Making the most of Big Data means discovering the benefits of business analytics with automated systems like workflow automation software… and unblocking the jams in your information flows.
When you’re optimising the way information flows around your business, you need to pay as much attention to the processes around documents as to the documents themselves. That means looking carefully at workflow management and other business processes... and how to make them smoother to ensure business continuity.
That’s why a great deal of document management involves usage analytics: looking at those workflows to see where the issues are. And crunching Big Data for insights that help improve business processes, across your organisation. These methods are moving into the mainstream, as the benefits of business analytics become widely recognised.
"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine." - Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Gartner Research
Why workflow analytics tools...work
In today’s connected workplace, much of the information you need to analyse your workflow is captured for you. Where?
It’s in your spreadsheets and databases, your servers and usage stats. Even simple email logs provide insight into who’s talking to who. This information, leveraged correctly, can reveal business process improvement opportunities, where decision-making is taking up too much time and energy, or there is duplication of work, or reliance on error-prone data entry, or reliance on paper-heavy processes that might be too inefficient
40% of organisations plan to increase their spending on workflow automation.
So what do we mean by “business process improvement opportunities”? Let’s give them their proper name: bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Look at where the flows stop flowing
Process efficiency is a core benefit of business data analytics, along with workflow management and automated systems. To improve a process, it’s necessary to understand how it works - and that means mapping the path information takes through your business, from the way it enters your workflow to how people receive, transform, and act on it.
The key to analytics: understanding how people use data
So it’s vital to look at the whole workflow, not just the part that’s automated already. Take the accounts payable function: you may have order entry and payment cycles down to a T, but if incoming invoices are on paper and entered laboriously by hand, you’ve got a bottleneck. Or in contract management: you may have legally watertight T&Cs, but if renewal negotiations depend on someone checking their diary, it leaves you open to risk.
Wherever business-critical information is printed on paper some distance away, there are bottlenecks.
And keep asking questions of your data
But while digitising your business is great, it’s not digitisation itself that drives process efficiencies. Rather, it’s in the big picture: how information connects up across the value chain. Questions you should be asking include:
- Where is the data? (Shared SaaS, connected systems, departmental silos?)
- How is it stored? (Relational database, personal spreadsheets, piles of paper?)
- What keeps it accurate? (Real-time updates, monthly key-a-thon, unlucky intern?)
- What makes it move? (Timely reports, structured cascades, the bcc field?)
- And most of all, who uses it?
These are the questions Big Data analytics tools can answer - giving you control over the messy mass of information that all businesses build up over time if left unchecked. Wherever information makes the biggest difference, that’s where you’ll find the biggest bottlenecks. Business data analytics unblock them.
Yet over half of organisations (56%) aren’t using analytics yet.
So imagine the value you could unleash by looking at your entire information infrastructure. Every business process, every connection between departments, the tangle of data at every interaction point. More to the point, looking at the data whatever its format – from large-scale relational databases to paper customer survey forms with the ink still wet.
To clear every bottleneck, look across the whole business
Luckily for today’s data-deluged executive, there are precise tools for the two core jobs of improving workflow management. To locate bottlenecks, check out the powerful business toolsets out there for looking at your business processes as a whole.
Make use of document analytics to analyse each individual process and assess its impact on the business in terms of time, money and risk.
Following that, you can turn to workflow automation software to digitise and automate your paper-heavy processes or smooth out problematic workflows.
Last but not the least, once processes are automated and information digitised, dashboards will display metrics and KPIs, and enable you to quickly and accurately draw inferences from big data for agile decision-making and competitive advantage.
Optionally, a well known MPS provider should be able to take you through the entire process and provide you with the most appropriate tools to unblock your workflow bottlenecks.
Identifying these business-blocking bottlenecks lets you cut down the paperwork in your business… and replace it with smarter thinking. And who doesn’t want less paper in their life?
That’s what business data analytics do for your document workflows. Are you intrigued to see what they can bring to your business?
Takeaways:
- Business data analytics sound abstract, but offer concrete outcomes – identifying process bottlenecks
- You know you’ve got bottlenecks in your business; business data analytics can show where they are
- The most important part of business data analytics isn’t data, but how people use them