Remote process management and monitoring – the future of managing your key business processes

In this time of physical distancing, how can you improve your key business processes?

Social distancing is necessary to reduce the transmission of Covid-19, however because of it, it may be proving difficult to ensure that your key business processes are running effectively and that improvement steps are being taken, whilst also protecting your employees health and welfare.

Few people expected this level of disruption to occur, and we are now becoming fully aware of its detrimental impact to processes – One of the questions buzzing around in Supply Chain circles is:  

If this level of disruption should happen again, how could we minimise the impact in order to better protect our jobs, businesses and economies? – and the answer is: by designing resilient, digital processes.

We are all experiencing the wonder of virtual collaboration, via digital platforms – be it Zoom, MS Teams, or in our personal lives, Houseparty! How can we extend this virtual connection to our key business processes?

Can you imagine: in the future, your processes have a remote digital connection, that your visualisation and analytics system was directly connected to your CRM and ERP systems in the Cloud, your team is able to meet virtually, topics of discussion are based on real time process monitoring data, they can identify risks before they become problems or set about collaboratively carrying out root cause activity whilst an issue is occurring in real time. Once solved, they can then send updates back to your process to course correct or make improvements, all from the safety and comfort of their home offices. This is true process resilience via Digital means – and that future is now.

Commercial processes are a great example of digitized processes – if you think of a large-scale OTC process, it would be unusual for this not to be almost entirely digitized. Therefore, the only thing holding you back from being able to remotely manage this process is the real time connectivity, and that technology also exists – from data connections, visualisation, analytics and remote management software. Of course, the process would need to be mapped, understood, calibrated, organised, installed and trained – but now more than ever, the only thing holding you back is the belief that something is holding you back.

We should all be using this experience to future proof our businesses, and when the dust settles one of the major reflections will be: that in order to keep our businesses going, digitization was the key.

At R&G, we understand the challenges that are faced by companies that aspire to be more data-driven, your data may exist across multiple systems, it could be aggregated, or it could just be that you don’t yet have the clarity necessary across your interconnected processes to know where to start. Challenges and concerns could also be of a ‘non-digital’ nature, do I and/or my team have the capabilities to deal with a digitized process, what would digitization mean for the businesses operating rules and accountabilities?

If any of what you have read has raised questions, we are here to help – at R&G we have a wide variety of resources available to answer the many questions you may have, from real use cases related to digital projects or experienced colleagues that have led digital implementations first hand – give us a call, it would be great to talk.

Sam Clarke is Senior Business Process Excellence Consultant for R&G Global Consultants in the United Kingdom.