Deloitte Process Bionics – Tangible Impact on Business Processes

It was Archimedes who said, give me a fulcrum and a place to stand on, and I can move the earth, but what is the fulcrum for a company nowadays? The external environment is not static, organizations in current state are exposed in the era of VUCA with increasing risks and challenges. More than that, new internal environment changes are taking place. Traditional views on internal controls are being moved away from emphasizing "compliancy", "standardized procedures" towards a broader range of value and perspectives such as "timely reporting", "digitalization" and "synergistic effect". To stand out in today’s global dynamic market, a high-performing digitalized process diagnostic and analysis tool is vital to enable an organization a rapid improvement in process flow and decision, which is the fulcrum to support tremendous forces.

However, process risks are often difficult to identify because processes model are developed implicitly through day-to-day operational practice.  Deloitte's process bionic service not only re-illustrated the process flow through data visualization and digitalization, but also reproduce the interlinking of neurons in data across domains and systems, which help companies to sort out and analyze covered problems in the mining process, form an optimized and improved solution, and create synertgistic effect in the whole organisation in terms management effectiveness and digital transformation.

Why bionic process comes in

1) Agilent dimension
The speed of enterprise transformation is accelerated. Conventional ERP system has insufficient iterative planning ability and inflexible of data analysis dimension to customize a business report in addressing the own development need of an organization.  If manual adjustments are made for reporting, it often takes a lot of time to perform data screening and processing, which is unable to meet management decision requirement in terms of timeliness and convenience.

2）In-depth vision
Whether the business process is operating effectively depends on judgement of the personnel who responsible for the process management, which is subject to human bias. When problem occurs, due to the absent of a marco-review on the process data and the inability of go into process details, the root cause of process deficiency cannot be found. As such, using a stop-gap solution for problem solving cannot sustained for continuous process improvement.

3） Collaborated business
Collaboration between various departments of a corporation is often hindered by the information asymmetry, which makes it difficult to maintain coordination in different business units and deploy resources effectively to create business synergistic effect.

4）Accurate prediction
The allocation of resources within an enterprise highly relies on the market analysis and is costs driven. Most companies' business forecast are not in real-time, not to mention automation and accuracy. Business forecast is still mainly depended on manual judgement and the value stream of financial data cannot not fully deployed.

5） Lower cost
In face of the current economic situation and fierce market competition, companies have been thinking of the ways to minimize costs, expand in the market share and achieve greater profit.

Process bionics in future

The Deloitte Process Bionics solution illustrate the company's processes in terms data neural network. By gathering the digital traces in business activities throughout various IT systems, high-performance algorithms are used to analyze massive amounts of data in real time for process integration, coordination and automation. As such, real-time tracking on operational status can be achieved and hence improving business transparency and operation effectiveness.

Based on the business needs and maturity of the company, Deloitte offers three types of solutions which are health check, process optimization, and sustainable improvement.

• Health check (2-4 weeks): By selecting the core business processes, perform detail planning and in-depth analysis, identify process bottlenecks and provide improvement solution.
• Process Optimization (6-12 weeks): Determine the goal, carry out comprehensive and in-depth visualization on end-to end-processes, identify process bottlenecks, provide improvement suggestions and action plans, complete bionics and perform predictive analysis.
• Sustainability Improvement (> 12 weeks): By defining corporate improvement strategies, develop process mining and optimizing capabilities, spread out management concepts, assist companies in realizing sustainable development.

Regarding to the above three solutions, the whole concept of process mining, data analysis, visualization and cognitive science are being adopted in assisting companies to achieve management improvement.

Corporate benefits:

• Implement transparency and visualization of the process
• Realise Process standardization and optimization
• Reduce operating costs and improve business integration capabilities
• Improve and ensure process compliance
• Improve level of automation
• Improve data analysis and forecasting ability

 Global vision, local action

The Deloitte process bionics service was first promoted in Germany and quickly promoted in many countries in Europe, with positive feedback given by clients.

Deloitte China is ready to localize and customize the solution. Let's look at an example of a sales process optimization for a multinational company to understand how the Deloitte process bionics service identify problems and develop solutions.

Case sharing: Optimize sales process, increase inventory turnover, and improve customer experience

1）Process mining and data analysis
Below picture displays the sales process in diagram with the use of process visualization technique.  Amidst different processes, there are relative activity time intervals.  It also shows the relative order quantity of each activity.  We can see the activity time of sales order confirmation varies from 1 to 89 days, and this obviously is out of rational range.

From the 2^nd diagram, we can find out that nearly 18% of sales order has been repeatedly confirmed more than 5 times.

Meanwhile, we also observed that for the proportion of sales order creation, only 23% of those made automatic order and confirmed the information; whilst almost 77% of sales order required customer service to create and confirm manually.

By the above diagram, we can therefore make a preliminary conclusion: Sales order information requires multiple manual confirmations with customers.  This would definitely affect the customer experience and evaluation, and also pose an impact on the actual delivery time and inventory turnover.  All these will lower the overall business efficiency and hence need to be solved and improved.

2）Business verification

We have verified the conclusion with customer service center, warehousing and logistics department, and IT department respectively:

• The customer service center confirmed that they had received a large amount of complaints about duplicate order confirmation. So they had to close the automatic order confirmation function, and change to send email to customer manually instead for their confirmation.
• The warehousing and logistics department agreed that there is an intense need to rectify and confirm the sales order information with customer, customer service and the line of production.  And complained that the lack of clear work duties and precise information resulted in wasting lots of manpower.
• After getting these kind of feedbacks, the IT department found out that some problems aroused in ERP due to the technical upgrade, which causing a failure to form a complete update to the order information.  And thus made other departments need to use extra manpower to handle the unnecessary information update.

3）Suggestions for optimization and its benefits

• Streamlining the procedures: Implement the real-time dashboard.  Process transparency of cross-functional areas can be achieved by order preview and process control.
• Problem fixed: Fix the ERP problem in order to improve the automatic order confirmation quantity and so as to minimize human intervention.
• Benefits: The inventory turnover reduced 17 hours and full-time manpower working hours reduced 30%.

More than that, by implementing the process bionics service, more scenarios for process automation can be identified.  By Collaborative Deloitte Robot Process Automation (RPA) tools, the digital transformation of an enterprise can be further driven to improve operational efficiency and accuracy.

As a pioneer in the process bionics service, Deloitte has provided consulting services to a number of large companies, including Siemens, multinational pharmaceutical companies, retails and automobile industries.