Quanton's World of Business Process Automation

We’ve always had a consultative approach where we understand our clients’ problems and issues, where they want to get to and how they want to get there – and the understanding that it’s about people, culture, processes, systems and technology.

Now we're taking things to the next level with our Operational Excellence Consulting and Business Process Management Services, with Ravi Kulatunga as Practice Lead.

When it comes to technology and digital transformation, there is a dichotomy, and it’s one that has always interested Ravi Kulatunga, Practice Lead for Quanton's Operational Excellence Consulting and Business Process Management Services.

For many organisations, operational excellence, process improvement and digital transformation are very different, and many are unable to bring the different streams together.

Why do we drive multiple streams of transformation? Wouldn’t it make sense to drive the whole lot together?

With the development of Quanton's Operational Excellence Consulting and Business Process Management Services, that's exactly what we're trying to help businesses do. 

Modern businesses are increasingly turning to automation, AI and smart technologies as tools in their future-state operating models. But too often the potential scope and scale for benefit from business process automation and intelligent automation is being trapped at a tactical level and is not supporting wider transformation and change efforts.

With the Operational Excellence practice, we’re not just supporting BPA, but driving BPA as well.

From tactical to strategic to…

BPA and RPA have been around for about 10 years and have always been a tactical approach to process improvement. With the Operational Excellence practice what we’re doing is making it more transformational. We want to move BPA into the transformative slipstream of organisations, so it becomes a strategic imperative, rather than just a tactical solution.

It’s not about releasing capacity, but about aligning to strategic corporate benefits and goals.

With that in mind we’re looking at more than just automation.

We’re looking at reengineering and optimisation of process as well. After all, it’s always best to ensure you have done the process improvements and optimisation before you automate something so you’re not just automating a broken process.

Our role is to support organisations as they move from tactical to strategic and then, as we start to look at some of the XO stuff that Quanton Managing Director and Founder Garry Green has been working with, on to the more disruptive realm.

Internally the launch of the new practice is also bringing change for Quanton itself, with the addition of more continuous improvement specialists.

An Abbyy Timeline

One of the key tools we’ll be harnessing, alongside Lean, Six Sigma, Operational Excellence and Kaizen methodologies, is the ABBYY Timely process intelligence platform.

One of the key issues around the current approach to BPA is that automation has been built around a standard process, but there is no such thing as a standard process.

Everyone is doing the same thing in very many different ways. So automating something you believe is standard, when it really isn’t standard, means a lot of work arounds, lots of exceptions or forcing a process that may not be optimised.

Timeline, however, enables us to do the process mining to validate the process and find what the happy state is and get it into a form that is standard before we automate it.

That is why Timeline is critical to the work we do, because before we automate it needs to be front ended, so we get to understand what that standard process is.

We believe it’s a tool that will help accelerate the work we do.

Powering up Mercury

The Operational Excellence practice has already had a big win, with Mercury as a key launch customer.

Their BPA programme was already a winner, returning thousands of hours back to the business and allowing staff to focus on higher value, more enjoyable work. Now, we’ve brought Lean and Six Sigma practices to Mercury and their ELT have taken notice and see it as a vehicle for cultural change.

This is one of the biggest changes we’re seeing: A lot of deployments we have in clients are not done at the C-level, they’re done within a business unit, sitting under digitalisation, or technology or sometimes under the operations itself as well.

That’s not the right place, and our goal is to lift it up, so it gets noticed at the higher levels.

Why? Because we’re not talking BPAs to develop software to solve a problem. We’re talking about cultural change and change management - much more transformative stuff that is aligned to things like the customer and staff, rather than just removing an operational bottleneck.

We’ve also got two other active sales process in place which we look forward to sharing more detail on soon.

With the launch of the Operational Excellence Consulting and Business Process Management Services, Quanton is putting a clear stake in the ground: We want to be involved in supporting your business drive cultural change and transformation.