The top six use cases for achieving massive ROI with process management

In a brand new Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, Forrester Consulting analyzes the return on investment (ROI) that can be achieved by using the process management platform ARIS. Read here how to realize an ROI of more than 300 percent over three years.

Usually when you think of ROI, you only think of expansion projects, sales plays and territory penetration to uncover new channels of revenue. Most of the time, you just do not think of processes at all as a game changer for your bottom line! Yet as the headline suggests, yes indeed – even managing your internal processes can net you some extra revenue. However, how is that possible?

In the last post, I discussed how to categorize the benefits of process management in general:

• Efficiency gains related to process management itself.
• Meeting compliance requirements.
• Performance optimization of the core business processes.

Now I want to take a reverse perspective: process management is a comprehensive approach that can address different focal points depending on the company. In this post, I look at the most important use cases of process management and consider the resulting benefits.

1. Process optimization and standardization

   This is the supreme discipline of process management. Process optimization, by means of process analysis and mining, is about identifying the weak points of the as-is processes with regard to cycle time, costs and quality. Process mining offers the possibility to identify and analyze all variants of a process. This is important because, according to the Pareto principle, rare special cases can lead to high costs and long cycle times. Based on the analysis results, the processes are adapted and optimized.

   ROI potential
   A more efficient processing and the analysis of the required resources aims at a reduction of costs. On the other hand, in the case of customer-facing processes, an increase in customer satisfaction can be expected through an increase in quality and adherence to deadlines, and thus indirectly an increase in turnover.

2. Digital workforce enablement

   Many transformation and optimization projects fail due to a lack of well-organized communication of the 'new way of working' to the employees concerned. This scenario makes work instructions and policies available to the workforce as a digital organizational handbook to ensure that they are always up-to-date. In addition, this also makes it possible to implement a feedback and collaboration channel that provides an overview of the acceptance of process optimizations.

   ROI potential
   The benefit potential of a digital workforce enablement lies in the cost and time savings in the onboarding of new employees. Furthermore, clear and up-to-date work instructions lead to an increase in process quality and high employee satisfaction through the possibilities of feedback and collaboration.

3. Customer journey optimization

   The analysis and optimization of customer journeys takes the perspective of the customer and aims at optimizing all touchpoints they have with the company. Mapping the customer journey with business processes brings together internal and external views.

   ROI potential
   The benefit potential lies in the increase of customer satisfaction by understanding the ‘moments of truth’, and thus indirectly in the increase of financially relevant key figures such as turnover and market share.

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4. Process automation

   Different technologies are available to automate processes or sub-processes: end-to-end process automation, robotic process automation (RPA) and low-code/no-code automation.

   ROI potential
   Process automation pursues a wide range of goals. On the one hand, more efficient processing should reduce the required employee capacities. On the other hand, it is also about reducing processing and throughput times and optimizing the quality of processing through standardization and reduction of the error rate.

5. Regulatory compliance

   The number of legal regulations is constantly increasing. Companies are obliged to know the ones relevant to them regarding elements such as quality, data protection and environmental protection, and to ensure that they are implemented in operational practice.

   Process management plays a central role here, as many standards, such as  ISO9000 ff, follow a process-oriented approach and the process landscape is used to structure the regulations.

   ROI potential
   Effective compliance with all regulatory rules prevents the imposition of penalties and negative publicity. Nevertheless, regulatory compliance is still seen by many companies as a burden rather than an opportunity. A close alignment between compliance and business teams leads to an optimal balance between compliance and performance goals.

6. Risk and control management

   Understanding business processes plays a major role in identifying the relevant operational risks and establishing the necessary controls. Process analysis and mining is used to continuously monitor the effectiveness of the controls.

   ROI potential
   Efficient risk management is an essential building block of business resilience and means a reduction in the costs in the event of an emergency. Analysis shows that companies can very quickly lose more than their entire annual profit in the event of a significant disruption to their supply chains.

   Comparative studies show that companies with strong business resilience grow almost 2.5 times faster than their competitors.