By Diwakar Nigam
It is a no-brainer that outcomes are critical for any business process and so is how efficiently the process executes to achieve the outcomes. Through the last couple of decades, and more, organizations have focused on automating straight-through processes to ensure faster cycle times and higher cost efficiency. However, over time, the process metrics have become the obsession with process owners, the impetus being on identifying and removing all operational bottlenecks. And, it is sometimes difficult to figure out if this obsession is in fact leading to counter-productive measures vis-a-vis broader business goals and eventual outcomes. The realization is slow to sink in.
Also, today, global leaders do realize that many of the critical business processes are complex and unpredictable. The process flows for many such processes are not 100% definable and hence cannot be optimized from the perspective of cycle time or operational efficiency. The success of these processes hinges more on the quality of outcome than the time taken to complete the task.
For example, in case of a fraud investigation by the finance department of an organization, the key is to get to the root cause of the discrepancy and much less to stick to a path taken to reach there. Often, the investigation invokes several work steps that are unpredictable and hence unplanned. However, if it is able to trace the source of fraud or culprit, it’s termed as a success. Obviously, the time taken to reach a conclusion is a critical metric, however, you do not get the efficiency by ensuring repeatability and standardization, but by building the flexibility in the process to reach the outcome effectively as well as efficiently.
Similarly, in many customer-facing processes, the business rules and organizational policies come in the way of customer experience – at least so it seems from a customer standpoint. For these processes, a predetermined rule based execution strategy may not always result in the best outcome. Dynamic processes, especially those that involve customers, need the right mix of automation and contextual human intervention to manage the unforeseeable deviations. These loosely structured processes (commonly referred to as “Cases”) move forward through dynamic workflows wherein the actions are governed by the situational context versus a rigid predefined rule set.
Digital forces that are gaining strength also support this dynamism, making external stakeholders such as customers and partners a part of the core operational framework.
A Paradigm Shift in Business Strategy – BPM to Case Management
In wake of these recent developments, a paradigm shift is seen in the management approach towards handling such processes. As the organizations strive to become more customer centric and quality focused, Case Management is emerging as a widely adopted management approach.
For providing superior and more personalized customer experience, organizations have started treating these unique cases as opportunities to differentiate themselves from the competition. They are thus looking to empower their resources with information and authority, transforming them into responsive ‘knowledge workers’, being sensitive to unique customer needs and yet retaining their speed and accuracy.
While, Business Process Management (BPM) platforms provide organizations the ability to automate and optimize many critical business processes, it doesn’t fare as well on handling dynamic processes that require high degree of human intervention and collaboration at multiple levels to improve the quality of their outcomes. In fact, in most cases, it falters badly from a customer’s point of view. And, failure to recognize this is one of the BPM blind spots among the process owners. It’s not their fault altogether. Most BPM solutions are actually not built to provide business users with tools to access contextual information and the architectural flexibility to apply their domain expertise at critical junctures. This can severely impact the process performance and create a huge gap between the desired and final outcome.
Hence, the role of Case Management Framework (CMF) becomes paramount, as it brings the much-needed flexibility and personalization across key processes. CMFs represent an amalgamation of contextual capabilities integrated within the process design and its execution to help case workers make highly informed decisions. They enable world-class customer services and incessant adherence to regulatory mandates by redefining not just the process flow but the entire response mechanism of an organization to different business scenarios. Many CMFs, however, have had their origins as Business Process Management or Enterprise Content management (ECM) solutions. In effect, many organizations have been using BPM as the foundation for building their case management capability.
Still, some pertinent questions need to be answered –
What is the difference between BPM and Case Management
What is the need for Case Management?
How can they work in tandem to optimize business outcomes?
The answers to these questions will help overcome the dilemma of having to choose between agility and standardization. A good way to begin will be by understanding today’s business environment and the evolving role of business users.
Knowledge workers need all the contextual information they can get to improve the quality of their actions and eventually the final outcome. Typically case related information can be extremely diverse, aggregated across multiple participants, systems, data repositories and enterprise applications. Traditional BPM engines are focused on hand-offs and workflows, with limited support for collaboration. A Case Management Framework, for such scenarios, creates a parallel process environment allowing knowledge or case workers to retrieve information from diverse sources, consult with subject matter experts and conduct active analysis of supporting data and content. It supports personalized workbenches for participants (based on role, preferences, access rights and so on) and provides interactive access to tasks, content and other resources.
Another stark difference lies in the objectives of the two management practices. BPM views “process” as the most important organizing theme with a firm focus on its optimization to increase the productivity of the work completed during that process. Repeatability is a key aspect which a BPM solution tries to establish for maximizing process efficiency. While, BPM manages process exceptions through business rules (which reside externally to the process), it comes to a cropper when exceptions extend beyond the degree of variance defined by business policies.
Case Management has a completely different design goal and focuses on the final outcome. It manages processes that are unstructured (or ad-hoc) through extensive human – human and human – system interactions. Think of it as a police investigation. While it involves series of standard procedures to start with, the case can suddenly take a turn and necessitate a new course of action. The investigator will rely on her skills and the contextual information. She will collaborate with fellow investigators, forensics and other state departments to move forward and will ultimately be judged by the final outcome. The system needs to support that.
BPM Powered CMFs – The Key to Success
While case management is a powerful approach to drive successful outcomes for critical organizational functions (especially in customer facing and market driven business processes), the real overall leverage gains strength with the underlying core BPM capabilities. Modeling, user rights management and work item distribution are key elements in establishing how cases are managed within an organization. Advanced analytics are leveraged to govern the user behavior with insights from past process and market related information. Monitoring and reporting tools allow businesses to track their performance over a period of time and strive for continual improvement.
While the underlying BPM system, incorporating all business rules and central processes, forms the heart of the operations, CMFs can govern its customer facing modules to effectively manage interactions with all stakeholders – internal and external. This enables the knowledge workers to capture precise information while improving their work efficiency. The captured information can then be fed into the BPM engine for further processing. This allows businesses to define case templates that can be dynamically changed by case workers to manage the case resolution workflow more effectively. A BPM-based Case Management Framework is, thus, a solution that balances efficiency, effectiveness and agility.
Diwakar is the MD, Newgen Software.
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