ERP Trends: Simplifying Business Processes

In a recent article in SAP Business Innovation, Aditi Chhaya discusses a growing trend of businesses needing to simplify business processes in order to grow. The strain on growth imposed by business processes stems from complexity and IT departments’ struggles to keep pace with new and changing technologies. However, some businesses are meeting business objectives by successfully simplifying complex elements of their business. According to Aditi, businesses successfully simplifying business processes are seeing benefits in 3 areas:

The study reports significant benefits in simplifying business processes:

Increase in revenue growth from 5% to 40% and cost reduction of 10% to 35% with companies better managing complexity
30% to 50% growth in companies with the lowest complexity when compared to enterprises with average complexity
3% to 5% growth in EBIT with systematic complexity management

Via Simplifying Business Begins With Leadership

In the article, Aditi references recent success stories from Medtronic and eBay. In both cases, the company’s leadership team took steps to simplify business data analysis to improve timelines in analyzing customer data. In addition to simplifying data analysis processes, Medtronic and eBay, have streamlined their end-to-end business process validation with automation. IDC reports that automated business process validation can significantly improve project timelines, improve quality assurance, and reduce the need manual testing. (For more information, download the full IDC Report here.)

Of course, before you can simplify a process, you need a good understanding of each business process, its variations across the enterprise, and what your team is doing today. That’s called “business process discovery” and is an emerging area for software technology. The good news is that automation solutions exist today to help you do just that – allowing companies to efficiently discover, capture, visualize, and analyze the actual business process in SAP and other enterprise systems.

Simplifying business processes and business process validation has proven to provide value for Medtronic and eBay, and will remain a trend through 2015. Being able to simplify processes will help industry leaders accelerate growth and profitability – and separate themselves from their competition. Automation can help in a big way.

If you would like to learn more about simplifying your business with automated business process validation or automated business process discovery, fill out the form below.