Innovative approach to business process visualisation helps organisations to make efficiency gains and reduce costs by better understanding their operations and processes

Fujitsu has announced that it is offering the means to provide accurate visualisation of existing business processes through an evidence-based approach.  The new service - called Business Process Discovery - enables companies to understand how their existing processes and supporting applications function through a visual toolset that displays process flows.  It can then identify steps that are not adding value or, are adding disproportionate costs.

Furthermore, it highlights exposure to compliance failure, fraud and other legal and efficiency issues lying hidden in a company’s operational workflows. The service will help organisations to be more efficient, this is essential in the current economic climate where organisations are under increasing pressure to reduce costs.

Traditional process discovery methods gather information by talking to operational staff about how they believe the process works; at best this may give a genuine but subjective view. Business Process Discovery is different because of its evidence based approach. It involves taking real data that has been produced by the applications supporting the business processes.  The data or ‘evidence’ is then fed into a tool to enable the reconstruction of current processes, converting interaction data into valuable visual information.

It helps the organisation to rapidly obtain detailed current process diagrams that represent what is taking place today in reality. This evidence based approach, rather than a purely consultative approach not only reduces the time taken to gather the information from months to weeks but also provides a more accurate result.

The service has been piloted with a number of Fujitsu customers in the utility and financial services sectors and has proved to be extremely successful, delivering substantial cost savings.

Spanish bank BBVA was an early adopter using the service to develop a complete and accurate picture of its loan provisioning process. As a result Fujitsu will now be offering the service to all of its existing and prospective customers as part of its suite of application and consulting services.

Rodrigo Alvarez-Martin Ermocida, strategy & innovation manager, BBVA, “We were impressed by how much was discovered in so little time. Fujitsu produced visualisations that are based on what is actually happening, that are easy to understand and that allowed us to make decisions based on evidence rather than perception.”

George Spyridakis, senior consultant operational excellence at Fujitsu UK and Ireland comments, “What makes Business Process Discovery so different is that by utilising Fujitsu visualisation tools we are capable of interrogating historical evidence to provide a detailed and accurate map for improvement. Our consultants are then excellently placed to apply their expertise and make informed recommendations based on the evidence provided. As organisations continue to look for efficiency and cost savings in light of the worsening global economy we think that Business Process Discovery is an invaluable service.”