Better performance and lower costs are among the most prominent goals of a process evolution. Where and how should your company start this evolution? Find out here.
In a constantly changing risk management landscape, we need to be able to adapt quickly. Process mining not only gives you 100% coverage of your processes, but it can also pick up unexpected events in the process, which traditional analytics cannot. This blog will discuss how to achieve precise internal control, a proactive approach to errors, and identify and adapt to changes via process mining.
Internal Audit and Risk Management Challenges
Management landscapes are constantly evolving in tandem with market transformation, global risks, digital threats, and regulatory complexity. Today, more than ever, businesses realise the importance of internal audit and risk management. But how do you equip your business with the systems it needs to cope with those threats? We recommend that you analyse and compare your ‘as-is’ processes with your ‘to-be’ or model processes and take measurable steps to address the gaps as they represent risks to your organisation.
The ‘to-be’ process is a process design that businesses expect to happen when they are executing in their operations. Businesses invest heavily in this process for training and other costs. The aim of to-be practice is to streamline operations, control costs and keep it minimal, reduce variations and the amount of rework.
However, in reality, ‘to-be’ processes are not followed by approximately 50-70% of actual business operations. This is due to various factors including human error. Since people have different ways of working, they are likely to only understand 40% of the big picture. For example, people perform work in numerous ways, policies, guidelines and plans are not always explicit nor followed, sharing and identifying the best practices is also difficult.
The ‘as-is’ process reveals what your company is actually doing when delivering your goods/services to your customers. Because it includes the non-desired activities, you are able to critically evaluate where improvements need to occur and how to better steer the ship. The as-is process also gives you insight on bottlenecks and efficiency improvement areas, the unexpected deviations, the processes where you are over-or under-controlling amongst many more.
It will further provide insight into the most profitable improvement areas in such as robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), or optimising key performance indicators (KPIs).
Mitigate risks
Arkturus allows you to compare your ‘as-is’ operations with the ‘to-be’ model and identifies non-compliant activities automatically. In order to fix non-compliance issues, you need to identify why there is a non-compliance issue and where exactly it is occurring in order to reduce costs. Arkturus not only reports these abnormalities in your processes but also simplifies root cause analysis for you to work on the solutions.
Another significant benefit of process mining is risk estimation using fact-based data. Once you can see how much your business deviates from the desired operations, process mining tools can estimate potential risks and suggest corrections. Moreover, these suggestions can be validated by re-running a compliancy analysis after improvements have been implemented.
Engage business operations
Using data you have gathered, you can present KPI reports, including the audit findings, and present them to relevant team members. Alerts can be raised for any desired exception in the process and sent to team members in a position to intervene, changing compliance and risk mitigation from a historical reporting activity to an ongoing and proactive activity.
Presenting data and engaging your wider team is critical to the success of your business as your team can collectively work towards meeting KPIs together. This will mitigate the gap between your to-be model and as-is operations, driving you closer to your ultimate business goals.
