workforce online, selling your products and services through e-commerce, and using ERP and CRM systems to run your business, your process improvement initiatives rely so heavily on paper? There’s a delicious irony in Six Sigma teams driving for operational efficiency using inefficient manual methods to map processes, document user stories, and capture pain points. You only have to watch someone walking around a conference room, scanning the multitude of pieces of paper on the wall for the one that documents the process they need to update, to realize there must be a better way.
Yes, your current systems and processes may be highly manual and disconnected, but that doesn’t mean the way you fix the problem has to be. Even if Word and PowerPoint represent state-of-the-art for your current process documents, shouldn’t your transformation program showcase your desired future state rather than mimic your less efficient current one? Luckily, like every other business operation today, achieving greater operational efficiency has joined the digital age.
Using BusinessOptix, you can digitize every aspect of your operational efficiency program, starting with importing all your Visio process flows (or however else you’ve documented your processes). There’s a suite of discovery tools, ranging from process mining to easy-to-use surveys, which allow you to harvest your workforce's cumulative knowledge and experience, capturing intangible – but invaluable – undocumented information. Using these discovery capabilities, you can dynamically build a comprehensive and detailed current state model of how your people, processes, and systems are working together to run your business.
Once your current state processes are mapped and modeled, you can use digital forms instead of sticky notes to capture improvement ideas. You can then link these improvement forms to your digital process maps (along with work instructions and related metrics).
BusinessOptix makes capturing your current state more accurate and efficient than manual, paper-intensive methods. Still, it’s in a league of its own when designing your target operating model. Does your current methodology provide a data-based way to measure your current state's effectiveness? Does it allow you to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies? Does it allow you to model the impact of proposed changes? If you’re doing things manually, the answer to all three questions is either a straight “no” or a qualified “yes,” with the caveat being it’s a slow, laborious process.
Using BusinessOptix, you can design your target operating model from within the platform, using our simulation engine to compare options and evaluate which will have the most positive impact. You can even use our scenario engine to see how your proposed future state will function in a range of situations, each one representing a different mix of business conditions. Think of these simulation and scenario capabilities as a risk-free environment where you can trial changes to key processes, even your entire operational model, without impacting your day-to-day business. Best of all, once you’ve implemented your target operating model, you can use our digital twin capabilities to continuously optimize your processes, allowing you to evolve constantly and stay ahead of your competition.
Reap the BenefitsPowering your operational efficiency initiatives with BusinessOptix makes it quicker and easier to gather and analyze data, build and test new process models, collaborate with stakeholders at all levels, disseminate information such as work instructions, and enable effective governance.
The business case for moving from a paper-based system to a technology solution is usually simple to make for almost every part of your business because the efficiencies and effectiveness are largely self-evident. If it’s an easy decision for Finance, Sales, and Operations, why isn’t your operational effectiveness program reaping the many benefits of true digitization?
