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To keep pace with frequently changing market requirements, more and more enterprises are moving towards Cloud ERPs. In fact, According to HubSpot, nearly 70% of organizations opt for cloud-based ERP systems over on-premise software due to their agility, ease of installation, and minimal IT infrastructure.
That being said, ERP implementations are risky. According to Gartner, ERP implementations failure rates can exceed 75%. McKinsey also suggests that more than 70% of all digital transformation projects fail. There are countless examples of Cloud-based ERP implementation failure. For example, Marin County recently sued SAP for $30 million for a botched implementation.
One of the primary reasons that in ERP implementations / migrations fail is lack of business process knowledge. Before deciding on the scope of your ERP implementation or migration, it’s vital that you understand your current business processes. Without detailed documentation of your current processes, there’s no way to ensure that they won’t break when you migrate or implement your new ERP.
Although manual process discovery is possible, it isn't practical since it's slow and unscientific. Enterprises often spend months of time creating complex Excel spreadsheets to document their processes, but often leave critical pieces out.
In this blog, we’ll explain why you should automate your business process documentation, and will also describe business process documentation best practices.
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What is business process documentation?
Business process documentation (BPD) is a complete description of a business process to designate exactly how the process should function in an ideal environment.
What are types of process documentation?
Examples of business process documentationformat types are
- Visual Process Maps
- Flowcharts
- Quick Reference Guides
- White Papers
- On-boarding Documents
- Training Manuals
- Video Tutorials
- Checklists
Why should you automate business process documentation?
Manual process documentation is unreliable: With manual BPD processes, business leaders rely on interviews with the people involved in executing the process to gather the majority of their baseline data. This approach is highly risky, whether you’re migrating to Oracle Cloud or any other cloud ERP, as there is no real way of telling whether a person’s view is objective or fully informed.
With automated business process discovery, the entire process is scientific, and doesn’t rely on human judgement. Automation software like Opkey can mine the process logs of your enterprises’ software, and discover the actual business processes that are run.
Explore how Opkey can help in Oracle Cloud migration.
Manual documentation is time consuming: To get highly accurate business process documentation, you need the assistance functional end users who know their day-to-day business processes best.
Manual documentation is expensive: As a wise person once said, time is money. And each minute one of your employees spend documenting their processes is a minute they’re not spending doing value-add business activities.
Top reasons to automate business process documentation
Automation makes process documentation easy: In automated business process discovery techniques, AI-powered engines pull data from various applications involved in executing a business process from beginning to end. They map out the entirety of an organizations' current business processes, and ensure that each process is recorded—all without human intervention.
Enhanced process efficiency: By painting an accurate picture of existing business processes, automated business process discovery enables business leaders to identify bottlenecks, redundant processes, process deviations, and other issues with their business processes. Thus, automated business process discovery enables transformation leaders to improve the efficiency of their operations as they undergo their digital transformation.
Meeting Audit & Compliance Requirements: Clear business process documentation not only reduces the time, effort and costs associated with an ERP implementation, but also helps you meet audit and compliance requirements. Clearly documented business processes ensure seamless communication between internal and external parties. Whether you need to on-board an outside consultant or train a new employee, clear business process documentation makes the process easy.
Conclusion
Automated business process documentation not only ensures that all your processes are mapped in their entirety as you migrate or implement your new ERP, but enables you to complete your project quicker, and with less resources. By quickly showing your all your processes accurately, automated business process discovery allows leaders to identify bottlenecks, redundant processes, and other problematic issues, and re-engineer them with minimal risk.
