Business process transformation in the digital age: what does good look like?

In the digital age every business must keep reviewing its business processes to stay current and relevant. Customers’ expectations are changing all the time, requiring an agile response from the companies that serve them. Companies also need to be able to adapt to other changes in the market, whether that’s the impact of the pandemic on supply/demand and buyer behaviour, or the disruptive effect of ambitious or new competitors.

This need - to be responsive and ready for anything - coupled with ambitions to improve cost efficiency, productivity and compliance, is a major driver of enterprise digital transformation initiatives today.

Yet, if business processes and supporting content are not managed in a seamlessly interlinked and intelligent way, to enable a system of understanding in place of the traditional system of records, it can be difficult to deliver true transformation.

Smarter handling of insurance claims

Insurance claims handling is both a resource-intensive activity, which needs to be managed efficiently to ensure a positive customer experience. It’s also the kind of activity that service providers would love to automate, if they could find a way to more seamlessly sort routine from more complex claims, enabling them to treat each case in the most effective and efficient way.

As long as users have to switch between different IT systems and screens to inform their next action, the scope for bold new process efficiencies and for better experiences will be restricted. Being able to manage business processes and supporting content together via the same platform would enable teams to innovate in a range of ways. This might involve using content sentiment analysis to help prioritise responses to angry or anxious customers, for instance; or providing facilities for clients to upload their own claims forms, photos and other evidence to accelerate processing.

Given that the teams currently handling claims workloads will have a strong grasp of relative case complexity, who the subject experts are, and how those people’s time is best spent, it follows that these users are the ideal people to adapt and hone case management processes.

It’s this kind of adaptive scenario businesses should be aiming for – rather than one in which they try to specify the ultimate new process up front, and build this rigidly into everyday operations for the next five years (during which time needs will undoubtedly change, and new service options will come to the fore.)

The ideal is to stay flexible, providing strong but malleable parameters that the business can adapt as needed, because there will always be new room for improvement.

Streamlined contract management

Consider current approaches to contract management. A more integrated and intelligent approach to managing processes and content makes it possible both to tighten and streamline compliance, security and information governance, and to manage contracts and supplier relationships in a smarter and more strategic way (by linking contracts to supplier records, timelines and cost/value analytics, to inform process automation/contact prioritisation/business planning).

Banks and financial services providers also recognise the potential to combine agreements with their own customisable intelligence to manage new and enhanced regulations around the retention and management of data - requirements which might otherwise tie up teams for months. Using intelligent content analytics and extraction would allow financial organisations to perform automated analysis of their loan agreements, for instance, storing a set of metadata for each one - as stipulated by regulators.

Extracting new value from legacy systems

Paving the way for next-generation business process management must start with a platform that can link processes and relevant content and deliver them to the right person, in the right context, at the right time so that they can complete tasks promptly, confidently and efficiently.

Where legacy investments are holding back transformation, consider a solution that preserves the value of ERP or CRM systems via direct integration, so that the rich data in these systems can be put to extended business use.

Content federation (using virtual/external information objects to create a 360° view of diverse information stored across ERP, CRM systems and more) and intelligent information management provide a path forward here, allowing content from other line-of-business applications to be brought into play.

It could even provide an initial step to eventual system consolidation, keeping the business’s options open.