A digital business process first starts by reinventing the process to make it agile, with minimal stakeholder involvement and cutting down the cycle time to process.

1. Driving Enterprise Performance by Structuring the
Unstructured
In today’s dynamic world, agility and stability are no longer mutually exclusive. The word most
apt to describe the way enterprises need to run is “agile”. In order to stay relevant, enterprises
need to move fast and be capable of responding to challenges and opportunities in a speedy
way. This means that business processes need to transform to suit the model of an agile
enterprise.
Every business process needs to work in a seamless manner, even while ensuring scalability
and adaptability. This is easier said than done. It is ironical that enterprises invest a lot in
transactional applications and yet about 80% of their business process is manual in nature.
Business users manually work with unstructured content that come in various file formats
(both electronic and physical) with manual workflows, approvals etc. That are managed via
emails, written approvals and so on. This brings about a significant delaying executing
processes leading to increased costs, reduced productivity and greater process cycle time.
Importantly, governance and compliance becomes a major challenge as information is not
found by the process owner when required, and worse, some confidential information could
potentially land in the wrong hands or tampered with.
Digital transformation in enterprises is being much talked about. But what’s a digital enterprise
without even a digital business process at the foundation? A digital business process first
starts by reinventing the process to make it agile, with minimal stakeholder involvement and
cutting down the cycle time to process. Digitization of the process needs to go hand in hand
with the process re-design. Important considerations here include digitization of the
unstructured elements in the process including data, documents, and workflows and
integrated of the unstructured with structured data world resulting from ERP and such other
transactional applications. Identification of the right technology will mean not only evaluation
of features and functionalities, but also goes beyond, to include quick acclimatization to the
organizational culture, complementing the existing enterprise technology landscape and
ensuring minimal change management. As with any initiative, this needs to be well thought
through and requires that process owners and other key stakeholders work with the
technology team to get this to life. Given that this requires interfacing with multiple divisions,
it would be advisable to identify a single owner with a mandated agenda to get the initiative
successful within a set timeline.
The benefits are huge: by ensuring integration of the unstructured and structured world in a
business process, enterprises have realized cost reductions by close to 60%. Enterprises and
third parties including auditors no longer have to struggle to find information required to run
their business. Legal holds can be used to preserve documents as required by regulatory
authorities, so that they are not tampered or deleted erroneously. With automated workflows

2. including mobile approvals, enterprises can maintain clear audit trails in addition to ensuring
quick process turnaround time. Documents can be attached to transactions in the ERP so
that the relevant supporting for transactions are easily found. Search and retrieval of relevant
documents in the context of any process becomes extremely easy and accurate.
Examples span across industries: a large metals and mining company automated it’s procure
to pay process in this manner and brought down the cycle time by over 60% and associated
costs by over 40%. A large company in FMCG automated its shared services process
including Accounts Payable, Accounts receivable, treasury and HR, consequently reducing
expenses by over 50%. A large media company automated its brand asset management
process and brought down the costs while improving visibility and governance since only the
most recent version of the brand asset will now be available to its internal and external
stakeholders.
Unstructured content is an evident area of improvement in enterprises. While all the much
hyped digital transformation initiatives are being considered by enterprises, something as
fundamental as integration of unstructured and structured data is often understated. Taking
this simple and fundamental step, is a big leap towards digital that brings down expenses by
close to 60% in a span of just three to five months. This also leads to significant improvements
in stakeholder satisfaction – satisfaction levels of the ecosystem working with an enterprise
including customers, partners and vendors.
Like a famous quote goes “He who does not lay his foundations beforehand may with great
ability do so afterwards but not without great danger to the architect and the
building.” Digitization in business processes is a fundamental step to digital
transformation and is perhaps a crucial one to propel your enterprise.