The Future of Process Excellence: The Age of Zero Loss
This episode reflects an era of departmentalized work done in an unstructured way which was enabled by lots of physical paper work.
Organizations started embracing process based approach towards the latter half of the 20th century. Departmentalized work was replaced by processes that cut across functions. This laid a classic foundation for the evolution of Process Excellence. Multiple approaches like — Total Quality Control, Six Sigma, Lean etc. were adopted by companies. Few companies also took a technology enabled approach for PEX through implementation of ERP systems. Both these approaches transformed processes rendering good results with a positive impact on their bottom line.
The dawn of 21st century brought with it new market players offering innovative products/services paving the way for competition in the market. Organizations found it challenging to deliver goods/service at lower cost while maintaining excellence. This had an impact on their bottom-line as well.
That’s when, organizations decided to outsource their operationally non-value added processes to low cost locations, which gave rise to the service industry.
There were certain fundamental principles in this transformation journey…
- Technology was a key enabler for transactions
- Organizations became customer oriented
- Focus was to lower the ‘cost to service’
- Service industry expanded & adopted PEX aggressively
- There was an Exponential rise in productivity/efficiency
While benefits have been reaped of past transformation exercises, it was indispensable for organizations to continue PEX in order to avoid getting extinct.
The Future
Design thinking, Robot-led automation, Big data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Language, Neuro-linguistic programming, Internet of Things would have impacted people & processes at work as dramatically as the machines of Industrial Revolution changed the factory floor.
Business & computing processes would be constructed by Design Thinkers. Design thinkers would have brought in an element of ‘Empathy for customer needs & desires’ that was lacking in the previous PEX approach. Case in point is a Global food company’s purpose of ‘serving the world by making food people love’, which is showing great promise to transform the way in which organizations cater to its consumer.
Robots using semantic analysis performing process transactions & trigger responses for activities like Accounting, production scheduling, inventory management, etc., have started to mature, robots have been piloted to dispute parking tickets as has been the case in New York and London, where 160000 traffic tickets have been overturned using the Donotpay bot.
Organizations would leverage big data to define strategies, innovate, compete & stay relevant. Mobile Maps are a great example of movement of people, traffic flow and incident reports to improve driving recommendations, between smart sensors and improved directions, this will lead to a dramatic fall in fatalities
Artificial intelligence will also play a crucial role in the back-end to perform advanced analytics. Fraud detection is one example which will use AI, the system will be able to spot a fraudulent transaction based on the signs and indications that it learned through continuous monitoring of trends and patterns.
The fundamental principles for this transformation journey would be…
Machine enabled decision making
Connected enterprise
Zero cost to service
Added focus on innovation & renovation
Sitting now in 2018 and imagining a visit to the same office in 2025, I expect fewer people in the office, they will largely be,
- Creating and Running advanced AI algorithms,
- Analyzing advanced visualizations for trends
- Guiding the product development team on the new tastes of consumer
- Managing potential risks by appropriately planning for technology utilization
The largest impact of these changes will be on the quality of life for all of mankind with increased life expectancy, a near complete wipeout of life threatening situations which would be proactively predicted and prevented.
