blog
October 18, 2021
Are you ready to welcome Process Mining?
This may sound too good to be true, but 2nd generation AI can already be used to find and refine the process models we have worked hard to create in recent decades.
DCR Solutions is revolutionizing the BPM market – with solutions that handle core processes in regulated sectors, such as health/pharma, finance/insurance, etc.
Many have recently participated in process modeling workshops or brown paper workshops, to describe the company’s processes. The initiative is often driven by the desire for deeper professional management with higher quality and better productivity. These initiatives often end up with long descriptions in different types of documents, Word, Excel and Powerpoint, where one has tried to describe how the work should be performed. These documents are often made available to employees on the intranet or in a quality management system.
Unfortunately, this often does not lead to the expected gains. Instructions and follow-up often live in its own world, which employees have to look up in, and Excel sheets that they must fill out to report status. All this, next to the IT system that they already use to do their job.
The financial sector has worked hard to describe and implement their work in processes to ensure that the work is carried out efficiently and in accordance with applicable legislation. Despite the great efforts, they are still struggling to comply with the rules, and in recent years more and more people are being employed in an attempt to stem the problems.
A road with many variations
Consultants who have worked in the field know that it is impossible to describe anything other than a small part of the process. Consultants say they focus on describing the highway as it becomes too complex to describe all the variations. All roads may lead to Rome but there are many routes to choose from.
Managers, on the other hand, often want their processes to be simple and find it anxiety-provoking that there can be more than one way of working. Therefore, large amounts of resources are used to unify employees to suit the work, rather than ensuring that the individual employees do what they are best at and that the work flows to those who are best at it.
Describing these small details is important as the employee needs help when the situation deviates from the normal. Just as a GPS helps us in the car when we are sent on a detour due to road work, so the process description must help the employees in those situations where it deviates from the usual so they can quickly get on and back on the highway. That is when we need help the most. The problem is simply trying to describe all the routes separately, in practice is impossible as there are simply too many options.
Our answer
DCR focuses instead on describing the rules and dynamically proposing the route based on the specific status and needs of the case. Even though rules are complicated, in practice there are significantly fewer rules than the possible routes that employees can choose along the way.
At the same time, focusing on rules makes it easier to ensure compliance with the law, as legal text can be expressed as rules. Thus, you can make process descriptions which are compliance by design, whereby you can document compliance with the law in the same way one can document how the law is realized in concrete rules.
Process mining is 2nd generation AI which helps to find the processes
DCR Solutions solves the challenges in a new and more efficient way which ensures that employees are heard and allowed to contribute with all their difficult experiences and suggestions.
First, we need to recognize that work is complicated and cannot be put on a simple formula, despite the management’s desire for simplicity. Employees are not the same, customers are not the same, and when we work, there are things that work better than anything else.
With DCR technology, we describe the work in a new way. The focus is on the substance of the work, what we do, the activities, and the rules that apply when we work. It may sound simple, but by focusing on activities and rules, we make the modeling exercise significantly simpler at the same time, while we create space for variation and for employees to choose their own routes considering laws and regulations, without it, the process becomes rigid and unidirectional!
DCR models are symbolic AI, which is dynamic and where the work along the way can be added, as new activities and rules, while men are in progress. A the process can be adjusted while working, that ensures, for example, changes in the law that come along the way can easily be incorporated into ongoing cases.
Next, we can use 2nd generation AI, process discovery, to analyze and understand work and propose rules. Rather than letting employees participate in time-consuming and tedious workshops, we can ask them to describe typical work situations that they have experienced. Partly the good experiences, where their efforts worked and those in their work experienced flow, where the work solved itself. But also, the frustrating experiences where things went wrong, what they do not want to happen again, the bad experiences.
Based on this data, 2nd generation AI algorithms, process discovery, can find the process, ie the substance and the rules.
A new database workshop where the robot helps
The substance of a process, the work we perform, is often not much discussed. Ask all employees to indicate the activities they perform. There will often be duplicates, why a review of the activities is an advantage so that concepts are clarified so that everyone speaks the same language. This is not a simple exercise but a prerequisite for starting to discuss the process.
Based on the activities, the substance, the employees are then asked to describe 2-3 typical work situations, scenarios. Both the good and the bad. They may like to describe more, but a minimum of 1 good and 1 bad is a good start. One scenario is very similar to the old-fashioned process description. The difference is that each employee describes how they think the work should be performed, by stating step by step what activities the different employees do.
The AI algorithm then captures this data and can then visualize how the work is performed and find the rules. If many employees choose the same path, then the algorithm finds the highway and makes it visible. Instead of trying to draw all the different routes that the employees choose, we analyze the routes and allow people to reuse other routes, which gives a significantly simpler diagram than the spaghetti diagrams you often end up with.
If you already run parts of the process in an existing IT system, you may be able to extract data from this system and let it be included in the analysis and visualization of the process.
Get started quickly - DCR AI Guide
Setting up processes in an IT system is time consuming and cumbersome, and often requires customer-specific development and configuration that takes time.
DCR offers a simple alternative which in the short term can guide employees to work efficiently and legally so that they experience flow in their work, do what they do best and ensure that they get help in precisely the situations where they are away from the highway.
DCR AI Guide nudges employees along the way in the same way a GPS helps us daily in traffic.
KMD WorkZone and SBSYS - Ready for full digitization
If you already have an IT system with DCR inside, as KMD WorkZone, SBSYS or DCR Open Case Manager, you can get started with full digital process support immediately.
Once digitized, you can get started with a continuous process improvement phase, where you evaluate how the work has taken place in a period using the AI algorithms, in order to identify new routes that may ensure more success or are faster and more efficient than other routes. The robot looks at how the work is performed and analyzes this data.
DCR Solutions is ready to help you
