Dive Brief:
- More companies are adopting process intelligence technologies to rationalize everyday business operations, according to an HFS survey of more than 400 senior IT and business executives commissioned by global professional services firm Genpact.
- Nearly one-quarter of respondents said their companies planned double-digit growth in process intelligence spending over the next 12 to 18 months.
- Process intelligence, a new application of data analytics, has several hurdles to overcome. Lack of knowledge about which processes can benefit from the technology was identified as a biggest challenge by two-thirds of respondents. Four in 5 said talent and skills is an impediment to adoption.
Dive Insight:
Invoicing and payments processing aren’t the most high-profile business functions. But they’re the financial engine that drives everyday operations for many businesses. Along with order processing and supply chain management, they’re also areas that are overdue for an analytics overhaul.
Companies are sparing modernization investments while cutting discretionary spending and trimming overall budgets. A technology solution that rationalizes business processes and yields efficiency aligns well with those goals.
Traditional process mining captures log data from IT systems, pinpoints bottlenecks and identifies points where workflows can be improved. Combining mining with process discovery, which tracks how individual users are interacting with IT systems, yields process intelligence.
“It's technology that started in a weird corner of the industry,” said Amaresh Tripathy, SVP and global analytics lead for professional services firm Genpact.
Cloud migration and the drive to deliver returns on modernization investments, along with advances in computer vision and data mining tools, have created opportunities for the practical application of process mining.
Half of the respondents to the survey expect impact from process intelligence technologies in the next year.
As companies implement process intelligence, they can use data to rethink policies around the way users interact with IT systems, locate areas where automation will have the most value, and optimize how people within the organization are actually using technology, Tripathy said.
“There’s the idea of how processes are supposed to happen, there’s what is really happening and there’s the happy path of how it should happen,” said Tripathy.
Adopting process intelligence requires an understanding of business metrics, ERP systems and data analytics. A mindset shift is also key.
“People who think about process don't fundamentally think data first,” Tripathy said. “They think about process first. If you're trained in a process-first mindset, it's a little bit of a challenge to slip into a data mindset.”
