Operational responsiveness – a quality of a business process or supporting IT solution, which indicates its ability to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur.
Have you been paying attention to the kind of technological advancements that have occurred in the last 40 years? If you have, you’ve almost certainly recognized how important and prevalent visibility into operational processes has become.
For example, in the medical field, resolution has improved in imaging, and now there is an ability to intervene into disease processes. In the manufacturing field, real-time visibility has improved product quality and operations… In home security, alerts and video images now allow for owners to access information regarding break-ins and other mischief.
With such advances, it comes as a surprise that many businesses aren’t taking advantage of capabilities that make business processes more visible when it is now possible for workflow automation tools to deliver more transparency to smooth out information flow.
Process visibility allows decision-making to accelerate and react to operations that are happening in real-time – but many companies are still not investing in operational responsiveness.
When we improve our workflow, it becomes possible to intervene early on into unexpected upturns and downturns. It becomes possible to improve efficiency and reduce risk, all while retaining competitive advantage.
Let’s look at 3 steps you can take to incrementally improve business process visibility.
Documenting
It often happens that businesses don’t use formal reviews and approvals to delegate processes. Changes are made ad hoc to suit the needs of employees. But, obtaining visibility into documentation, processes can and will improved. If you decide on which key performance indicators to monitor within each process, you become enabled to build a foundation for reporting and dashboards that allow for process visibility.
Automation
In many cases, management assumes that employees track their responsibilities. While daily work can be managed with email reminders and task lists (paper or screen), spreadsheets, and project plans. Yet, when problems arise, management goes straight to the question, “what actually went wrong?” Everyone ends up scrambling to answer this question to avoid blame. Without automation, it becomes difficult to pinpoint where the trail failed.
Automating workflow can eliminate processes falling through the cracks such as an overflowing inbox. Errors due to manual processes are eliminated. Alerts are triggered and directed to their proper designation according to set rules. Tasks are replaced by queues within the automated software.
Monitoring
Ultimately, management has to have visibility into operations in order to have the ability to intervene as early as possible as catastrophe moves into the danger zone. Gone are the days where spreadsheets and manually written daily reports are circulated on a need-to-know basis. Automation tools that work to set processes work to obtain real-time information on process health before facing a catastrophe.
To view and diagnose workflow issues
Workflow automation tools give execs visibility through well-designed dashboards. If there are duplicates and errors, workflow can change quickly. These errors can be easily traced into an automation system.
Don’t be left in the dark!
By shining a light on your processes, you can put your workflows on the right track. When you boost your process visibility, operational responsiveness improves.
Struggling with document processes? Ready to automate your workflows? It’s possible to effectively monitor all operations using an automated process that will quickly run and support your path to process visibility.
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