Process Recording by SMEs for agents working from home to provide a Standard Operating Procedure

Business Continuity is something that enterprises tend to adhere to theoretically. Most companies have a plan at place but only on paper, leading to managers and leaders gasping for a course of action during this unprecedented time of crisis. The sudden focus on business continuity can be perplexing to some of us. Why is Business Continuity the most mentioned keyword currently among top CXOs globally? Why is there a sudden focus on Change Management? That’s because the world, as we know, is at present in dire straits. We are amid an economic meltdown owing to the recent pandemic that has engulfed humanity — the COVID-19. Due to the immense possibility of human-to-human transmission of the virus and nearly a global average of 5-6% mortality, if affected, organizations are taking the necessary precautions. They are going to great lengths to ensure that their employees do not face the wrath of this pandemic by coming to the workplace physically and by not adhering to the social distancing norms that must be practiced during these turbulent times. Even if we somehow overcome this disruption, we’re unaware of the collateral damage that we’ll have at our hand and how businesses, especially in the Travel, Hospitality, and Retail industries, would operate post this pandemic. Companies are looking for solutions that will work as a contingency plan for weeks, if not months, to come. One of the immediate solutions that organizations across the world implemented was allowing employees to ‘Work From Home (WFH).’

But does that solve the problem operationally? Well, as convenient as it might sound from a business continuity perspective, the reality is a bit afar. Operations in physical presence are usually collaborative, where an employee abides by a specific operating procedure that is standardized across a business function. Working in silos, on the other hand, defeats the purpose altogether. The chances are that WFH operating protocols and procedures won’t be followed, or even if followed, will result in erroneous transactions and human errors that will have an overall impact on process excellence.

So how do we address such a situation at hand currently or also in the future? Process Discovery can be one of the viable solutions that helps address the ambiguity around process excellence attributed to employees working from home. AssistEdge Discover is a market-leading process discovery product that captures and leverages digital interactions to create business process maps and transformational insights that aids enterprises in process improvement, automation, and efficiency. Free from human biases, the business process maps and insights generated by the analytics engine in AssistEdge Discover provide a powerful foundation for inter-functional collaboration, process excellence, and continuous improvement.

Benefits of Process Recording for employees working from home

SMEs for a business function can record a particular process with the help of a desktop recording tool, which will capture every user action across different applications relevant to the process. Moreover, there is also a scope of addressing exception handling by recording processes of different scenarios and addressing the complexity that comes with it. Once the recordings are done and dusted, SMEs can feed it to a neural network algorithm, which will automatically clean the additional noise or events that are irrelevant to the process and create a holistic map view of the process with different variations as per the complexity. This can be directly exported as a Business Requirement Document, which will help employees connecting remotely to gather accurate information on the operating procedures and standards. The process variations will also help employees understand what actions to perform from an exception handling point of view. This will result in minimal human error, accurate process transactions, and an overall spike in process excellence standards set across a business function, which can be extrapolated to an organization level subsequently.

In the post-pandemic era, most enterprises would be overwhelmed by the complexity of a work-from-home model affecting their business delivery. If we juxtapose it to organizations who are early adopters of Process Discovery, the foresightedness will bring in enhanced brand value and a content customer base while leading the digital transformation of an organization.