Adaptive Processes Are Essential to Keep Pace with Resources
Having had a thorough BPM analysis for your company with meticulous process discovery, detailed mapping, and enough simulation, you may feel that you are ready to automate what you think looks like the perfect process. You may even have carefully considered all of the “what if” scenarios and made proper arrangements for them. However, if you have overlooked the part played by your resources in structuring your process, you could be heading for inefficiencies later. You must consider all of the people participating in your process, that is, your employees. Have you paid attention to the fact that people call in sick all the time or go on vacations every once in a while? There’s also the possibility that at times people get overloaded with too much work and simply cannot take on anymore for the moment. If you have overlooked these possibilities with your resources, the efficacy of your automated process may be at a significant risk.
We like to believe that business processes can be accurately mapped and planned. However, there will always be limitations to this. There is no way to predict exactly how your resources are going to behave, and your business may in the end suffer because of this. This is why you need a proper business process that can adapt to the changing situations and resource behavior. Adaptive processes are the kinds of processes that account for changes in resources and make quick decisions on the run to fight any major roadblocks or bottlenecks. Here are some of the chief ways in which adaptive processes help your business.
Assigning a new task to somebody who is already burdened with existing tasks is a purely inefficient step. A well-automated adaptive process understands how much backlog an employee has and accordingly assigns the new task to someone else who’s available.
Assigning new tasks or projects to the people who aren’t available for work right now is another exercise in futility. Adaptive processes understand who are the people currently out of the office and accordingly assign the task to someone else who is available.
Adaptive processes also understand tasks that are high in volume and need speedy execution, and accordingly assign the task to multiple employees in order to have it completed on time.
To sum up, a strictly defined process may not be able to give you 100% efficiency, and hence, you need an adaptive process that acts according to the resources situation at the time.
