“You have reached your destination”

When planning your way to a less known destination, it’s good to take a short break and think ahead. If you travel by car, the planning is made easy with the emergence of car integrated navigators. They monitor how much gas we have left or if a road is blocked, reflecting this on our journey. This kind of solution would be perfect in business as well, where planning should be done every day. But often we sit down only once or twice a year when some major strategic lines have to be defined. 

Equally important to reaching your destination, is reflecting on the now; where you are and what you have. That's just what we did recently at QPR Software with a group of colleagues from different units. We know of course well what we can offer in the fields of Process Intelligence, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Enterprise Business Process Analysis (EBPA), as well as Performance Management. But while doing this reflection, we also observed that our tools enable organizations to know where they are and how to plan forward. 

In a changing business environment, you need to react fast and be proactive. This agility means that all tools supporting operational development must be interconnected, leaving no room for guessing and reducing complexity of root cause analysis.

As said previously, first you need to know where you stand in terms of your operations and see how you're doing. Dashboards and reports using the performance management standards of your choice must be easily available at all times to provide your current status compared to your objectives. When the red light starts blinking, many fail however to discover the real root cause of their current performance problems, because they don’t have the visibility to the actual processes behind them. This can be easily handled by linking performance metrics to the actual processes. 

Knowing your current performance is not just a matter of numbers and sitting down to review your operations. You need facts and process intelligence. Especially when processes become complex and produce vast amounts of data to your business information systems, it's vital to use the information and see what works and what doesn’t. Process tools use the data to provide process intelligence for monitoring performance and gaining visibility needed to make correct decisions on improving and developing your processes. 

After you know what happens under the hood, comes the part where you need to draw the map to your goals. It all comes down to evaluating and aligning your assets against the strategy in order to make your business successful. Your strategy map should not be linked only to the actual performance information, but also to your current as-is enterprise architecture model. Often when discussing with our customers they tell us how important it is to be able to fast track the dependencies of one single item to the tens or hundreds of other items in process, application, information and technology layers.  At first glance the layers often seem to be a complex grid of elements; however the right EA tool will highlight and help you recognize the necessary connections and dependencies. This considerably reduces the needed time to plan a future to-be model and the transformation roadmaps associated with it.

Support for successful business transformation and continuous improvement should remain a high priority. QPR sees that taking a comprehensive approach to develop operations drives sustainable results. Reducing and managing the complexity of operations becomes a key asset in growing organizations. The integration of software tools supporting EA, EBPA, Process Intelligence and Performance Management might not yet be at the same level as a car integrated navigation system, but at QPR we can already offer our tools together as an integrated solution to help the work of business units, planning functions and ICT.

Jussi Siltanen

Product Marketing Manager

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