Lack of automation and digitization costs companies a lot of money | Pallas Athena

Lack of automation and digitization costs companies a lot of money

Pallas Athena's experiences show the need for improvements in business processes.

A lack of automation of business processes and the digitization of information are leading to considerable inefficiency and unnecessary costs within organizations. This is one of the most important findings by Pallas Athena, market leader in Business Process Management. These findings are supported by studies by Gartner, the worldwide leader in IT research, and by the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

To create an understanding of the added value of BPM solutions, we looked at the main solutions that are used for removing bottlenecks and streamlining business processes. Pallas Athena identifies five areas in which significant improvements in efficiency can be achieved:

1. Automation of tasks – By integrating applications, the number of manual operations can be reduced. This process automation prevents any duplication of data entry, reduces the number of unnecessary process errors, cuts processing times and saves on labor costs.
2. Digitization of information – The digitization of information produces a massive acceleration in lead times and also greatly improves process monitoring. Moreover, a graphical representation of the project status results in a reduction of the transfer time when several people are working on a file or project.
3. Rapid implementation of process changes – Changing internal or external conditions demand a quick response. By using the right tools, processes can be disconnected from the supporting IT systems and business managers can implement process changes themselves in real time.
4. Collection and use of management information – Process-related reports are often generated using analysis software that indicates only whether KPIs have been achieved or not. To actually improve processes, it is also necessary to find out why KPIs have not been achieved. This can be done using new process mining and process animation techniques.
5. The best person for the job – By using the right tools, you can ensure that every task is performed by the most suitable employee, based on rules, profiles and seniority. This leads to increased speed of the process, fewer errors and better results.

“Organizations are still wasting a lot of time and money as a result of inadequate processes and deficiencies in process analysis,” says John Hoogland, CEO of Pallas Athena. “With the deployment of the right Business Process Management tools, processes can be significantly improved by means of automation and digitization. Furthermore, BPM solutions enable users to actually gain an insight into the individual process indicators and to quickly make process adjustments themselves.”

Hajo Reijers, Associate Professor of Business Process Management at the Eindhoven University of Technology, says: “These five areas are clearly in accordance with the results of other research that we are doing at the Eindhoven University of Technology into the ‘best practices’ for achieving performance improvements. I sometimes find it surprising how much time and energy time people devote to pursuing all sorts of trendy management concepts, while a list such as this one offers a much more practical guideline.”