Session Information:

How to Identify and Resolve “Points of Failure” in Business Processes

• How to break inertia by changing existing rooted perceptions?
• What is the best process to achieve on-going continues improvements?
• How to harness the right KPIs to facilitate buy-in of people on all levels of the company?
• The importance of focusing on tangible, visible results
• Creating a complete turnaround: from worst in class to BEST IN CLASS within few years. 

Session Transcript:

Hello, everyone. Good morning, and welcome back to the three of you live. I'd like to thank Josie and the previous speakers, or they are really excellent insights into what best practice looks like in the world by BPM.

And I'd like to introduce you all to our next speaker, Rowan ..., who is the founder of Box Fish, a Business Process Management software business based out of Auckland, New Zealand. So, continuing with the theme of Going Around the World, is a career consultant with over 20 years of management and technology consulting experience. At two rates, 11 positions with the Big four consulting firms is, absolute passion is bringing together lean software development. So enabling organizations to be.

Welcome, ruminating, over to you thank you so much, Brian, and good morning, everyone. So my topic that I'm going to be presenting over the next half hour is titled, Transform Into a Lean Enterprise to Focus on Customer Value in Times of Uncertainty. And certainly, we're facing a time of uncertainty in today's climate. Just to kind of re-iterate in terms of my background, is as Brian mentioned, so, definitely a passionate person when it comes to business process management intelligence. Business, process management. I come from a background of being a practitioner of Lean six Sigma and now, as Brian mentioned, founded a new business called Box Fish which is a software business. I'm pretty excited at this this current stage of business process management evolution. We'll call it.

Because with, and what I'm seeing in the industry is more integration, I guess, between the two worlds of business process improvement, as well as Lean six Sigma and software development. All sort of coming into play together at this time. And, certainly, in this presentation, what I'm going to be going through is how I see the world coming to sort of coming together in terms of the establishment of what's known as a Lean enterprise. That certainly seems to be a trend that's happening in the industry at the moment as well.

So, it goes without saying that businesses are facing very uncertain times. Just a little while ago, I just did a bit of a Google search on on job losses in 20 20. And you get over 300 million results. So, obviously, I didn't check every single one. But there is a lot of businesses that are suffering at the moment. And, regardless of the current you know, covert 19 Environment, the prediction for the market and economic climate for this year, and in the future, in the immediate future research, have research analysts have actually been saying, over the last year, or so, that they were predicting times, we're going to be tough for businesses.

If you look at a couple of research findings here in front of you, a quote from Gardeners, Global CEO Survey last year that they highlighted, the economic slowdown was going to be one of the top CEO concerns. And as a result, CEOs actually rank improving productivity, and efficiency is amongst one of the top strategic business priorities for them this year in the immediate period to come as well. So, IDC, International Data, Corporation, their research, or also quite consistent with, gotten us research in the sense that their findings from a study was the top transformational goals for businesses are going to be focusing on, optimizing and simplifying business processes. So, As opposed to, in the past, where A lot of businesses, I have big growth plans, I think, a lot more.

The focus is now internal about how can we deliver best to clients better, faster, cheaper, than ever before? And, how can we protect, as businesses, core businesses, and a core value that we're trying to drive towards customers?

So, the, the, the question that I have, I guess, when I see a lot of this kind of research is, really, are companies actually going to invest more into business process management?

Now, I'll quote from a PQ see American Productivity and Quality Center. Some research that they came up with in the last year as well, which was that their findings was that 54% of organizations are going to be investing into when processors over the next 18 months. Question being: why?

By investing an end to end processes, businesses are able to link what they do in terms of processes more directly with customer value. So, that was, 63%. Said that, And, you know that, when we talk about customer value, that's kind of Lean 101, in terms of starting off with the customer mind? What value do you want to drive towards the customer?

The second finding, I guess, from that study as well, is that by focusing on end to end processes, you're able to create more sustainable process improvement. So, you know, I've worked with organizations and my consulting career where they got me involved in looking at a particular pain point within their business, but often what happens is the root cause of those pain points, like she doesn't reside. And where they thought resides and are not in that particular area of the business. A lot of times, the root cause happens in other parts of the business.

So without the end to end process view, you may miss exactly where some of those root causes to pain points come from, more upstream in the in the process. And then some other key benefits of looking into in processes, as well as the obviously, breaks down operational silos. And it helps move organizations from more of a functional based organization, towards more process based. And what that allows a company to do, was have, you know, when you look at into end processors, and mapping those out. You're not really considering the organizational structure in mind, you're looking at the customer value. And what are all the activities that, as a business, you need to execute in order to drive that customer value. So, you know, when you, when you look at end to end processes, you, you don't have all the, the, you know, the restrictions of what the silos or the various departments in your business may have.

I thought this was quite interesting, as well from the same report and study from ..., which was, in terms of where businesses are actually going to be investing in terms of inside their business. Seems to be more processes to do with request to service. So, that customer interaction end of the business seems to be where companies are more interested in looking for, understanding, how they do things, process perspective. What kind of improvements that can drive that as well. And that's obviously quite consistent with the other finding on the left-hand side there, in terms of making sure that you're able to link processes to that customer value.

But I guess, you know, as it's one thing, for companies to know that they need to improve productivity and efficiencies in this current time of uncertainty, and it's also, you know, and it's dependent on them, actually improving processes into when, But the odds are simply stacked against them when it comes to actually succeeding in a lot of process improvement exercises. So as practitioners were very familiar with some of these percentage failure rates. So Bain and Company reported last year. That a lot of times with process improvements, Hey, there's an 80% failure rate to drive value, is also a 74% failure rate to gain competitive edge.

McKinsey quoted that, just for general, complex and large-scale change programs, is about a 70% failure rate and they also mentioned that, you know, the most important or the most difficult part or process improvements is actually not about what to do but how to do it. And employees often fall back into their old ways of working and these type of process improvement initiatives teams to fizzle out before you can get to the point of implementing some of the improvements there.

So, it's one thing to recognize that it's a business, you need to improve your your productivity and all the rest, but it's another to actually do it right, in a way that actually allows for that sustainable, continuous improvement.

And I guess if you drill down now on some of the key reasons, why this is, these failures actually take place. We go back to a peak, you see some of the top three reasons from a survey that they conducted in the past year. The first one was really a lack of that ongoing, continuous improvement after you do the process improvement exercise. So, before been there before where there's a lot of focus, a lot of energy during a process improvement exercise or Lean Event, a Kaizen event, on all these type of exercises. But at the end of them, you come up with a whole bunch of recommendations for improvements. But then, the project team members, dishpan, you know, the business people go back to their day jobs. Consultants, if you're using consultants, tend to go back to the mix engagement. So, a lot of times the energy disappears, and that's really when the start of the journey should happen in terms of process improvements.

But it just doesn't take place.

The second finding from ... was the lack of frameworks to actually build process models or maps in process improvement exercises. So, a lot of people think that just producing a process map is delivering business process management.

Whereas, the actual out effect of my experience of a process map, other than for training purposes doesn't really give you a lot more any more value in other than just a whole bunch of boxes and arrows on a piece of paper. And certainly in the last 20 years of my career doing a lot of process improvements. What I've seen is that what we used to do was create a lot of process maps on a three sheets and put them in three ring binders just for all of those to be stored away somewhere and never to be seen Again. And all we've really done over the years is actually convert from paper based to digitizing these process maps, but really, the value of the actual process themselves, still questionable other main reasons. Being that there are a lot of times that these documents are static. They don't continue to live and breathe. They don't have any rich data to kinda show how your, your processes are actually performing post. You know, your current states.

The third point from a peak you see, in terms of a reason for failures as well, is that there's an inability to actually capture ROI and performance measures on improvements. So a lot of times, you know, I kinda call this, the squeaky wheel gets gets the way in the, in the, in the workshop on the room. So, often that the list of improvements that come out of these press improvement exercises, The motivating factor to actually move forward for these improvements, there's not necessarily an roi captured against them and the real root cause of some of these For the reasons. Why. That's the case is that you know trying to tie and improvement back down to the actual cost savings and the the effort saving said a process level. It's very difficult to do often without a systematic way of doing that. And if even if you're able to do that the ongoing tracking of the roi is also very challenging as well.

So, the challenges that I've mentioned, so far, in my view, has led to now a rebirth of lean. That's happening in the industry. And this is titled Lean Enterprise in the Gartner report That I mentioned earlier, they even quote that, organizations need to lean up for more efficiency and scale.

So, if you, if you take a step back and look at, you know, the evolution of Lean, since its introduction in the early nineties, Nineties were all about implementing Lean in, the manufacturing industries.

Whereas, in the 2000 period, and that was certainly when I got involved in Lean and six Sigma, LinkedIn was applied more in service industries, right? There are, people were quite skeptical. Back then about, you know, implementing Lean and services because it originated from manufacturing, but certainly, the principles of Lean. In terms of understanding value to the customer, value, stream, flow, all of those things still cannot be applied in services, and, really, in the last 10 years, Lean, again, hasn't really gone away. The Principles of Lean is very much in the foundation of such approaches as Agile. And DevOps, If you work in the software IT space, and, now, what we're seeing is the next real rebirth of Lean, in terms of the consideration of Lena's of, in terms of Lean enterprises.

And really, the biggest evolution that we're seeing here, is actually the, the, the emergence of a lot of digital solutions and tools, and systems, that can now help facilitate the Lean way of working the Lean mindset in organizations.

So, let's, like, let's just dive into this a little bit deeper now.

So, I'm gonna throw this out there. The traditional ways of doing Lean is actually not very lean in itself. And you're probably saying, Well on Earth is Rohan talking about here?

Well, let's let's take. Let's go through a typical type of lean event, or process improvement event. So, we're all very familiar with getting a whole bunch of stakeholders into a room and doing your typical brown paper wall exercise in the workshop. And this, on this brown piece of paper, we're putting a lot of post it notes in terms of the various steps to go through a particular process. What is value added steps? What is Way steps? All those kinda nice things.

Now, you know, the challenge of doing an exercise like this is, if we what's, it's dependent on everyone being in the same room and take this conference, For example, we're all joining remotely, and I think, you know, this is going to be more and more the norm moving forward. So, how do you now facilitate a session like this? When everyone's joining remotely, certainly if I was to put a whole bunch of post it notes on my wall behind me, chances are you're not going to really be able to see that very clearly. So it needs to be a better way of facilitating these type positions, especially is with globalization and a lot of people being located and all over the place.

The second thing that happens, generally in these posts improvements, that you collect a whole bunch of data, in terms of cycle times and steps, lead times. Again, percentage of steps that are value, adding percentage of steps, or non value, adding all the risks. And if you're like me, typically, I have to resort back to a spreadsheet as a way of actually analyzing a lot of this information. It can be time consuming. It's complex. And certainly if I'm going to be doing it, it's probably going to be prone to human errors. But she translating from post it notes back into a spreadsheet. So there has to be a better way of doing this.

And the third part, is that off.

Obviously, we need to document what we do, in terms of the current state processes, the future, state processes. And, typically, we have to resort to tools like Vizio, for example. PowerPoint Word. Different ways of actually documenting these process flows as a way of communicating back. Now, the challenges with this is, depending on who the author is, the standards may be different. The stencils may be different, and, again, going back to my earlier point, A lot of times these artifacts just don't add a lot of value post producing them. We always say that they should live and breathe, but often they don't. They just get followed away either a three ring binders, which is how I started my journey on, on, on these type of this type of work or now, digital saints, but still again falls away in some photo located in some shared drive somewhere. So the actual value is still very questionable there.

And ultimately, I guess, with a lot of these posts, improvements, they stop, and this is the going back to my continuous improvement point before. You know, at the end of these type of exercises, that's really when the journey should stop, but because there's no ongoing, systematic way of continuing to track the performance of your processes, given the improvements.

So you're going to make, often, things just, things just tend to stop in terms of the actual implementation of those improvements.

So in my view, what I BPM solutions provide is the ability for it to enable businesses to have a tool that, first of all, capture customer value and value stream. So, going back to ... off of not having frameworks as part of a lot of these posts, improvements exercises.

The ability to use IBM by BPM Solution is that it often is designed around some sort of framework, whether it's Lean, or six Sigma, or some other type of process improvement methodology. So, unlike traditional process, mapping tools that you may use. The whole idea is that IPP into, which allow you to, first force you to think about your high level value streams, your value chain. And then drill down into each one of those value streams into the processes. And start capturing data against it. So it's very rich and data that you can then analyze. So, whether you're an executive level team, member that wants a bird's eye view of your, if your entire value chain and how you're performing in terms to your productivity and efficiency or you're at an operational level. Just trying to understand, you know, what processes you execute at a task level. I BPM solution should give you the whole decomposition process hierarchy there.

I personally worked with a number of utilities, companies here in New Zealand and in utilities asset management is obviously a very key function of their business. It's all about maintaining parallel lines or the transmission distribution network, what have you. And you know, the ability to use IP, pim solution in this industry has said it helps you break down from asset management to your various processes, whether it's routine maintenance, corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance processes, and being able to see how you're performing in terms of your productivity and efficiency levels within those processes. So you can easily decompose from asset management down to the, the processes there, and then drill down and actually see, you know, what your performance levels alike.

Now, the other thing I want to mention here in terms of the solutions is that the key, The Key Application of Lane here is being able to force the user in the business to think about that customer value first. And driving, you know, what is it that you're driving it from a business perspective to deliver that customer value. And then working backwards on the customer, value to then what value streams that you actually need to to execute to deliver that customer value. So.

Another example here. I worked with a client and the last year where they asked me to fix the invoice billing process. Now, for many, if any of you have ever worked and billing, that you probably know that a lot of the issues when it comes to invoice building actually doesn't, isn't the root causes, doesn't lie in the actual billing process. Often, the problems, the root causes of these problems tend to happen upstream in the process. For example, if you're onboarding a customer, and you're you accidentally put in the wrong address for that customer, guaranteed that invoice that when you, when it comes to building, isn't going to get to their customer. So without the entire end to end, view, that value streaming view of things to try and fix a problem in one area of the business, you may miss way that root cause lies somewhere else upstream in the process there.

That's where IBM's, IP, pim Solutions allow you to actually see that kind of end to end view of your business. The second part is, you know, what sits, I think IPP in solutions different from, say, traditional BPM tools is the ability to mission analyzed data? So going back to my starting slide, that organizations need to improve productivity and efficiency. And the key question here is how do businesses even know what the current productivity inefficient levels are today? In reality, most businesses may not know. An IPP and solutions provides this ability to be able to not only capture these measures, but drill down to the data in terms of the processes to surface up these these these measures to two uses IP, pim Solutions also consider different branches of a process.

So what I mean by that is when if you consider a lead time for a process into win, often there'll be multiple lead times. If you're trying to measure how long does it take to get through a process? Depending on the number of decisions that happened in that process, there'll be a number of different branches that happen. Each one of those branches may result in a different lead time to another branch. So, again, traditional BPM tools may provide this mapping, but the ability to actually capture data in, twin for the different lead times is very challenging. So that's where, when it comes to intelligent BPM, solution can consider all of these different branches, and the different volumes splits that you may have at these different decisions there.

So surfacing this data helps the Lean principle of not off of flow, so the whole idea around wanting to do. Business process management is also trying to make decisions on the actual processes. Where can I invest money to reduce cost, reduce effort? So without that data surfacing up when you're looking at processes, it's very hard to make that call.

So the idea around flow is very much ingrain in intelligence, business, Process Management, solutions, because it's about enabling a decision maker to have the data required to decide where is my biggest bang for my buck, in terms of my investment decisions there.

Now, the other thing that is happening with an IPP him, as well, is the data that I'm mentioning in terms of cycle times. For example, where, if it lies and processes, you know, unlike traditional methods of needing the user to input, you know, how long it takes to do things or needing to. Or you may need to actually do like a time and motion study to actually capture how long it takes for people to execute certain tasks. The exciting thing with IP, pim Solutions, is the ability to tap into source systems. So, a number of medium to large enterprises use ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning software, for example, ASAP, Oracle Dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics, you name it, all of the solute applications. Also, capture data in terms of how long it takes for certain steps or processes to be executed.

So, we're a BPM solution comes into play as it can actually tap into these different data, says as a way of extracting the data directly into your value streams, and your processes. So now is the object of the data that you capture as objective thing. Relying on people telling you, you know, how long on average it takes to actually execute student task.

And that provides also the ability for your processes and your your eye BPM solution to continue to live and breathe and MP dynamic because as your ERP systems or what have your source systems, continue to capture data, continuously refreshes that in your, in your processes in your IPP solution.

Lastly, when it comes to IP, pim Solutions, what it ultimately gives you is the ability for that continuous improvement improvement. So where, you know, businesses tend to stop with a lot of these initiatives and and and and and finish in a kind of future state that still needs to be executed the BPM solution. The idea around these these systems is that allows you to continue to ongoing monitoring and tracking of how your processes are performing.

So, this will give you the overall tracking of how well your, you're doing, in terms of your productivity and efficiency levels. If your Executive Team, executive member, having that bird's eye view of your business, and all, and your percenters efficiencies across your areas of your business, is very, very powerful to have, because the ability to didn't drill down within each of these capabilities or functions, or value streams into the very steps of those processes gives you The end to end view is very, is very important.

For general staff. You know, these solutions are also very useful in the sense that it gives. It encourages a culture of continuous improvement, motivating people to be able to continue to check the improvements, and see that reduction of time and efficiency into process in terms of those processes. And this is obviously very useful from a performance management perspective, as well with you or your staff.

You can actually embed it into the KPIs and all the rest in terms of, you know, motivating more improvements to come in the future.

So, in general, this will be, you know, IP PM Solutions is generally a great communication tool throughout the business.

And to that, I think that's my, one of my last sub points here. So, just just in conclusion here, again, my business is called Box Fish. We are I BPM, process mining, software, business. We're located here in beautiful New Zealand and we've got partners in the US. If you'd like to contact me, these are my details here along with the business details there as well. So feel free to contact me after this presentation if you've got any questions around IP pim Solutions or just generally about this presentation as well.

So at this stage, I'm going to hand it back over to you, Brian.

Thank you very much. Indeed grown, very insightful and very enjoyable, and that would be shared by the audience. So I have some questions, which hopefully you'll be able to answer. Move forward from this. So first of all, let me start with one, which is, first of all, a bit of produce, some great presentation. But the query is really around, How do you do with individuals who don't believe in person snapping. And yet, you are trying to sort of be implemented in software, get our thinking about ways to move the business more success. That's obviously a challenge which a lot of individuals both in the sector, How do you have any sort of suggestions, ideas to action?

I think in general, this kind of stakeholder management resistance is generally a change. I'd say it's actually broader than just process improvement. I think a lot of times, this is just goes back to organizational change management. And I think, you know, to motivate anyone to do anything, Has to go back to what's in it for me.

And it has to go back to the individual level, at least from my experience. So, unless you're able to communicate, you know, the benefits and the value of doing something back to the individual, it is challenging to get them over the line and actually doing something. So, no, one of my last points, and in my presentation, there, is actually using process processes as a way of, you know, motivating your employees, to actually look for more and more improvements to kind of build that culture of change. And really, you need to incentivize staff for employees to be able to do this. So, having measures that motivates them to look for improvements and incentivizing them to look for those improvements. as one way of getting them over the line.

Because they can see a direct benefit to them if they actually do engage with using a system to actually, you know, look at either documenting the processes are looking for ways of improvement. Ultimately has to go back to what, what drives that individual and how can you motivate them and through incentivizing them to create that change. That's one point or another and incentive that.

Often I see companies using is just from a self development perspective. You know, to be able to train people and process improvements, and skill them, is a really great skill set to have, and it's not unique to any particular industry. It's a skill skill, skill set that they can continue with post. You know, those, those improvements.

Obviously, if it hasn't been, children pick it up with the post event run. Moving on to the next one from Mark. Do the current IBM's BPM systems have the capability to import the BPM artifacts created under the original BPM initiatives?

I process maps, narratives, etcetera, Yeah. The short answer is, yes, you can actually import a lot of these artifacts.

It depends what kind of formats and all the rest, but, yeah, most of them actually do allow you to actually bring as a, as a starting point. You know, certainly what we're doing in our business in Box fish is actually creating a number of different templates that's available for businesses to kick them off in this journey. So, rather than have to start with a blank sheet of paper and start modeling things from from scratch, we're actually creating student templates, depending on the industry. Utilities, for example, was one that I mentioned, a lot of my experience, And so we actually have a starting point in terms of, you know, what are the typical type of process hierarchies that you would have in that particular industry?

So, by doing that, you know, clients are, you know, it expedites and accelerates the time it takes to actually build these things out. But certainly, importing a lot of these artifacts is a standard feature. The other thing I also mentioned before was the ability to integrate these solutions into soil systems, because it's one thing to actually bring in the models. It's another to keep it alive and and feed that data in terms of, you know, What are the cycle times within each of those steps. So, I BPM Solutions, have the integration point into your source systems now, and there's certainly a feature that we've developed within our solution, as well, that you can, then map things into your transactional systems that has that kind of actual data today.

Mark, I hope to provide you some some feedback, so if you have a follow up to that, please let me know. Mike asks, What are the prerequisites or BPM solution? Implementation, Success, who's not familiar with BPM tools, but it seems to him, but unless you have a very robust ELP, or, alternatively process known as until we're ready to close, the IBM BPM Tool kinda automatically measure, analyze, waste in processes. What would be your thoughts on that?

Um, I'd say it's 50 50 on my side. I'd say, I kinda agree and disagree in some ways, as well. Only. In the sense that, yes. You know, without any source systems, you need to as a human being, to feed it with the data. So, that's in some ways, I agree. I agree. with that point, obviously. Having an ERP system or source systems, automates a lot of the data entry because it's feeding the IPP and solution. But the actual analysis part can be automated. So, once that data isn't there, you needing to do your typical Lean analysis in, calculating what percentage is waste, and what percentage is not, what is my overall lead Time, What are the different cycle times? And all the risks that kind of analysis can be done automatically.

And I think that's a big selling point to these solutions, is that a lot of times when you go through a process improvement exercise, you know, a lot of the effort is actually the documentation of it and the actual analysis of that information. So that analysis part, IP, pim, Solutions, out of the Box test does does give you that, however, you're right in terms of the source systems. If you have those source systems, that could be a good period, because in terms of data feeding it without it, you can still feed it manually in terms of the data. And that's where I kind of mentioned before, you know, going back to time and motion studies. And I don't know, nowadays, people don't really do that kinda thing anymore. But, you know, an absence of any system tracking time kind of have to go back to some of these exercises to, in order to get that data about what's actually happening out in the workplace.

I think, Sorry, Brian, I'm sorry, go ahead, Yeah. So the, the other things, I think in terms of prerequisites is, you know, technology at the end of the day is only one factor in terms of making things successful. The old age role of processes people and technology those. Trifecta is very much still in play. When you're implementing an APM solution. I'm going back to the earlier question you definitely need to help bring people on board, which is more than just selling a solution, Is selling them the journey of what you're trying to achieve. In terms of process improvements, and also selling the, what's in it for me, as mentioned before.

So, I think those are prerequisites as well, in terms of doing these things, and then going back to the AP QC study, as well, teaching people about the framework that you're using in order to do process improvement. So whether you're following Lean, six Sigma, or combination of both, you know, instilling that, education to people, which is vitally important. Otherwise. If you start asking people, what is waste is, you're populating these tools, people won't get it, they won't understand what you're talking about. But what is a value stream? They may not even understand what that is. So education around you know, a lot of these principles is vitally important as a prerequisite as well.

Sorry.

Not a problem, and thank you, Mike, for responding to Robin's answers to see number one, It is common to the firm response data collection is proving to be whose greatest challenge today. So thank you, all the insights moving on to query. for Cameron, have, you seen cases where machine learning and AI can be incorporated into a BPM.

Especially in the future, swipe design, sustainability, phones, all the blue deployments, any use cases you can choose.

So personally, I see, I, BPM Solutions extending beyond that of just the modeling part but also into the automation part. So you know, of work with clients where it's, as a prerequisite to implementing an RPA tool for example use IBM IP, pim Solution as a way of documenting and modeling your your processes. and to clean up your processes before then automating it and to say automation tool.

You know, I think once you're able to clean up, I think, one of, the, one of, the, the challenges, I think, whenever you're looking at, you know, system implementation or automating any kind of process is to give time to actually clean your processes and create optimal state when it comes to those processes first. And that's where BPM solution very much comes into play in terms of being giving you the ability to create, you know, remove any inefficiencies first. Because the risk otherwise of automating a lot of these processes is that it's garbage in, garbage out, or you're doing is automating inefficient processes. So I think that's, so that's this area, and then kind of the use cases that I see with the IP BPM solution is that it creates an opportunity to create those efficient processes first. Or they're moving into, say, the likes of an RPA tool.

Now, in terms of machine learning, I guess, the whole idea around keeping your processes dynamic and evolving, it's the ability to continuously reflect on those processes and learn from it. So, you know, the decisions.

Just now, I was talking about, in the process, having decisions, and whenever this decision is basically a split in the process. Now, what machine learning can give you, is, the understanding of, what is the general, no volume of times that a process, this, this goes one way versus the other. So, rather than having to manually decide, you know, what the volume counts is, the way machine learning would be very useful in terms of being able to give you the data point in terms of, OK, actually, what we're seeing in terms of the regularity of processes, that it's actually going via this branch, in this decision, more than another branch. And that's a good learning when it comes to calculating, now, what is the what's what's a typical lead time for a process? Generally, know, Machine Learning Learning would give you that that data point of acute majority of the time it's actually going one way versus the other.

Fantastic. Thank you for that, Rowan. And has a question, can you use ...?

You can use BPM solutions, and pretty much all industry. I would say, I don't I don't think IBM has BPM Solution is unique to any kind of one industry. The BPM Solution gives you the ability to facilitate any kind of process decomposition. So, whether it's aviation or whether it's something, you know, another industry, like utilities, as I mentioned, or what have you or Industries have processes. And, and this understanding of a customer. And what is it that you're trying to drive towards in terms of value to the customer? So certainly, you can populate, so any kind of process library within the IPP solution, and find efficiencies in those processes. So, absolutely. I think aviation would be.

Is that as applicable?

Fine. I think there's a couple of excuses, but what I really like to get your views on is where do you see the future going BPM going?

Yeah, so actually the the question before about data sources is where I kind of see where it's going more and more. I think, you know, right now the way I PPM solutions are tends to, a lot of them tend to only tap into 1 or 2 different data sources. I think where I can see ... solutions going is that the ability to actually tap into multiple data sources from all over the place and not just internal data sources, say from ERP or even external data sources. You know, if you're wanting to capture what is value to the customer? A lot of times these sentiments come from market research information data sources.

So where I can see IP pim Solutions going is the ability to actually act as almost like a business intelligence tool to be able to tap into all sorts of different data sources. And that's where I bridge the gap IP, pim Solutions and process mining is converging more and more because the whole idea is that you want to keep these processes alive. And and the way I see that happening is to make sure that this is very rich and the data that provides you.

Road, it's been hugely enlightened and enjoyed the session. Before you go, is there one last nugget to share with you use that they can walk away with those things that they could almost immediately do when they get back to the business?

Yeah.

Absolutely, I think the main thing is, you know, any kind of process improvement initiative starts with, first of all, understanding your customer value. Again, going back to my original objective of this presentation. Businesses. And certainly in times of uncertainty. The moment and I think a lot of businesses need to protect their core business. And the way of doing that is to make sure that whatever that is driving them, in terms of that within the business, starts from the customer in mind. So, making sure that that customer value is very, very clear. And then working backwards on that into the kind of value streams that happened within the business, I think that that's probably the biggest thing right now is, you know, a lot of times, companies stop inward looking first at the outward.

So what I'm suggesting here is definitely just remind yourself as a business, you know, what is your ultimate customer value? And what is it that you do as a business to enable that? Because everything else, in Lean terms as waste.

Robin, thank you very much for that. And I appreciate you staying up in various areas and morning. If you haven't realized yet, learned who's joining us from New Zealand is about four o'clock in the morning, just coming up four o'clock. So, that's all good types. So, thank you very much for your time. And with that, I'll close your presentation. So, thank you very much. Branches.

Ladies and gentlemen. The next session starts at mid-day 12 o'clock Eastern Time. You simply go and check into the link that you've been provided already. We have another exciting presentation coming up form ... form of Kona, which is focusing on digital transformation. Why where, how, and once I know from a number of the conversations that I have with individuals? On a daily basis? Just the words: digital transformation generates a lot of different foods abuse. So we look forward to seeing you back here at mid-day and hope that you enjoyed that very forthright session.