Introducing New Operational Features | QPR ProcessAnalyzer

Process mining has become a key enabler of data-driven business operations, as it visualizes operations and pinpoints process inefficiencies and otherwise hidden information. This new release of QPR ProcessAnalyzer is aimed at those who want to find new ways to boost their operational efficiency: identify and eliminate operational waste, deliver accurate KPI measures, and take action based on business notifications.

With these, you gain the insights to track, analyze, improve, and automate operations. The latest product features even notify you about the potential business opportunities that can be utilized with swift action.

Read: What is Process Mining?

In this blog, I’ll present how you can improve your operations by using the new operational features of the process mining software QPR ProcessAnalyzer:

1. Business calendars that deliver accurate KPI measures
2. Operational SLAs that classify success and improvement potential
3. Business notifications and actions that keep operations highly efficient

Let me review these new functionalities with an imaginary e-commerce store, HyperStore Ltd.

1. Business calendars deliver accurate KPI measures

Due to ever-growing competition, organizations must optimize their operations and especially lead times to offer goods and services in competitive form. To understand how competitive your operations are, you need to measure and understand your current level (this also acts as a foundation for improvement). This often means tracking lead times in both calendar and working time.

This can be observed with an easy example - Olli order a t-shirt from  HyperStore:

What is the 90 hours gap?

As there are e-commerce vendors working 24 hours, 7 days a week, with next day delivery promised, customers experience every hour between placing the order and receiving the goods.

However, HyperStore ltd. had made a decision to only work for 8 hours on 5 days a week. Therefore, HyperStore's team had only 8 hours on Friday to work on Olli's order and as Monday was a public holiday, the final shipping-related actions took place on Tuesday morning.

No matter what kind of Process Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or calculation rules you would like to apply for your organization’s most important lead times, QPR ProcessAnalyzer has a very intuitive way of providing those you out-of-the-box in seconds without complex formulas: easily check both calendar time and business time KPIs for deliveries and other lead times.

[Editor’s insight: Actually, after doing some QPR Root-Cause analytics HyperStore ltd. ended up having their e-commerce order management open 12hours on 5days a week which increased direct labor costs by 50% but revenue jumped by 80% and customer satisfaction from 54% -> 85%. Great call!]

HyperStore’s avg. shipment times per company codes.

Upcoming webinar: Achieve Operational Efficiency with Process Mining

2. Operational SLAs to classify success and improvement potential

Service-level agreements (SLAs) refer to a quantifiable level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, or sometimes, the level of service between two departments in a company.

Violating SLAs is something you should avoid for several reasons: you avoid having to pay unnecessary fines or refunds while you maintain a good reputation and customer relations.

The HyperStore team's goal with using process mining was not only to point out the challenges in their operations but also to drive customer satisfaction and long-term success in a continuous manner.

Therefore, they decided to set the Order Shipping SLA, which they now easily track with QPR ProcessAnalyzer, to 6 hours of working time (calendar time excluding non-working time, weekends, and public holidays). 

Today, HyperStore’s customers are happier than ever before because of quick and successful deliveries.

HyperStore’s SLA configuration on QPR ProcessAnalyzer

Dramatic change on HyperStore Ltd's thinking - from Past to Future

HyperStore’s management realized that many areas have improved significantly in a short period of time.

However, the remaining business outliers still create a lot of manual work, and often the window of performing those corrective actions is rather short.

Therefore, HyperStore set the following targets:

• Increasing the zero-touch rate in order handling (no manual interventions) from 30%->75%
• Using RPA on challenging order categories to help with quicker resolution
• Order booking team heads to be immediately informed about A) order’s which are stuck and B) orders with include problematic product combinations

3. Business notifications and actions to keep operations highly efficient.

QPR ProcessAnalyzer’s latest feature, Business Notification and Actions, is used to put the new targets for automation and effective job execution at HyperStore into action.

HyperStore implemented five highly important notifications and actions using QPR’s latest ACT capabilities:

1. Every morning, a notification is sent to the operations team about the orders which are the most important cases based on their urgency / Service Level Agreement.
2. Operators get a direct option to review urgent cases via the QPR Operation Dashboard and to assign them for example to the special team responsible for UK tax calculation and export cases
3. An RPA bot is put to collect data from 3 backend systems and bringing end-to-end insights to QPR Dashboard for each order getting stuck in the process (=order handling person has opened the order but could not ship it with the first attempt) to support a quicker resolution
4. Monthly reports about how the SLA ratio is improved from month-to-month
5. The head of operations is immediately notified about the orders delayed over two times the SLA period.

+ Additional new features: Smaller improvements on QPR ProcessAnalyzer’s usability and visualizations

QPR ProcessAnalyzer has received plenty of smaller new features and capability improvements. A huge thanks for excellent feature suggestions and candidates for everyone participating! For example, the new box plot charts are highly informative. Stay tuned to see the new QPR Lean Six Sigma dashboards coming up in the next release!

Want to learn more about optimizing operations or changing your organization’s thinking from the past to the future?

• Contact me, Olli, for a casual discussion on for example:
  • A) What kinds of real-life HyperStores we have boosted with excellent operational results or
  • B) How to recognize a reindeer from a regular deer (yup, I’ve done massive analysis during the past months in the Finnish Lapland.) : )
• Schedule a meeting with QPR Sales to discuss how your organization could apply similar methods, as HyperStore used, within a 2-4 week project.
• Join our upcoming webinar: Achieve Operational Efficiency with Process Mining

Best regards,

Olli

olli.komulainen at qpr.com