#89 Let's talk about Business Process Management Tools and Features

Welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yeah, you know, we are talking about all things process and automation here. Workflow, no-code, low-code, process mining, business process management tools, really everything. So if you listen back all our episodes, you will have lots of content to go through. And we cover pretty much everything. So today we thought we will look sort of at the area of business process management tools and what are the important features to look at and to look out for in these tools. And so it should make your life a bit easier when you currently looking around purchasing a process automation platform or elements elements of that, process mining tools, etc. So yeah, we'll go through a list of those features and yeah, so you can then pick the best out for what you need. So as you know, most of organizations out there like yourself, processes are everywhere. We all rely on process to get work done. Processes are the backbone of success. And yeah, and if we are not really taking care of these processes, yeah, things go wrong. So we know that. Suddenly if our accounts payable process is not running smooth again, there will be huge backlogs, etc. Suppliers will be unhappy. Yeah, so that's something to look after a lot. And you have to make sure you can develop your processes, automate your processes, optimize your processes, and orchestrate your processes as efficient as possible. So as I mentioned before, we look into these areas of business process management and the tools. And yeah, so sort of you can break them down into 4 areas, and the areas are sort of process development, process automation, process optimization, and process orchestration. And yeah, so we will look into each of these areas and drill a bit deeper. And yeah, we will kick it off. Arno, do you like to start with process development?

Yes, Sascha, that's obviously one of the cornerstones of any sort of BPM undertaking. And again, sort of BPM really is defined as a sort of a people-driven discipline inside an organization to manage and create and optimize processes. And again, BPM is an old term and, you know, ultimate goal of it is really to continually improve business results, business outcomes. And BPM focuses on entire processes rather than sort of individual tasks, and that helps strengthen, you know, sort of the performance, KPIs, outcomes, and, you know, results in sort of fewer errors being made in the business, happier customers and lower costs and all of those positive benefits. So again, the cornerstone is kind of process development, you know, so you need to be able to create a process with inside tool that, that can be sort of adapted and bended as needed while still kind of maintaining your compliancy guardrails. So you don't want to sort of just allow everybody just to develop everything. And, you know, if, if you want to do that, you need to have a sort of a digital ability and the capability inside that gives you that agility. You know, and we will often talk about process development and the IT team do that for you and there's lots of demands on them and it's overwhelming for them. They've only got limited resources. So when you look at a process development tool, especially on the actual capability it provides, it does allow your team and also sort of enable them to, with power and speed, kind of work more efficiently than ever by using, you know, built-in features like the low-code development element. And there's a lot of AI-aided development these days as well. The tools that we start to see coming through where you use a ChatGPT interface, you ask it to build a form and it does that for you. It also builds a process. It asks you to describe the process. So all of that sort of AI-aided development is coming through. And then from the user, end-user experience. So these are kind of the UI/UX capabilities. You know, it needs to kind of have a very strong sort of story for that so that when you create or when you develop a process, you know, it's not just about automating the process, but if you want to build user interfaces that users actually participate as part of the whole kind of BPM journey, then it needs to look nice, it needs to work well. The user journey needs to be good. You know, people want to come back to it and not complain about ugly buttons or things feeling outdated. Again, so I'll just kind of briefly touch on those three elements again. So again, with low-code development, it's now mainstream methodology. As you know, it sort of allows you to use a visual interface to draw a workflow diagram or a visual interface to sort of perhaps create a form or API connection. So, so It's just a shift away from high-code development where, you know, when you have a low-code platform, you can train somebody, either an IT user or a business user, to actually create these processes and develop these processes. And if you have to have collaboration between, let's say, technical users, end users, advanced business users that can create some of these processes, You know, a lot of these low-code development platforms have got very strong collaboration built inside it. So, you know, you could share ideas, you could share things that you're building, you could rapidly test it. So again, you know, you don't need to understand things like SQL and.NET and Python and all of the scripting. You know, everything is very visual, drag and drop. You know, a lot of these sort of platforms do have pre-built connectors as well. So you could have a sort of canned version of a process, let's say, a procurement process, bring it in, change it, you know, and that allows you to expedite sort of the whole development of your process. Again, I kind of touched a bit on the AI development, but, you know, this is, this is becoming a bit more mainstream now. It just means that you could perhaps upload a PDF That's a form. And what the tool does, it generates a form for you in a digital format. For example, you know, we, we have capabilities like the natural language processing engines that's built into tools. It just means that you can perhaps create a chatbot that interacts with your process, that surfaces data to a user. And, you know, like I said earlier, with this sort of generative AI out there. I'm starting to see more and more examples of the ability to actually integrate with tools like that to, in a natural language way, tell the platform what you want it to do from a forms perspective, and it will create the form for you. And you could challenge it to say, no, that shouldn't be there. You need to have this field. This date validator, you know, so there's all sorts of sort of advances going on there. And again, sort of just briefly, and I'll give you a chance again to speak, but the— we ultimately, when we develop or engage in process development, we are ultimately going to create a user interface, and we want to make sure that, you know, that experience that either the end users or your customer is going to have when they interact with your processes is good, is as good as it can be. You know, there is, you know, a nice user interface they can use, you know, to sort of kind of drive that engagement, that satisfaction. You know, you need to be able to publish this to mobile devices as well. So all of these cross-platform Functionality should be within sight, you know, the thinking when you do process development. And, you know, fortunately enough, a lot of the low-code platforms do actually provide you with these capabilities natively. So if you build a form and you flick mobile view, it will give you a layout of roughly how that would look in mobile, and you can sort of amend that and change to tweak that sort of in real time before you publish it. So just briefly, I think that the three elements there that I think from the process development is just kind of key considerations to look out for when you start deploying your business process management journey, especially automation.

That's cool. So yeah, when it comes to that process development and the capabilities Arno just mentioned, so we have that The Automation Guys community, and we have our memberships. If you like to see a couple of those things more in action, you can just sign up and then, yeah, we'll have access to lots of resources and demos and videos and the sandbox to play with process automation, process development things. So, yeah, just a little plug here on our community. But, yeah, so next one up is the process automation section. So yeah, any, any process platform out there at the moment has a robust— should have a robust process automation capability built in. So organizations need to automate processes. And really, in whatever area you're looking at, automation of your processes is key. And when you look out for specific process automation capabilities, yeah, you should definitely look process modeling, business rules management, task management, content processing, case management. So these are sort of the big pillars you should look at. And let's dive into the first one. Yeah, the process modeling is really like a critical framework for organizing all the processes you have from really end to end. So if you don't have that clarity of of your processes, then automation will become a bit more challenging. So it's sort of the backbone of automation. And with those process models, developers can— or when you have process modeling capabilities, your developers can process, design the processes and really plan out all the automation activities step by step and all the different paths it can take. So really structuring that flow how information and data and humans and automations are interacting. So you can map that all out. So that's a very, very important element of your platform. So you shouldn't just budge on that one. So yeah, next one is the business rules and management. Business rules as such instruct sort of, yeah, the workflow. The engines to carry out tasks and deliver that information in a very, very specific way. And that really depends on certain criteria. So maybe when it comes to like a mortgage application, you can check certain scores, figures, and all those things are captured in a business rules engine and are usually managed from the business very easily from the outside instead of really hard coding it into, into sort of a system. So, so So those criteria then dictate how the process runs. So that's something which is really, really important. Yeah, why are business rules an essential part of business process automation? So they define how documents are routed for processing, how certain prices and insurance premiums are calculated. It will really enforce corporate policies as well, so enable sure that maybe data is flowing and is formatted in the right way when it's captured. So very important piece of technology, I would say. And indeed, not every platform has it, but more and more platforms include a mechanism like that in there. Yeah, task management, of course, and task management that integrates with robotic process automation and people. So that's where it's important. So you can either either offload— not offload, but get tasks completed by an employee, or if that is a task of more of a repetitive nature, or maybe employees are not available, it can be performed by a robotic workforce instead, or maybe even in parallel. So that task management is very, very crucial when it comes to automating end-to-end processes. So yeah, make sure it is working in a way you need it and it's working with the RPA technologies you have maybe already in-house, or that platform needs to come with some RPA technology, of course, already built in. So, but both options are available and yeah, you definitely need to look out for that, that it all works very nicely in combination with what you want to achieve.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's all very, very good points. And of course, when we then look at the, I guess, the next area is all about process optimization. And, you know, when you look at BPM, it, it is really adopting a mindset of continuous improvement. And, you know, with, with all the technology out there, automation platforms, you know, this sort of technical evolution over the last couple of years that really made it possible to improve processes really fast. You know, and you can be very precise in, you know, the sort of things that if you optimize and, you know, it is kind of, we talk a lot on the podcast about this, but it's, it's two real tools out there. One is, one is process mining, where you sort of look at the data footprint your processes leave, and then you have a tool to mine that, and it tells you about the overall health of your process. And then there's also kind of like process monitoring, which includes sort of health checks on that. And, you know, this includes things like where you could ensure that the processes that you have optimized are performing the way they should do. You know, they kind of within the KPIs that you've defined. So again, if we look at this sort of process mining capability, like I mentioned, you know, you generate a lot of data inside your business and, you know, all of your applications collectively, you know, creates this dataset. If you take that and you could mine that, that allows you the ability to identify the bottlenecks and where you see nonconformities, and that could really help you with root cause analysis, you know, that would otherwise, if you don't do it, you know, it would be in, you know, have an inhibiting effect on your digital transformation goals. So, you know, the sort of conventional approach is to sort of do a lot of stakeholder research, end-user research, speaking about their processes and how optimized, well-affected they are. But with process mining, you sort of just point the tool at the data and, you know, it's going to tell you, you know, which areas should be streamlined, where are the bottlenecks, you know, that's inside your process itself. Then again, if we look at sort of process monitoring, you know, that's another important optimization aspect to look out for, you know, and then that's done by sort of health checks. And, you know, and then within these tools, you know, it will help developers to sort of monitor the health of processes that's busy executing and, you know, how well they're performing. Are they sort of within the KPIs? And, and that will provide you with a sort of a bit of a dashboard with an early warning system to say, you know, these processes are not performing well, or they, they are broken, you know, and, and it helps you sort of navigate that and get to, get to, get to, get to the process and the root cause of it to fix them. And I just kind of want to add task mining as well to this. Task mining is another way that you could deploy that to optimize your process. So what that means is that if you have a version of your process that's running and you are continuously monitoring it. And you are looking at what people are doing, interaction with it. You could also capture keystrokes, and that keystrokes is just an additional dimension that you can then use to look at. It's the sort of things people are interacting or providing the process as inputs or interacting with it. And that just gives you another kind of dimension to look and say, well, if we have to optimize this further, what other elements can we kind of go after to fulfill our optimization goals?

That's great. Yeah, now all this information which is actually captured while process mining is happening or task mining is happening, that's so important for also looking at the next important part here, the process orchestration because there it's all about how processes are flowing end-to-end and you're orchestrating it with some other systems. So yeah, so very important area and it's our final area of today where we look at enterprise data system integrations and governance when it comes to process is extremely important. So yeah, we look into these three areas here in this section. We know processes require data, and if you want to have really, really strong processes, they need more and more data, and data what is really that is accessible and properly synchronized across that organization you're at. So you have to look out for platform that can deal with data in a really good way, has really strong data management capabilities, so you can then integrate that data from all the sources into your processes. So with that information, you can then later on unify that data and you can run your processes as efficiently as possible. So it's the same what we had very early on when we had RPA. So because RPA is all about performing a human task, but if the data is not clear, maybe from documents, information is not captured, so then the robot and the RPA technology can't really perform that well. So we have to make sure we get that data clean, accessible to get the best results. And instead of migrating data in one big massive database, it really makes sense to really get that from from all the different areas where it resides. It's absolutely fine to have lots of data in SAP. We don't want to replace SAP with a process implementation or process application. We just want to get access to the data. We want to get access to all sorts of systems you have to allow that process flow as best as possible end-to-end. So yeah, that brings me to system integrations. All these systems out there, Some of the legacy systems are not that good to have APIs, but if you have an API, you can interact with systems in a really good way, structured. You can put data into your systems, you can pull data out of your systems, and that allows you to orchestrate processes even more, a much better end-to-end. So you can For example, if you have an HR tool, you can, you put information from a recruit into the system. From there you push something to a payroll system automatically. Then you pull something from your SAP and then you push something back to another system, learning management tool or whatever it is. And that allows that the process just flowing through without human interaction, without any disruption. So working getting API integrations working in your platform, it's, it's very, very crucial. So yeah, one, one big thing you have to look out for, that the platform you, you choose has that capability, because it's already painful if you have to go into a legacy system without these API capabilities. Then you have to fiddle around and you have to— you always find a way, but yeah. API is the word here. Yeah, the next one is the governance. Yeah, when you have all these multiple applications out there and lots of different users are using it, you want to ensure that IT remains in control. So if you have lots of people developing processes now with the citizen developers, we encourage everyone everyone to develop applications, right? So it was a local platform that was obviously possible, more possible. So, but that control needs to remain within IT or in another sort of group within the business to guide everyone what is allowed, what's not allowed, security elements, access to data. All that has to be sort of controlled a little bit, otherwise we are in the wild, wild west and yeah, things are implemented maybe through different channels, different APIs, that, that will be very chaotic after, after time. So, so that governance is very important, and you need to have a platform which, which can help you with that. So DevOps comes to mind as well, to, to make sure whatever is developed is deployed into all the systems in a good, good way. So best practices, monitoring, deployment, testing, all these things are important here. And yeah, find a platform which is supporting you also in those areas, because there are lots of systems and platforms out there, they, they leave you, leave you hanging after you have developed your solution and you have to put a lot of effort into to get it, get it live. So yeah, but for all of these areas, there are platforms out there, plenty. And at The Automation Guys, we will talk about lots of platforms and things. And yeah, just sign, sign up to our community. We will share lots of information further down the line as well. So nearly, nearly 100 episodes in, so we have shared a lot of information. Yeah, so it's lots of stuff to, to, to, to gain from joining our community. Yeah, as always reach out to us if you have more questions, if you have feedback, if you, if you'd like to know more about specific things. Just get in touch and visit us at theautomationguys.net. And yeah, we will be back with another episode very soon, as always. And until then, let's automate it!