Visibility has become a great concern for enterprises who are scaling their operations. As Forbes highlights, ‘Many businesses have built their technology systems piece by piece as a combination of mergers and acquisitions, new purchases, legacy systems and strategic improvements deposited company data across a patchwork of on-premises, mainframe, cloud and hybrid locations and formats. That approach also caused a significant increase in technical debt.
When you’re dealing with disparate data sources, a multitude of apps hosted on different platforms and a mismatched legacy stack of software, it can be hard to gain a unified view.
This prevents organizations from:
• Finding opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiency • Solving gaps between teams that lead to frustration for employees • Seeing where backend systems are failing to support the customer experience • Reducing risk across their supply chain by identifying problematic dependencies • Maintaining regulatory compliance through the proper management of data
Taking this into account, it’s easy to see that organizations with better end-to-end visibility will have a significant competitive advantage.
Here’s how to unite your operations and bring end-to-end visibility to your organization.
The first and arguably most important step, is to identify where separation occurs across departments, teams and systems, and determine where data and information needs to be shared.
Silos can lead to poor quality data as the fragmentation makes it hard to identify a single source of truth. Data analysis is becoming invaluable to help organizations make informed decisions. But duplicated data, or even worse, accidentally excluding data sources can skew analysis, hinder efficiency and even result in regulatory penalties when it’s time to submit company reports.
Identifying any silos in your organization makes orchestration easier and means that all data can be gathered to create a single source of truth accessible to everyone who needs it.
In addition to identifying silos, its also important to define business processes before attempting to connect your applications and data sources. This can help form the framework for your operations. If you get the basic business processes right, the applications will follow.
Providing clear, integrated and automated workflows not only helps with the visibility of information, but also the status of processes and tasks. This way, colleagues don’t have to spend time chasing each other for status updates.
Unilever International used Bizagi’s low-code platform as a user-friendly interface to manage large datasets across its supply chain and finance processes. Visibility of workflows including customer shipping information maintenance and customer pricing frameworks improved accountability and accuracy of information across the business. “Users now have visibility of the status of every single request and can follow up with team members to close the action. If we don’t have the right approvals, it leads to leakage in profits, so the controls in Bizagi have really helped the business.” - Cynthia Tan, Digital Transformation & Capability Lead
It’s not just data that needs to be visible. True enterprise orchestration means connecting people, processes, systems, bots and data. Having one platform that can be accessed by everyone, and supports all day-to-day operations means you have a central hub for information exchange and collaboration.
One platform delivers a single view of all operations, and dashboards can display everything you need to know with real-time data and live updates. Not only does this enable visibility, but also can aid holistic management of operations as the deeper insights help inform better decision making.
If you’ve got a single platform in place, you still need to integrate third party apps with your enterprise workflows. This remains one of the top barriers to digital transformation success as organizations struggle to orchestrate the various applications and software in their IT stack to achieve a cohesive experience.
Using connectors or APIs to orchestrate applications allows information to flow seamlessly between apps and tools and unites it to create a single source of truth accessible to everyone who needs it.
Adidas integrated with SAP, Oracle and Sharepoint through Bizagi to centralize and improve the quality of supplier data. This helped them to reduce factory onboarding time by 50%. “Bizagi is fast and gives us the opportunity to integrate with other systems within our company, creating an efficient business network plus reducing workload for regions." - Manager of Finance Consumer Direct, adidas
Security, reliability and scalability: the benefits of running operations in the cloud are plain to see, so it’s no wonder that an increasing number of enterprises are adopting a cloud-first strategy.
Running your applications in the cloud highly increases accessibility throughout the enterprise and offers scalability and flexibility wherever your employees and customers are. Internally, it promotes real-time collaboration and for your customers it provides smooth and reliable interactions.
While visibility is important to increase operational efficiency, not everyone should be able to see absolutely everything! It’s vital to create guardrails within your enterprise and establish data governance practices to ensure compliance, security and data quality.
You can ensure that data is collected, stored, shared and used in a compliant way by setting up permissions and views for different users and accounts. This allows you to drive insight and efficiency across your enterprise without risking the security and integrity of the data.
Finally, it’s vital to encourage collaboration and communication between teams. Technology only goes so far; you need to establish a culture of communication and ensure everyone follows company protocol to achieve true enterprise orchestration.
Provide training and support to help employees understand the importance of breaking down data silos and using a single, integrated platform. When they see the value of shared information and the ease of collaboration, they're more likely to adopt the new practices.
Bizagi's orchestration capabilities enable you to connect the people, processes, systems, bots, and data that support your day-to-day business operations.
Find out more about how Bizagi can help orchestrate your data and operations.
