Routes of Adoption: Process Optimization

Over time, processes need to be adapted or improved, but not without first having good visibility as to how processes are performing or what areas of opportunity exist. Teams can benefit from visualization tools, process monitoring, and process intelligence to guide process optimization initiatives with solid process measurements. We call this route of adoption 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:

• Helping identify and measure what matters
• Ensuring that processes drive corporate performance
• Accelerating management decision making
• Driving towards real-time process awareness
• Enabling collaborative analysis of process performance

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.

In addition to using Visio, tools such as Performance Point Server's Dashboard Designer allow for the creation of dashboards and scorecards that can be published directly to a SharePoint Server. And of course, Microsoft Excel is also a great tool to perform powerful data analysis, integrating with all kinds of data sources, including SQL Server and SQL Server Analysis Services.

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