Identify the ‘Low Hanging Fruit’

Process Standardization helps organizations identify the ‘low hanging fruit’ and achieve process improvements using human workflow and electronic forms to address manual procedures and one off exception.

Human workflows end electronic forms help drive process repeatability and consistency across people. Some of the benefits of workflow include:

Realizing quicker time to market through self-service Microsoft SharePoint Server provides teams and individuals with out-of-the-box capabilities to implement human workflows. SharePoint provides built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archiving processes. With SharePoint, users can create, maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling them to streamline collaborative processes.

"[W]e can now perform long-term, strategic business planning. At all levels of the organization, people are aware of the operational context and can take action that benefits the company as a whole."

Integrate and Automate Business Processes

As the number of instances of your process increase, it is difficult to scale the process economically by just adding more people. Here, we need to integrate processes across applications and systems and to automate the execution of groups of steps to increase speed and efficiency, as well as to reduce manual work and repetitive labor. This is called Process Automation.

Automating business processes requires connecting diverse systems both within and across organizations. Once integration and automation is achieved, visibility into business processes is possible.

Some of the benefits of automating and integrating business processes across systems include:

BizTalk Server connects legacy and line of business applications that reside on different platforms.

BizTalk supports a wide variety of different communication languages (including both standards-based protocols and industry- or application-specific formats) through the use of powerful integration adapters. In addition to ensuring accurate and complete communication between applications, BizTalk serves to route messages to the correct destination based on user-defined conditions (such as the type of application, or if a message meets a certain threshold requirement, as may be appropriate with financial messaging). It also implements “publish and subscribe” messaging to loosely couple source and destination systems.

"With its SOA, Austrian Post has reduced the time required to connect to disparate systems from weeks to hours, increased employee productivity, cut IT and operational costs, and realized a return on investment (ROI) in three years."

Process Improvement and Measurement

Over time, processes need to be adapted or improved, based on their performance and business needs. Teams can benefit from using visualization tools, process monitoring, and process intelligence for process optimization initiatives. Process improvements coupled with process measurement is called Process Optimization.

Measuring business processes helps drive process improvements by helping identify areas of opportunity through objective metrics that are delivered to the right person at the right time. In addition, process measurements help ensure that business processes align with departmental and corporate goals and strategy. Some other benefits include:

Once the right measurements are agreed upon, teams can then publish them via portals and dashboards that include KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) as well as other forms of contextual visualizations to drive visibility across team members, process owners, and executives.

One of the most useful ways to visualize the performance of a business process is to render them directly on the Visio diagram that was used to model the process. It is very useful for business analysts and users to derive new insights on process performance directly from the visualization context provided by the data-connected Visio process model that they helped develop.

And of course, Microsoft Excel is also a great tool to perform powerful data analysis, integrated with all kinds of data sources, including SQL Server and SQL Server Analysis Services.

Finally, SharePoint Server's portal capabilities provide the best platform for the publishing and distribution of these reports, scorecards and dashboards to a broad enterprise audience.

"Today, an end-to-end special order takes 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes, thanks to Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Virtual Inventory Cloud from GCommerce."