April 2023

5 ways Automated Contract Review can save your time and money

Contracts are important enterprise documents carrying valuable information about an agreement between two or partners. Review of contracts is essential to prevent leakage of any business opportunity, but the intricacy of the workflow involved makes the task cumbersome and time intensive. Today, contract review automation is no longer a privilege of a handful. Instead, it has become the need of the hour for many good reasons. Automated contract review involves AI and ML-enabled software solutions to streamline processes, assess contract patterns and apply the same to similar types of agreements, highlight essential assessment aspects, and identify improvement opportunities.

Reviewing agreements is a painstaking endeavor, and legal teams couldn’t agree more. But experts believe that 23% of lawyers’ tasks could be easily automated because of legal technological advancements. This sounds promising, especially for legal experts, who spend approximately a few hours to over a month reviewing a single business contract. And when you throw multiple contracts in the loop, the time can be hard to estimate. Therefore, AI contract review software solutions are highly regarded as a blessing in disguise.

Manual vs. Automated contract review – Evaluating the difference

In all senses and purposes, an automated contract review is the best bet for legal professionals and contractual partners. One of the primary reasons behind this would be the time factor. Today, business partners can no longer afford to delay the execution of their contractual terms simply because the lawyers need more time to review the agreements. Therefore, the alternate, tech-enabled version of manual contracting is deemed the go-to solution to speed up the execution of the terms.

But nullifying the legacy human-centric contracting would be wrong without exploring the downside of the method. However, manual work is considered less effective for its time, cost, and labor-intensive factors.

Human contract review, popularly known as manual contracting, follows a structured process involving legal professionals reviewing a draft agreement multiple times to ensure the agreed terms align with the organization’s policies. The continuous loop of reading and writing is exceptionally time-taking and exhausting for lawyers. The latter must create flowcharts or checklists defining areas in the contract that require checking, highlighting the changes, and adding comments wherever needed. That’s not all. The clause language describing standard terms varies significantly from contract to contract. The negotiation phase, where concessions between two parties are narrowed, ideally takes five to ten days. And each sitting comprises a thorough review coupled with the actual negotiation. No wonder manual contract review is time-intensive, thereby driving up review costs. The contract review and negotiation process move at a snail’s pace, leaving behind a trail of human errors and negatively impacting the deal’s speed and overall sales. Inconsistencies and missed deadlines are rampant in manual contracting and review.

Contrarily, legal contract review using the power of automation and AI offers a more streamlined approach, where contractual patterns are assessed and applied automatically to every category of agreements. AI-enabled tools take less than a minute to review a contract, compared to approximately an hour of manual effort. In addition, the software system can quickly put together standard practices seen in earlier agreements and apply the same to the one about to be reviewed.

However, human expertise is still needed in AI contract review software solutions. But courtesy of advances in technology today, lawyers will soon have more self-reliant AI models at their disposal to break down and simplify the contracting lifecycle.

Benefits of automated contract review

Contracts are critical to an organization’s success. They are physical evidence of agreements made between two parties. The business processes subsequent to accepting the contractual terms heavily depend on the latter’s timely acceptance. Here, any delay in the review process would eventually slow down the execution of the terms, leading to lost opportunities. Therefore, automating the legal contract review is imperative for several reasons.

Streamlined contract review: An automation software solution streamlines the tedious, time-consuming, and expensive process of manual contract review. This helps organizations to optimize their time and budget more productively.

Electronic contracting process: Automated contract review has effectively replaced the long-haul, paper-based process with an electronic one. The transition has successfully prevented agreements or their clauses from being compromised, misplaced, or lost, also arresting unnecessary delays.

Contract tracking capabilities: Automation and AI simplify the review process, enabling lawyers to track multiple versions to eliminate duplicated work. The intelligent software system ensures that all contract versions are better maintained and controlled.

Contract repository: A centralized repository is created to allow contract review automation, ensuring the final copy is securely stored along with their revision history for future reference. This repository eliminates every chance of inadvertent changes in the contractual terms once the partners have duly signed the agreement. Furthermore, the storage enables lawyers and companies to create and store preferred clauses and language that can be leveraged during later contract reviews.

Automated contract review drives better contract performance by mitigating contractual risks through proper analysis and supporting legal and contracting teams in pursuing higher-value, strategic work.

For example, a 100-year-old Tokyo-based conglomerate prevented subjective interpretations and human errors in contract risk analysis and saved 25% of the procurement staff’s time on contract review by switching to automated software solutions.

For more information download the case study: https://www.edgeverve.com/xtractedge-contract-analysis/conglomerate-contract-management-achieved/

Primary objectives of automated contract review

The purpose of a contract review is to ensure that legal agreements and the terms contained within them are robust and that legal and financial risk is reduced as far as possible to protect the interests of your business. With the help of automation solutions, the effectiveness and accuracy of the entire process are guaranteed, enabling partners to put into action the contractual terms as soon as possible.

Therefore, the core objectives of an automated contract review would be:

Improving accuracy and consistency

Automated contract review is considered a practical approach that improves the accuracy and consistency of contract analysis. By leveraging its extended capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, the software system can scale up analyzation of legal documents in large volumes while quickly picking up potential issues and inconsistencies, regardless of how minor they are. Further, the risk of human errors is significantly reduced, as already stated. The software solution identifies potential issues that escape a human reviewer’s eyes. On the other hand, using a standardized set of rules and criteria ensures that all contracts are reviewed the same way, no matter who is reviewing the contract.

Enhanced visibility and management

AI contract review software tools have the power of machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to quickly analyze and extract critical information from legal documents. This improves granular visibility into contractual terms and assists with adequate management of all contracts. Furthermore, the platform provides compliance assurance to meet legal and regulatory requirements while identifying potential risks and opportunities for improvement. Simply put, an automated contract solution helps organizations quickly and efficiently manage their contracts and drives the positive transformation to the overall contract management process.

Lower costs and increased efficiency

Automated contract review platforms can significantly reduce contractual costs while boosting organizations’ efficiency. Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques streamline contract negotiation cycles and reduce the overall review time. It can also analyze past contracts and suggest alternative clauses to move the negotiation cycle forward.

Irrespective of the benefits mentioned above and the objectives, it is essential to note that an automated system still requires human review and oversight. However, with humans in the loop, these automated software systems’ proper and adequate functioning is assured and guaranteed.

Automated contract review – Best implementation practices

Now, it is evident that an automated contract review is a powerful tool for organizations to streamline and accelerate their contract management processes while reducing reviewing time and related costs. However, automated platforms often face challenges and fail after the pilot phase. To override the same crisis, enterprises, and legal teams can follow some of the following best practices to ensure the implementation success.

Final thoughts

Automated contract review tools are tasked to improve and speed up the contract management and negotiation cycle. By respecting the best practices, enterprises can genuinely scale the benefits of an intelligent solution, unlock potential opportunities, and reduce costs involved with contracting.

Financial process automation – A CFO’s guide

CFO, also known as the Chief Financial Officer, wears many hats, from maintaining accounts and bookkeeping for the company to planning the following year’s budget. However, overseeing the day-to-day financial activities of the company leaves limited bandwidth when he would be spending more time analyzing how to make the company more profitable and competitive. . Insufficient accounting systems, mundane data entry tasks, and redundant workflows slow down processes, impact productivity, prevent the availability of real-time data, limit transparency, and hinder informed decision-making.

Therefore, financial process automation plays a pivotal role, automating and speeding up mundane tasks while freeing up CFO and other financial analysts to focus on strategizing and strengthening the organization’s financial stability.

What is financial process automation?

Today, the CFO’s function has evolved from being a mere finance and accounting owner to the partner of the CEO. He is expected to play a directional business role, but juggling multiple responsibilities has become a concerning challenge with the growing complexities in accounting and compliance concerns. Even though the CFO is expected to act as a catalyst for instilling a financial mindset throughout the organization, he is left only to handle the financial activities. Therefore, a change is needed, especially in how the finance department works, and technology has always been the most significant enabler.

Financial process automation comes to the rescue. It refers to the use of technology and digital solutions to automate the execution of financial processes and other related operations. It empowers human resources to dive deeper into the analytical part of their job rather than diverting their energy to conducting repetitive tasks like data entry or reconciliations. In addition, automation in financial operations ensures data transparency and guarantees data storage security in a centralized platform while maintaining compliance and governance expectations.

Finance automation – A brief history

Finance and accounting have come a long way from double-entry bookkeeping in papers to matching debit and credit totals on digital spreadsheets. However, human intervention remained the only thing constant for ensuring all figures were adequately entered and matched to reveal the company’s financial status.

#1. Manual data entry on papers

The whole process was extremely time and labor-intensive. Even though bookkeeping aimed to detect mistakes and fraud, the human error involved with manual data entry failed to reveal the accurate picture. And one tiny mistake could prove excruciatingly damaging for the organization. Adding to the list of problems was the number of hours spent manually calculating sums all day.

#2. Digital spreadsheets with embedded formulas

Digital spreadsheets were a robust innovation, enabling executives to efficiently manage data pools and quantify performance using formulas already embedded in the sheet. Unfortunately, spreadsheets also had their share of limitations, from being standalone documents giving rise to duplicate data to entering digits manually and messing up the entire sheet during a format change, and so on.

#3. Cloud spreadsheets for data storage

Contrarily, storing documents in the cloud was a quantum leap, allowing the safety of the data to be remotely stored in a single, organized place. Moreover, with the cloud data storage change came a wave of innovative tech-enabled solutions, making accounting an easy, less cumbersome task.

#4. Advanced tech-enabled solutions

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Automation, and others proved to be a breakthrough, improving every aspect of businesses’ operations, including maintaining their accounting books. Finance automation is more than just automating the whole accounting process. It is a one-stop solution providing access to reliable, error-free, accurate financial data and analytical support.

Why do we need financial process automation?

Financial data offers a holistic view of a company’s finances and enable owners to make accurate predictions about their future performances. These datasets provide insights into the company’s most profitable customers, identify and flag suspicious transactions, provide visibility into department-wise performances, track and manage expenses in real-time, help understand the organization’s cash flow situations, and forecast future costs. In addition, finance process automation can help speed up the entire workflow leading to such analysis, enabling businesses to stay responsive and ahead of time.

Today, innovative tools like Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Document Processing are embraced by companies to streamline their operations and provide access to critical enterprise data. Financial data is the core element that can transform businesses with game-changing data-driven strategies. Hence, accessing them in real-time, especially during decision-making, is crucial. Therefore, financial process automation can quickly fill the data gap without delaying other workflows. That said, it’s essential to understand the exact benefits of automated solutions and how they help CFOs.

Financial process automation benefits for CFOs

Enhancing the team’s productivity

The accounting work involves collecting data from multiple sources and entering the same into the spreadsheet, which is time-intensive, costly, and prone to errors, impacting an employee’s alertness, productivity, and efficiency. Thus automated document processing financial services like XtractEdge can automate mundane tasks in minutes, freeing the employees to focus on higher-value tasks.

Removing data entry errors

As stated above, data entry and extraction in bulk is no child’s play. When performed manually, errors occur, delaying subsequent processes and impacting decision-making. Contrarily, financial process automation follows rule-based tasks, where the scope of error is eliminated , and data entry and extraction are much faster, ensuring data is available when needed.

Minimizing operational costs

The main benefit lies in reducing operational costs, from hiring extra staff for manual data entry to compensating for crucial data loss or misrepresentation resulting in wrongful transactional decisions. With more extensive improvements in compliance, data quality, and maximizing the productivity of resources, operational costs are greatly reduced by automated tools.

Eliminating operational risks

Corrupted spreadsheets resulting in data loss or the inability to update results can hinder operations. Excel sheets with complicated formulas and massive datasets can trouble executives in many ways. For example, they might become unresponsive or reflect duplicate inputs and slow adequate information retrieval. Without a proper backup, the chance of losing the entire dataset is always high. Such instances negatively impact other operations directly, depending on those insights. Financial process automation tools are ideal for mitigating sudden operational risks and preventing the loss or damage of crucial data.

Generating actionable insights

With minimal data entry and extraction errors, enterprises benefit from actionable, quality, and reliable information for their decision-making. Moreover, it saves time resolving minor errors or compensating for incorrect payments.

Improving transparency and accountability

Financial processes involve too many human hands before tasks are marked complete. But, executives and stakeholders need financial information to make decisions wisely. Unfortunately, the manual work extends the time for each accounting-related task completion, and decision-makers must wait indefinitely before getting access to insights. Furthermore, tracking errors in the process during manual execution is not possible, which reduces the accountability of defaulters. Transparency into the operations, data, and executions, as garnered by automated software systems, allows easy access to crucial data in real-time and increases the accountability of every staff involved with the process.

Challenges for CFOs in implementing financial process automation

The roadblocks to investing in a financial process automation can range from a biased mindset of staff to inadequate data supporting the investment choice. The following list comprises a handful of similar roadblocks:

How can CFOs implement financial process automation?

An automated software system for financial processes should run smoothly after the successful deployment. But unfortunately, many organizations reported digital transformation and automation failure after the pilot phase. Experts have cited that the human tendency to resist change and their reluctance to adopt change are primary reasons for projects to fail. Well, not just human behavior, but a lack of adequate planning can also be a reason, especially when owners try to add a new solution to their technology stack without prior intimation. Therefore, for any form of transformation, be it automating financial processes or streamlining document workflows with software solutions, proper planning, and careful step-by-step implementation are needed. Simply put, financial process automation begins by following the given steps strategically:

Identifying financial processes for automation

As stated earlier, many financial processes could be easily automated. Hence, creating a visual roadmap of each process using Process Discovery and other solutions will quickly help identify suitable candidates for improvement. Without a proper roadmap, the chances of picking the wrong process for automation remain high. The visual roadmap further highlights the reasons and areas where inefficiencies or bottlenecks occur, which would assist owners in making informed choices, thereby laying the foundation for automation success.

Choosing the right FPA platform

The success of a pilot project depends mainly on the type of platform a company chooses for its transformation initiatives. The variety of features offered by the software solution matched against your company’s automation objectives matter in ensuring investment success.

Planning and preparing for implementation

The planning and preparation stage involves getting the resources on board with the automation program and assigning them specific tasks like developing the digital workflow and removing steps that don’t directly contribute to the intended outcome.

Monitoring software performance

Following the successful implementation, test out the processes within the automation scope. Monitor the software performance to identify new gaps and discrepancies and address them as and when they occur.

Evaluating the results

Continuous monitoring and evaluating software performance show how much the new solution succeeded in meeting your investment objectives. If all runs as planned, you can start deploying the solution across critical processes in the organization.

The key takeaway

Today, the world relies heavily on fast-paced movement and an influx of data. Data is needed to improve customer services, enable informed decision-making, and gain an edge over the market competition. Again, insights are equally important to power business growth through mergers, acquisitions, or new investments. Financial data plays a significant role here, but manual efforts cannot capture game-changing insights in real-time. And maintaining financial statements or generating reports also occupies many productive hours of employees without guaranteeing reliable, error-free outcomes. Enterprise financial operations are intricate and challenging, keeping CFOs and their executives on their toes. Given the current intricacies related to accounting and finance departments, financial process automation has become the need of the hour. Without automation support, enterprises will likely lose promising business opportunities.

Financial process automation software systems standardize operations, provide accessible and secured financial data storage, generate accurate reports, and share insights on time, supporting big business decisions. It is a surefire way to fully optimize enterprise data and resources to obtain an optimum value for the organization.

Role of Business Process Management in digital transformation: Successful strategies

Did you know that worldwide investments in digital transformation are forecasted to grow to $3.4 trillion by 2026?

Digital transformation has emerged as an indispensable requirement for companies to endure and maintain competitiveness in today’s market. The rapid advancement of technology has brought about a significant shift in customer behavior, market trends, and competitors’ strategies. Hence, it is time businesses transform digitally to keep pace with these changes and remain ahead in the business game.

At the process level, digital transformation enables businesses to automate and streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer experience. By deploying digital solutions and technologies, companies can automate routine tasks, optimize processes, and leverage data analytics to gain necessary insights into business demands. This empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, enhance customer engagement, and improve operational efficiency, achieving a competitive edge.

This is where the combined role of digital transformation and business process management (BPM) comes into play. Business process management involves analyzing and improving business processes to increase efficiency, while business process transformation is the complete overhaul of existing processes to meet the demands of changing markets. Thus, digitization plays a significant role in business process management and all-inclusive transformation, enabling businesses to automate their processes and respond proactively to market changes.

What are the different categories of business process management?

Process modeling: It involves creating a visual representation of a process, usually with the help of diagrams, to understand how it works and identify areas for improvement.

Process analysis: This process uses data and metrics to analyze performance and identify improvement areas.

Process redesign: This step reengineers a process to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality.

Process automation: This part is extremely important as it uses technology to automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes.

Process monitoring: This stage tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics to ensure a process performs optimally.

Process optimization: Finally, this step continuously improves the process to achieve better results, often through data analytics and other technologies.

Benefits of business process management

Improved efficiency: BPM helps organizations streamline processes by eliminating inefficiencies, reducing redundant tasks, and optimizing workflows, which results in quicker processing times, diminished costs, and improved customer satisfaction

Better agility: BPM enables organizations to respond quickly to changing market conditions by making modifying and adapting processes easier, helping organizations stay competitive and agile in an ever-changing business environment.

Increased visibility: BPM provides organizations greater visibility into their processes by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics. This allows firms to detect domains for improvement so that they make data-driven decisions easily.

Greater collaboration: BPM facilitates cooperation and communication between different departments and stakeholders involved in a process, thus n improving teamwork, reducing silos, and enhancing overall organizational performance.

Enhanced compliance: BPM enables organizations to ensure compliance with regulations and standards by enforcing rules and policies that cut down the risk of associated penalties and non-compliance.

Challenges of business process management

Implementation of business process management can pose various challenges for organizations ranging from technical issues, such as integration with legacy systems and software compatibility problems, to cultural challenges, such as resistance to change and lack of employee buy-in.

Organizations must adopt a systematic and holistic approach to BPM implementation to overcome these challenges involving process mapping, continuous improvement, and effective change management. Addressing these challenges can enable organizations to achieve the benefits of BPM, including improved efficiency, visibility, agility, compliance, and collaboration. In addition, by identifying and addressing these concerns and challenges, organizations can implement BPM successfully and achieve their strategic goals while remaining competitive in a rapidly evolving business landscape.

Why should leaders prioritize business process management today?

Leaders should prioritize Business Process Management (BPM) today as it can provide numerous benefits for organizations’ success in today’s ever-changing business environment. One of the primary reasons is that BPM can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and boost productivity by streamlining processes. In addition, BPM can also improve agility by enabling organizations to modify and improve their operations in response to changing market conditions.

Additionally, BPM can help organizations improve their customer experience by identifying areas for improvement in their processes, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, BPM can assist organizations in achieving compliance with the growing complexity of regulations and standards, avoiding legal and reputational risks. Finally, BPM can foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, allowing organizations to identify new opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.

Leaders should prioritize BPM today because it can help organizations achieve their strategic goals, improve their bottom line, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving business landscape. By executing BPM, organizations can increase their efficiency, enhance agility, improve their customer experience, achieve compliance, and enable innovation, all of which can drive growth and success in today’s dynamic business environment.

Expected features of an ideal BPM tool

Here are the key elements of a perfect BPM tool in bullet points:

Best practices and strategies for BPM

Identify the key processes to digitize: Organizations should find out and prioritize their primary business processes to be digitized to streamline and automate repetitive tasks, thus reducing errors and improving efficiency.

Develop a process-centric mindset throughout the organization: Companies should develop a process-centric attitude by warranting that all employees understand the importance of processes and how they contribute to the organization’s success. This helps to create a culture of continuous improvement and process optimization.

Establish a process governance framework: Organizations should establish a process governance framework to ensure that processes are standardized, well-documented, and compliant with relevant regulations, reducing variability and improving process quality.

Ensure process ownership and accountability: Process ownership and responsibility should be established at all levels of the organization to ensure that processes are continuously improved and optimized to create a culture of process excellence and foster innovation.

Implement process automation: Organizations should leverage solutions to modernize process workflows, erase manual tasks, and diminish errors to free up time for employees to focus on higher-value pursuits and improve overall efficacy.

Continuously monitor and optimize processes: Enterprises should constantly optimize their business operations using data analytics and performance metrics to detect areas for improvement and drive continuous process advancement.

The future of business process management

The future of business process management in businesses is promising due to the skyrocketing adoption of digital technologies. Consequently, BPM is likely to grow in importance with the companies seeking to enhance their processes and automate their operations. Hence, companies can drive innovation, enhance customer experience, and achieve sustainable growth in an ever-evolving business landscape by adopting a process-centric mindset and embracing automation technologies.

Furthermore, several trends are shaping the future of BPM, including embracing AI and ML, cloud-based BPM solutions, a focus on customer experience, automation of end-to-end processes, and fusion with other technologies like RPA and blockchain. As a result, businesses can optimize their processes, reduce costs, and improve their overall performance by leveraging BPM tools and strategies.

Try business process automation with AssistEdge

AssistEdge, an end-to-end Business Process Automation (BPA) platform, can help organizations streamline operations, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience. With its advanced automation capabilities, including Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), businesses can automate their workflows and eliminate manual errors, freeing up valuable time and resources.

For instance, a global bank, a client of EdgeVerve, wanted to adopt RPA to enhance its operational efficiency. Still, the CTO was cautious due to the high failure rates of initial RPA implementations. They realized the need for an RPA center of excellence (CoE) and discovered AssistEdge Discover, which simplified the process selection and implementation journey. The bank successfully leveraged RPA to reduce manual errors, free up employees’ bandwidth, and reduce processing time. The RPA CoE efficiently supervised the program, allowing the bank to focus on strategic growth opportunities.

For more information, download the flipbook.

Hence, with the increasing adoption of automation technologies like AI, ML, and RPA, BPM is becoming more available and accessible to implement than ever before. Subsequently, companies that leverage BPM tools like AssistEdge can gain a significant competitive advantage by eliminating manual errors, automating repetitive tasks, and freeing up valuable resources to focus on high-value activities.

Process intelligence and its growing significance for businesses in 2023

A typical business process comprises various roles, tasks, and systems executed differently. Unfortunately, a lack of adequate tools makes it impossible for executives to identify root causes during process deviations. Explicit variations are easily recognizable, but subtle nuances stay camouflaged. And quick fixes could easily limit business opportunities in the long term and possible chances of higher returns. Undoubtedly, existing processes become ineffective with time, resulting in service delays, lost revenue and market to competitors, and added overhead costs for the company. Therefore, a bird’s eye view of each operation is imperative, so they are responsive enough to seize an opportunity as and when they occur.

Business process intelligence – A brief overview

Process intelligence is data systematically extracted to analyze every step within a business operation, reflecting the overall workflow. Business process intelligence provides:

As a result, it helps elevate the quality and speed of operations while mitigating process risks and arresting overhead costs. Process intelligent data provides a basic understanding of what is expected from each process and how they can be transformed to garner higher results.

Manual methods of unearthing process data have proved insufficient and inaccurate for multiple reasons. Thankfully, process intelligence tools use new-age technologies like AI and Computer Vision to automatically create a detailed blueprint of the current digital processes across all applications, departments, and the entire enterprise. The automated software systems can monitor each task execution and extract data without disrupting the general workflow. Furthermore, since the tools follow specific pre-programmed rules, the chances of omitting or removing incorrect data are negligible. Therefore, the quality of process intelligence captured is impeccable, error-free, reliable, and accurate.

Furthermore, process intelligence software systems collect, aggregate, clean, and update data in a centralized platform for easy and real-time visibility.

Evaluating the importance of business process intelligence

The primary objective of extracting process intelligence is to transform existing operations digitally to keep up with the changing times. Reliable and accurate data captured in real-time eliminates the guesswork from the process and enables owners to make informed choices regarding business process transformations. Therefore, optimization initiatives become faster, more accurate, and more data-driven. However, its benefits are not limited to process migration only.

At the most granular level, process data reflects bottlenecks and assists owners in identifying tasks consuming the maximum time for execution. This will help determine if automation is needed to speed up workflows and arrest human errors. On the other hand, employees can leverage business insights to deliver their objectives more accurately, and their efficiency improves manifold.

Process intelligence fuels intelligent automation, value engineering, process standardization, resource optimization, and employee experience. Additionally, from a business standpoint, it can improve compliance and governance and enhance operational efficiencies across the enterprise.

Benefits of process intelligence for businesses

Often, enterprise transformation initiatives fail at the pilot stage, and in many other instances, the owners need help to scale digital solutions across critical operations. Lack of visibility into actual processes is one of the primary reasons. In the absence of accurate and real-time process intelligence, implementing any change to the existing system is quite impossible. Therefore, process intelligence software solutions serve some specific purposes, namely:

Scalability: Process intelligence comprises granular details about how each process functions, demonstrating problem areas needing immediate improvement.

Accuracy: It leverages cross-application datasets and AI technology to provide real-time insights, allowing businesses to make informed and impactful decisions.

Speed: It identifies slow, manual steps within each process so enterprises can opt for digital solutions to accelerate task executions, improving the company’s time-to-value and returns on innovation investments.

Unbiased: Process intelligence tools are automated, capturing as-is processes without the bias or errors associated with manual capture.

Continuous: These software systems continually capture process variations across different shifts, locations, and roles to optimize and tailor future processes for unique needs.

Process intelligence can reinvent businesses – Four reasons to justify

When companies need help understanding their processes, they can solve the equation of what to automate and why with process intelligence tools. With automated solutions, owners can easily access data from multiple locations and applications, gain a comprehensive view for deep process understanding, and make informed decisions. In addition, process intelligence empowers enterprises to optimize business processes and test automation capabilities for higher outcomes. Below are the following four reasons businesses must invest more in process intelligence tools to revamp their operations.

Improved operational efficiency

Process intelligence allows owners to dive deep into each process, map workflows, and mine data for analysis on a real-time basis. The tools capture accurate data on workflows, people responsible for their execution, the duration for task completion, average lead times and existing bottlenecks, and their source of origin. Non-linear processes with multiple discrepancies are mapped to compare how work is done against standard practices. Such insights enable owners to decide whether to automate or eradicate recurring, time-intensive tasks to bring down the overall time taken for execution, thereby accelerating workflows and improving operational efficiency. When processes are streamlined, employees can complete their responsibilities efficiently and within the stipulated time. Their productivity improves while deliverables are accurate and reliable.

Enhanced customer experience

Today, customers prefer tailored and hyper-personalized services matching their convenient expectations. So, companies need information about what the former needs, things that motivate their buying decisions, and where they prefer searching for information or shopping. With the help of such valuable insights, it becomes a lot easier for owners to custom-create services for their end users and keep up with their quantity and quality preferences. Furthermore, services and product information transparency are essential for new-age-conscious buyers. These details help build trust and loyalty among buyers. And good customer journeys and shopping experiences can go a long way in boosting the brand’s awareness in the market while drawing more valuable prospects.

Better decision making

A study shows that nearly 43% of companies surveyed agree that process intelligence enables them to leverage data strategically and win over markets within a year. But data should be available in real-time, as and when needed, for any game-changing strategy. Process intelligence software solutions ensure that the same data is present at your fingertips. These tools supersede the manual capabilities of humans for extracting data from multiple sources and processing and analyzing them within the shortest time possible. Hence, decision-makers have readily available quality and reliable insights to frame their strategies.

Increased agility and flexibility

Process intelligence empowers organizations to become more agile and flexible with their operations and strategies. With the rightful insights, they can adapt quickly to the rapidly changing and ambiguous environment. In addition, it helps enterprises become more responsive and technologically adept while effectively catering to the needs of employees, stakeholders, and clients.

Process intelligence software implementation – Challenges and remedies

Misaligned expectations: It is always better to outsource advanced software systems from trusted vendors for various reasons. Continuous backend support is one of the main reasons behind the choice. However, poor research about the vendor and their software offerings can lead to many challenges when employees start working with them. Misaligned expectations and what kind of support the vendor can provide will turn into a dominating concern going forward. Transparent and open communication between internal project heads and the vendor can save a lot of pain.

Poor data integrity: Post software integration, enterprise data needs to be migrated from the existing system to the new one. But here, important decisions are required pertaining to which data can be shared across systems and which cannot. And also, data integrity and quality should be maintained during transfer. Any chance of data getting compromised or spoiled can damage the company. So, understand the level of interoperability between the two systems and continuously verify data integrity to be safer.

The non-cooperative mindset: 79% of respondents in a survey kcited ‘people’ as a top three challenge for process intelligence adoption. Every employee within the team is responsible for ensuring the software implementation’s success. That the new tool will be in the best interest of all should be communicated first, and then a framework for identifying common user problems should be created so everyone in the team is on the same page.

The unpreparedness of the IT team: Some employees would be satisfied working with the existing system, wherein the IT team might need a basic understanding of how to work with more advanced tools. Recruiting a new batch of trained staff is never a feasible option. So, companies should focus on training their team about the benefits of a new process intelligence software solution and how to use them effectively.

Lack of vendor support: The vendor is an extended partner in the project, and their expertise will be needed to ensure a smooth transition. Therefore, opening lines of communication with them is essential, especially during the initial days. But first, companies need to ascertain from the vendor’s earlier or existing clients about their customer support before making a wrong investment choice.

Diminishing productivity: Frequently, it has been witnessed that employee productivity dips during a new software implementation. This can impact the ROI of the system and employee morale. However, contextual learning, based on an individual’s current needs, alongside tailored guidance and real-time support, can enable employees to complete their work and maintain productivity levels.

For more information download the whitepaper: The New Paradigm of Process Excellence

The final takeaway

Process intelligence is valuable enterprise data that enables them to scale their digital transformation initiatives effectively while becoming more responsive and competitive with their strategies. In addition, such insights also contribute to improving their customer experiences. Today, data is the most valuable asset for an organization, and its operations, processes, and documents are a treasure trove waiting to be extracted and leveraged. With the help of AI and Automation, businesses can easily tap into the locked information and realize unlimited possibilities for their organizations while scaling higher returns and business opportunities.