How to Turn Process Pains into Business Gains
In our three-part webinar series, “How to Turn Process Pains into Business Gains,” Forrester analysts and Nintex customers explore the major pain-points holding organizations back from wide-deployments of process automation and the critical need for digital transformation.
In part one, “Where there is a will, there is a workflow,” Emerson’s Enterprise Cloud Manager Blake Scott and Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Rob Koplowitz discussed the need for rapid and agile enterprise-wide process management and workflow automation with host Nintex Corporate Marketing Manager Elise Harrington. The webcast is available on-demand.
The importance of automating enterprise-wide workflows
Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz analyzed the impactful role of the citizen developer and why rapid automation is critical right now.
In our current global climate, Koplowitz compared the importance of driving automation across organizations to the analogy of a frog in hot water – the water gets warmer slowly until the water is too hot, and the frog is unable to save itself. All in all, if your organization is slow to react to the need for digital transformation it will inevitably end up in hot water.
Recently, the global workforce saw the critical need for process management and automation in the shift to remote work. As Koplowitz recalls, “processes that worked on Monday, no longer worked on Tuesday.”
In striving for a world of end-to-end automation, he noted that the goal is more than building the next mobile application. The functional goal of digital process automation is “when everyone in the organization is able to express what they do, and be able to do their job through online, managed automation.”
Two processes ripe for high-value automation
Koplowitz helps us identify two business processes in almost any organization that are quick-win scenarios for digital transformation:
- Dependencies on paper
Paper proves to still be critical for some organizations. Over 76% of organizations in the Forrester 2020 Digital Process Automation survey report reliance on paper throughout their business processes.
Especially within a global pandemic, paper is viewed as a biological agent – not to mention highly unproductive. There is no getting around it, in a world of remote work, paper-based processes break.
Quick win: Address paper-based processes through implementing drag-and-drop forms-based capabilities through Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms – which can be customized and branded specifically to fit the requirements of the organization or process.
- Electronic manual routing
Koplowitz shared that in the same survey, 63% of organizations rely on electronic manual routing processes through spreadsheets and email. The issue with electronic manual routing is that these processes seem digital since it is “online,” but are still extremely manual-driven processes.
“If you think about it, an individual is working in a spreadsheet and then circulating the information manually through email,” Koplowitz explains. As soon as the process owner is unable to initiate or continue the multiple manual steps within the process – it fails.
Quick win: Implement process mapping with Nintex Promapp® to define and provide visibility into operations, automate processes with Nintex Workflow, and utilize robotic process automation (Nintex RPA) for highly repetitive processes.
Next steps
Koplowitz posed the question, “What does this mean for deploying enterprise-wide automation – what does this mean for IT?”
It is up to IT to prepare the organization for success.
Rather than IT historically driving structured and methodical solutions, they must provide guardrails and a framework to facilitate hundreds of wide, situational processes driven by the business using process automation platforms.
The action here is to establish toolsets and best practices to safely govern citizen developers and process experts. With low- to no-code digital process automation tools like Nintex Workflow, Nintex RPA, and Nintex Forms, organizations can establish enterprise automation solutions and process excellence.
These tools don’t compete but complement each other in capabilities for a smooth and seamless suite of automated solutions.
Automated solutions with Emerson
When implementing enterprise-wide automation, Koplowitz recommends determining the breadth of automation needs (always assume more is needed) and establishing a center of excellence to teach, support, and reward the adoption of automation across the business.
Emerson is a great example of this. Emerson Enterprise Cloud Manager Blake Scott put these principles to work by deploying process automation enterprise-wide with Nintex.
Before using Nintex, Emerson did not have easy-to-implement tools to create automated solutions, relying heavily on custom code that was difficult to support and maintain.
As a solution-oriented leader, Scott believes in the 80-20 rule, saying, “If you can solve 80 percent of the problem, help 80 percent of users – it’s time to take action (make a purchase, turn a process on, execute).”
In the search for solutions, Scott identified three possible options: Low barrier to entry but basic workflow solutions, medium barrier to entry with some options for workflow customization but high risk for site crashing, and high-risk/high-cost solutions leveraging developers. Scott initially hired developers but ran into problems with system downtime, long deployment windows, and high costs for testing and support.
Tired of unreliable processes, Scott found the Nintex Process Platform and put Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms to the test – having a developer build the same solution in SharePoint Designer and with Nintex. The easiest solution for building workflows, forms, and process applications was Nintex. With Nintex, Emerson’s team can configure solutions without code, which ensures the ability to roll out enterprise-wide end-to-end automation.
To support long-term success, Scott established a security team, training path, and user group for workflow authors. The workflow author user group meets every other week to review issues, cover Nintex product releases and celebrate milestones in their digital transformation.
Scott received enough buy-in on their progress toward process automation that he was able to create a position within his team for a process matter expert that acts as both a coach and librarian to facilitate optimum utilization of the Nintex Process Platform.
He has created a mentality of process excellence facilitated by his team and enabled citizen developers across the organization to digitally transform the way they work.
Don’t miss Parts 2 and 3 of “How to Turn Process Pains into Business Gains”
Join us for Parts 2 and 3 of our webinar series with Forrester. Part 2 of the series, “Where there is highly repetitive work, there is a bot to automate it” will feature Nintex RPA customer Seacoast Bank and Forrester’s Craig Le Clair. Part 3, “Future of business, powered by effective process management and automation,” includes Forrester’s new analyst John Bratincevic and Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, who is successfully leveraging the end-to-end capabilities of the Nintex Process Platform.
Register to attend the live webcast or receive the on-demand recording by signing up here.
See how the Nintex Process Platform enables business analysts and IT and ops professionals at organizations everywhere to quickly adopt rapid and agile automation to build and manage their own solutions through a suite of low-code and no-code tools – schedule a demo today.
