Ravindra Datar (Ravi) has over 15 years of Industry Research, Consulting and Strategic Marketing experience. His experience spans: 2 years at Indian Market Research Bureau as a Consultant in their Business & Industrial Research & Advisory Division, that catered to the advisory requirements of the B2B market place. As a consultant, Ravi managed all stages of research-based advisory services from primary research surveys, secondary research (in the pre-internet days), analysis and advisory to the clients across industries as diverse as construction, steel, fine chemicals, packaging, furniture, State Government/s, shipyards, heavy vehicles (earth movers) manufacturers, food products manufacturers and automobile companies. 8 years at Gartner Inc, starting as a research analyst in 1998 and growing very rapidly to Principal Analyst in 2001, winning many global research awards at Gartner on the way, covering research agendas as diverse as the domestic printer market, domestic IT services market, IT Services Offshore services (exports) from India and BPO markets and delivery locations across the Asia/Pacific region, all simultaneously. In 2001, Ravi set up Gartner's Asia Pacific BPO research coverage across 11 countries from scratch. He continued running all these programs simultaneously till 2005, when he moved on to Patni Computer Systems Limited. 5 years at Patni Computer Systems limited where he joined as Senior Manager - Corporate Marketing, focused on setting up strategic marketing initiatives. At Patni, he set up and grew the Analyst Relations function and grew it into a larger Industry Influencer Relations Function covering industry analysts, advisors, provider industry associations and buyer industry associations. Patni got featured in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Offshore IT Services in the strong challengers quadrant consistently for 4 years in a row and also got featured in some other Gartner reports on the way. At Patni, Ravi also set up the Strategic Research Group that was instrumental in proactively feeding significant market intelligence to business units and corporate leadership, triggering various strategic market initiatives like a special program targeting the US recession, an initiative to build, package and take to market a new set of offerings around Cloud Computing, etc. Ravi was also directly involved in setting up the Strategic Outsourcing Group that rose above business unit silos to address lareg deals opportunities with integrated solutions blending various business unit competencies into solutions that delivered direct business benefits to clients. Ravi moved on from Patni as Associate Vice President - Strategic Marketing Initiatives, in 2010. At present, as Head - Global Marketing, Ravi is in the process of setting up the global marketing fucntion at Datamatics Global Services Limited, a global Provider of business-aligned "Smart Solutions", integrating depth & breadth of domain, technology & process expertise, with a global track record of excellence.

Quite often, Process Design or Redesign are burdened with a lot of Legacy Thought! Sometimes, it may be better to start a Design or a Redesign of a Business Process with a clean sheet rather than make marginal improvements!

Many processes just evolve from nothing, or have a lot of outdated steps that may have been necessary when they were designed for the first time but may be outdated today!

Plus, technology may have evolved over the last two decades a business process has been under use, and now may be a good time to rethink processes. It may be time to evaluate whether what it being done inside the process is of any use, and of relevance today, or may be better done at an order of magnitude more efficiency and effectiveness than used to be done before!

Sometimes, it may be better to start with a clean sheet and design or redesign a business process from scratch!

Home Mortgage Loans in the U.S, are a great example of how a business itself has evolved over a period of time and how the design and redesign process may need to be thought of on the fly. Mortgage loans used to a local affair with local banks making and owning loans for a long time. Then national banks started buying them from the local banks and servicing them. There are now online ways of applying for loans and increased automation at the backend have also speeded up and simplified many of the subprocesses in mortgage loan processing.

Today, Offshore outsourcing and use of the Service Providers's systems, people and processes adds one more wrinkle to this whole thing that were not there even five years ago!

So today, if you were to Design or Redesign a 20 year or even a five year old Mortgage Loan Process, it may be better for you to start with a clean sheet approach! Failure to do this will only mean that your processes will be competing with a new company that was put together say five years ago and may be more efficient and effective than you are!

Legacy and Age may not make business processes more efficacious! You should be lucky if they don't set you back as compared to your competitors!

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese. - Billie Burke

Handoffs are encountered in Business Processes, whether they are In-house or Outsourced. Many are artifacts of the division of the different functions within a company. Like the Finance Department is responsible for the payment of a vendor on an Invoice even if the user has the budget and has approved payment. The shipping department is responsible for the shipping and logistics even if the order has been made ready by manufacturing.

In Outsourced Business Processes, the handoffs are more a function of manual Vs automated parts of a business process. For example, in an order processing process, some steps are manual and others are handled by an automated business rules engine, the parts that are manual are usually outsourced or even offshored for saving costs. Once these steps are completed, an automated process takes over and performs the business process till the next handoff.

There are multiple problems for everyone in these kinds of business processes in which there are handoffs. The first one, customer annoyance. Customers do not have to deal with different people in your company, just because there are handoffs in your own internal business process. There is nothing more annoying to the end-user or customer than to deal with multiple parties within your company, going over the details of what the problem or the issue was from scratch all over again!

Many organizations have tried to deal with handoffs by requiring people who deal with you to document what happened before the handoff so that anyone handling you subsequently to get all the details so that you don’t need to recount these all over again. But this may be unnecessary work or a waste of time, effort and resources.

Single Interaction Resolution may be a good answer to handling handoffs properly but may not be possible in all cases, especially where outsourcing or offshoring is involved. This is where minimizing or concentrating all end-user or Customer Touchpoints in one or very few interactions may be a very useful way to handling handoffs and providing better service.

Customer Touchpoints are very good opportunities for companies to handle handoffs properly and may even provide opportunities for Cross-Selling or Up-Selling, if handled properly.

Being sensitive about handoffs in a business process provide a lot of opportunities in improving the metrics associated with it, especially Customer Satisfaction.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it.
It is what the client or customer gets out of it. - Peter Drucker

Many organizations are busy implementing Master Data Management (MDM) solutions on top of all of their applications. Master Data Management unifies the concept of a Customer of a business or a Patient in a Healthcare System. MDM solutions unifies the data about a single Customer or a single Patient in one place. This picks up all the data regarding a patient from many databases that a healthcare system like a hospital may have, and makes it available when needed. Many compliance regulations like HIPAA may need the hospital to make this available when needed. Companies may use MDM solutions to gather up ALL the information about a single customer in one single place for doing marketing, cross-selling, up-selling, etc.

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is used to stitch many disparate heterogeneous databases together to make this happen. The information about a patient in a hospital may be in Patient Records or the Pharmacy transactions database. Making them all available in one single place involves accessing many different applications and databases and SOA enables them.

Master Data Management could be so very useful in the context of Business Process Management also, End-to-end business processes involve many different applications and databases. Managing, measuring, analyzing and improving business processes involves pretty much the same kind of problem. MDM soolutions that help you keep track of a Customer or a Patient could just as easily keep track of an end-to-end business process like Order to Cash, tracking the order through the company and various departments and functions! Very intriguing idea!

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. - Charles Babbage

Before you can effect any Process Improvement you need to have a clear, accurate and reliable picture of the AS-IS condition of a Business Process in terms of its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs can be measured against SLAs if it is outsourced, or in the Shared Services context. In case it is not outsourced, companies may need to benchmark their KPIs against the Industry Best. There is hardly any point in improving a Mortgage Loan Processing process from 21 days to 20 days when your competitor has an online system and they do the same process in 5 days! Sometimes you may need to leapfrog over your own old benchmarks! Incremental process improvement may not help you face the competition effectively, in the marketplace!

This article Business Intelligence Adds to Process Reengineering talks about this very eloquently. The authors make the point that relevant KPI performance data needs to be collected consistently all the time.

They make the point that sometimes all this data may be spread in many places and need to be collected in one single set of data tables using Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) functions. Analysis in terms of dashboards and alerts can then be of use in process improvement.

This is the classic problem many business processes have. They are all run end-to-end with multiple heterogeneous software systems in the background. If the process is outsourced or parts of the process is outsourced, then data gets dispersed between multiple companies. This makes it very hard to assemble ALL of the relevant KPI data in one place.

For example, let’s say in an Order to Cash process, the collections part of the process is outsourced to an external vendor. This company has all the data upstream and downstream, but in between for the collections process, the data is in the vendors’ systems somwhere else.

This is where measurement is usually done with whatever is available, rather than what is needed for meaningful analysis and improvement!

Business process improvement is not possible without the collection of the right data at the right time and making it available in the right form to the right people. Easier said than done! Legacy considerations and history of processes within companies still support a Functional View of operations (Finance, Marketing, Manufacturing, etc) rather than a Process View. WIth increasing automation and shortening process cycles, this is becoming somewhat easier!

The best performance improvement is the transition from the non-working state to the working state - Anonymous