The Problem
Based in Europe with a large international back office, a telecom provider was convinced that there was a lot of extra work happening outside of actual business processes. However, it seemed impossible to understand the real patterns of employees' work. Various time and motion studies were conducted manually through interviews and data collection from time registration and process workshops. While there were indications that the issue was significant—potentially amounting to tens of thousands of hours spent on non-value-adding tasks—there was no concrete evidence, nor was the root cause clearly identified. Eventually, manual discovery failed to deliver the expected granularity, and the cost of inspections became too high. The company suspended this initiative due to its unscalability. To better understand the real picture of processes, they chose a data-driven approach to mapping processes and workflows in their back-office unit. The idea was to use the automated process and work discovery to identify:
- Core process-related work activities and tasks.
- "Other work" and evaluate if it’s adding value or could be eliminated.
- The tasks that don’t require human involvement and could be automated.
The Solution
ProcessMaker Process Intelligence analyzed the telecom company’s back-office operations for sales orders and shipment processing department activities over a period of 4 weeks across 75 computers. ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence uses the ESA framework as a guiding tool for finding the improvement opportunities for clients. E - Eliminate ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence unveils overlapping, duplicate, and pointless work in process steps for more meaningful work and quicker returns. S - Standardize ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence shows various teams' methods to identify the most effective way of working and become a fully optimized organization. A - Automate ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence reveals manual work on business apps to show quickly automatable process steps and long workflows for RPA.
The Value Created
ProcessMaker Process Intelligence provided full visibility of repetitive activities that employees needed to complete in order to process sales orders between their CRM, invoicing, and supporting systems and tools. The initial expectation for a customer was to find automatable tasks and eliminate extra work. The results were beyond that as the customer found root causes for the problems: 25% of customer communication was happening using email Not all internal communication was centralized in CRM systems. It was making case management tracking impossible and causing a lot of reworks as information on previous cases was often missing. Tens of tasks and thousands of extra hours were caused by the customer's master data issue The data didn’t flow as expected across main systems, which caused people to manually transfer it, even if that data already existed elsewhere. This also caused a significant rework issue because of manual entry errors. From a 4-weeks analysis initiative with ProcessMaker's Process Intelligence, the case company was able to pick up the root cause for productivity issues and solve systematic problems. This can help them get rid of thousands of manual work hours and improve customer experience, improve quality, and save time for people to focus on value-adding customer work.
