This week in process excellence
The pursuit of process excellence continues as businesses and leaders remain focused on innovation and improvement amid a sea of opportunities and challenges.
On Monday, our latest Research & Reports news bulletin explored findings on the novel construct of “digital transformation anxiety” and its effect on digital performance. Researchers from universities in Taiwan found that digital transformation anxiety leads companies to adopt unnecessarily conservative practices that prevent them from flexibly responding to technological advances. “This insight highlights the negative effect of such anxiety on absorptive capacity and dynamic capability, extending the application of path dependency theory to companies,” the academics wrote. The research underscored the value of enhancing dynamic capability and reallocating resources to foster digital innovation.
Meanwhile, a Harvard Business Review article claimed that most business functions and more than 40 percent of all US work activity can be augmented, automated or reinvented with generative AI. The changes are expected to have the largest impact on the legal, banking, insurance and capital-market sectors, followed by retail, travel, health and energy. Furthermore, a new chapter published in the Business Process Management and Digital Transformation handbook introduced the most important capability and maturity models and their roles in business process management (BPM) adoption, with another research paper outlining a process mining approach for identifying causes of waiting times and assessing their impact on process cycle time efficiency (CTE).
On Wednesday, our attention turned to the latest industry Vendor news. Process automation vendor Appian released the latest version of the Appian Platform with the expansion of several AI capabilities designed to enhance data and process automation for enterprises. The release delivers support for more enterprise AI use cases with extended compliance, offering a strong framework to help organizations prepare for current and forthcoming AI regulations.
We also covered Accenture ’s completed acquisition of Logic, a services firm that works with retailers to boost revenue and increase agility through technology. The deal enhances Accenture’s ability to drive technology transformations for retail clients globally through integration of Logic’s capabilities in digital, analytics and cloud. “This strategic move underscores Accenture’s commitment to helping retailers transform their organizations with technology so that they can better navigate the evolving retail landscape with confidence,” Accenture stated.
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IBM revealed how its generative AI technology will help to transform the upcoming US Open tennis championships, intelligent automation (IA) provider ABBYY announced the return of the Intelligent Automation Month and representatives of vendors Nintex , Celonis , GBTEC Group and Kognitos made PEX Network’s new 25 operational excellence thought leaders to follow in 2024 list.
To close out the week, Friday’s Community news roundup featured General Motors ' landmark renewable energy deal with NorthStar Clean Energy . “By expanding our renewable electricity portfolio, we are taking a major step forward in reducing our carbon footprint and advancing our broader sustainability goals,” said Rob Threlkeld , GM director of global energy strategy.
We also gained insight into Kalmar ’s new “driving excellence” initiative targeting efficiency gains across its operations. These efficiency improvements aim to enable enhanced investments in sustainable innovations and service growth, with the main measures related to operational excellence actions. These include process optimization and a continuous focus on competitive operational cost-base and faster decision-making, the firm said. “Making continuous improvements across Kalmar is fundamental and a key enabler in our journey towards excellence and a service driven company,” commented CEO and president Sami Niiranen .
Elsewhere, the American Productivity & Quality Center ( APQC ) published a new version of the Process Classification Framework (PCF). The PCF is a taxonomy of business processes that allows organizations to objectively track and compare their performance internally and externally with organizations from any industry. Offshore infrastructure firm North Star announced a £5 million (over US $6.5 million) investment in digital transformation and the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) continued its search for two new deputy directors to help it “radically transform the digital transformation function” of the organization.
We’ll be back with more of the latest news and updates from the process excellence industry next week!