COVID-19 has ripped open the foundations of what we considered protected, sheltered and secure. 

Organizations are today grappling with this unprecedented situation globally, complying with all federal and state guidelines to ensure safety of employees, clients, partners, and other business stakeholders. While doing so, they are also looking for solutions to navigate the challenges the pandemic has created and exploring mechanisms to become more resilient to future threats and disruptions. 

Businesses are constantly trying to find ways to become resistant to market and technology disruptions.  Digitization of books could be one of the ways for a publishing company to become resilient, at the same time opening new business avenues like e-books or audio books. Digitization and digitalization of key process information or standardized processes will help a global manufacturer to become more resilient. Digital knowledge “know-how” is critical for what to do with digital input to get a digital output performing a task without violating compliance.  In case of a sudden change in business conditions, or when moving to a new vendor, this digitally structured knowledge could be accessed quickly to move to new ways of working. All such transformation initiatives run on efficient business processes. If these processes are not harmonized or standardized, they become deterrent to growth and make the organization susceptible to disruptions.

Roadblocks to resiliency

To remain resilient, organizations need to keep a close watch on their people, process, data, systems and governance. However, lack of clear visibility into business’ non-standardized processes results in leakages, inefficiencies, increasing operational costs, and dropping margins, making them inefficient and resistant to change. In order to overcome these challenges, organizations resort to quick fixes without sufficient groundwork to understand their current state and emerging risks. 

Here are some roadblocks that organizations experience when looking at transformation and business resiliency:

• Non digitalized, non-standardized business processes spread across geographies, captives, shared services centers or business units creating challenges such as underutilized resources leading to reduced productivity,  inability to leverage global workforce and skillset across organization  in time of need, etc.
• Lack of objective assessment-driven automation and process transformation initiatives. Time consuming, manual-intensive and biased Robotic Process Automation (RPA) assessment and process selection result in lower ROI, failed automations and siloed bots, which only increase cost, and inefficiencies in the long run.
• Lack of on-demand, secure access to digitized, structured process knowledge. This plays havoc during critical business changes, making businesses less resistant to sudden internal or external disruptions such as the sudden COVID-19 driven need to work remotely. 
• Inability to identify process gaps, no benchmarking clarity, no actionable insights or triggers.

The need for process transformation

Business resiliency demands resilient business processes. In other words, business processes need to be standardized, streamlined, and automated where appropriate to reduce human dependencies. Wipro’s business process transformation and harmonization platform - Harmony enables streamlined process design, automation assessment, and management of change. It helps digitize process knowledge using rapid process capture methodologies. Harmony assesses process efficiency based on the algorithms and offers embedded industry process libraries and codified activities to accelerate process design. It comprises of in-built project management tool for change programs, and automated reports and risk views for transparency through the transformation project. 

Harmony has helped our global clients increase business resiliency, in-process visibility, on demand access to critical process knowledge, and unbiased automation assessments by:

• Building efficient processes to support digital/transformational journey - Reduced variance, increased standardization of processes by up to 50%
• Reducing automation journey timeline with automated objective RPA assessment – Picking right processes for automation, higher RPA ROI, 100+ automation opportunities successfully delivered using Harmony’s Robotic Process Automation assessment module called BOTMAP 
• Retention and on-demand availability of process knowledge - Delivering on-demand, digitized, structured process knowledge across organization, up to 40% reduction in process knowledge capture/documentation timeline by reusing and structuring the existing knowledge. More than 4000 users are benefiting from this feature across client organizations.  
• Ensuring operations continuity – Process standardization, and on-demand process knowledge availability ensure business continuity even in the absence of key people
• Enabling work from anywhere and work by anyone – Process knowledge and simplification enable businesses to reskill resources quickly (on demand). Idea is to enable work from anywhere or by anyone, thereby reducing dependency on people and location to a greater extent
• Drive robust process governance and control – Better visibility into the processes makes business more agile and increases resiliency by helping key decision makers respond to threats or changes proactively  

Design your processes for a resilient future

A clear line of sight deep into processes and on demand availability of structured processes help decision makers steer the business clear off disruptive forces well in time.  But in order to reach such a perfect agile state, process activity must become digital - input/output should be digital, knowledge should be digitized and digitalized, governance and controls should become digital, and finally, work from anywhere by anyone should become a reality.

Decision makers need to design and deploy standardized and harmonized digital processes to institutionalize best practices across all regions and service centres. This will help present a unified view of people, process, data, systems and governance to them. Decision makers, operations leaders will have better control during disruptions and help quick implementation or adoption of new technology. Once processes are streamlined, next step is to identify automation opportunities within these processes and establish work from anywhere by anyone strategy. Automating key or repetitive processes will reduce dependency on humans, reduce costs, and increase efficiencies bolstering organizational immunity further.

We would love to show you how Wipro’s business process transformation and harmonization platform  Harmony designs and deploys digital processes that enable up to 50% increase in standardization, up to 60% accelerated automation assessment leading to overall increase in ROI, and more. Request a meeting here.

ThangaPrakash Kanagaraj

Associate Vice President, Product head – Wipro Harmony

ThangaPrakash has more than 22 years of experience across business process solution design, delivery, transformation, and automation leveraging technology. Currently, he is managing Wipro Harmony, a SAAS-based Wipro IP with user base across 60+ countries. ThangaPrakash holds a Master’s degree in Information Technology, and is a qualified CMA.