Infor process mining partnership goes ‘one deeper’ into digital
As a term, digital transformation is too woolly, too high-level, too broad and too vague.
Yes, we know that it denotes the move to cloud platforms, the move to mobile-first technologies, the move to big data analytics, the move to smart business contracts using blockchain-based digital supply chains (just to get a bit more specific) and all the goodies that sit inside the Internet of Things (IoT) and so on.
But broadly speaking, it’s all a bit too non-specific.
Rather than our usual need to go one louder, in this case we need to go ‘one lower’… or perhaps ‘one deeper’ if we’re going to understand more of what’s happening down in the data and down in the code itself.
Infor and Signavio have partnered to attempt to give us that one deeper, one lower, one richer insight into what’s happening in digital platform applications and work process management.
Business process mining
As we know, Infor is an industry-specific business cloud software specialist — Signavio’s software on the other hand is a web-based business process modeling and intelligence tool that exists to mine, model, monitor, manage and maintain business processes
The collaboration between Infor and Signavio is designed to provide business process modelling intelligence through a collaboration environment capable of sharing information about processes inside organisations… all the way down to an individual task level in order to be able to direct people.
But business process mining is hard. So the companies say that they will aim to address some of the toughest parts — including data onboarding and initial set up of analytics rules, because these are the toughest part to get right first.
“Process management is a critical, yet often elusive, component for businesses navigating digital transformation,” said Dr. Gero Decker, CEO at Signavio. “We believe customers can benefit from Signavio’s process mining and process management capabilities, combined with Infor’s Implementation Accelerators, which can help enable smarter decisions across a variety of business functions.”
Infor Implementation Accelerators
Implementation Accelerators are preconfigured chunks of software based on the latest version of applicable Infor application suites. They are designed to serve specific core industry application processes and to reduce implementation times.
Part of the Signavio Business Transformation Suite, the Process Manager and Process Intelligence products are designed to capture, connect, and communicate how work is done and where decisions are made and deliver that information to Signavio Collaboration Hub.
“Signavio’s process mining and intelligence technology can provide Infor customers with the platform to support the alignment of suggested practices and business processes delivered by our Industry Implementation Accelerators against real-time transactional data generated by Infor suite of applications, which can be used to help companies identify and resolve deviations from such practices and can assist and support organizations in improving business performance, based on real data,” said Soma Somasundaram, Infor president of products and CTO.
Where is process mining toughest?
So where is process mining the toughest to pull off effectively?
Infor’s Somasundaram and Signavio’s Dr. Decker hosted a presentation at the Infor Inforum 2019 event in New Orleans to answer press and analyst questions on this subject.
The bottom line from both men was straight i.e. those processes that are toughest to mine (and therefore toughest to digitise) are those that are the most differentiated in terms of their component parts.
Where the perhaps essentially creative and deterministic level of desired output is highest, process mining hardest (let’s remind ourselves that determinism relates to the philosophical doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the human will)…
… so in practice we might assume that mass manufacturing is easier to manage through process mining and that creative artistry is hardest, but, in reality, even the creative arts can be ‘mined’ once we know what the mission of the organisation overseeing any body of work breaks down to.
We’re digitising work… and so that means breaking down, process mining and efficiency-categorising workflows, individual roles and specific tasks — and this, specifically, is what one lower and one louder into digital transformation actually means.
Infor: Push It (one louder, one deeper) if you want to mine process for real digital business.