Exceeders Blog, ESP | read
It’s the start of a new fiscal year and the IT Department are very positive and optimistic of what lies ahead. Budgets secured and approved? Check. Projects lined up? Check. All planned properly? Check. These are good enough reasons to make anyone happy.
Fast forward a few months and you’re approaching the end of Q2, you’re halfway through the year and you have a few initiatives that are running behind schedule. And by the looks of it you’re going to miss out on getting a few of those planned projects completed before the end of the year.
These things tend to happen, more often than we’d like to admit it. Some initiatives are prioritized over others, an agreement doesn’t go through with a service provider so you need to initiate the selection process all over again to find another company to work with, business owners change the scope and their requirements have multiplied. The pressure is building up on the IT Department and time is running out.
And this was the case with one of our strategic customers that we recently met with. We have several country-wide initiatives running with them and the topic of delayed projects came up in our discussion. They were feeling the pressure from a business unit who had expressed their dissatisfaction with the delay in having an e-services portal up and running before the end of the year. The reason for the delay was that the chosen IT Service Provider had pulled out of the contract and will not be delivering the portal. This leaves the customer with a huge project that requires automating 15 services in just under 1 month.
The previous IT Service Provider had estimated 1 week of development for each of the 15 services, meaning they would have required a good 15 weeks (just under 4 months) to develop these services for them- 15 weeks that the customer clearly does not have anymore. So, with just 25% of the original time allocated for such a project, the IT Department were in a bit of a pickle.
We tried to help them in setting the priorities for delivering the e-services portal in the time remaining before going live with the system by asking some questions:
To the business all the e-services were equally important and critical, but the good news was that the process for approvals is pretty straight forward due to them being linear processes that had no dependencies on other systems. We were off to a good start after analyzing the scope and the business’s requirements, which then left us with the technology to be used for developing the system.
IT had a preference for a specific technology but the time to develop and cost incurred to mobilize even more resources to complete the job was somewhat impossible to achieve. This is where the Enterprise Submission Platform was the right solution for them.
ESP’s ability to automate processes for application approval dynamically without needing to rely on a team of techies to do any of the development work was exactly what this customer needed, and it achieves that through a simple and easy way of:
The best part is that the task of managing and updating any feature in ESP can be done by the business users themselves, so this eliminated the need to involve the IT Department or even the IT Service Provider in maintaining and updating the system.
The IT Department put ESP to the test and went ahead with it, and within 2 weeks, they had a complete system ready for the business users to review and test. To start off they were given a 2-hour session to familiarize themselves with ESP’s features and capabilities, and then they went ahead and created all 15 e-services by themselves.
It was now time for the business users to see the system. After reviewing the details and process flow for each of the 15 e-services, they had some comments and wanted some minor changes to be done which took just a few minutes of tweaking and updating and then they were all set. The business quickly understood the capabilities of ESP and started planning what other e-services they can add to the system in the following year.
The customer successfully launched the e-services portal on time and with the features required, and within the 1stday had over 2000 users registering and applying for services.
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Originally published Dec 4, 2018 9:56:58 AM, updated July 24, 2019
Topics: Exceeders Blog ESP
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Business continuity has become every organization’s top priority with the recent escalation of the Covid-19 situation. Everyone is consumed with the possibility that they might not be able to sustain operations after orders to work from home have been officially circulated. Survival is on everyone’s agenda, and to survive, you need to diminish any contingencies that may affect operations.
Employees are every business’s most important asset. If your employees are not able to perform jobs or submit requests that require a chain of approvals, you might be heading down a dark road of less productivity, slow operations, no achievement, and incurring losses.
Among the many challenges we have seen organizations struggle with after implementing “remote working”, the biggest challenge yet has been the disruption of operations due to the absence of people to approve requests submitted by employees and to “keep processes flowing”. What happens when your approvers are physically inaccessible?
We believe we have what you need to not only survive, but to also maintain a normal pace of operations and eliminate factors that will disrupt them.
While we at Exceed did not necessarily anticipate Covid-19, we did however, anticipate a shift in operating models. We have been implementing a remote working model since 2014 when we detected patterns in where the business world was heading. To support our vision, we created numerous solutions that will sustain our remote working model, one of which is the Enterprise Submission Platform a.k.a ESP for Employee Service Catalogue & Digital Approvals.
ESP is a process automation system that empowers business users to create and manage their processes, without having to rely on IT staff to get the job done. As it is easy to use with little to no training, this reduces the time needed to go live and the cost required to maintain and manage the system. This model will make the process of approving employee requests while working remotely much easier to control, track, and manage.
How exactly will it solve remote working challenges?
Step 1:
We will help you map your old traditional approval processes on the system
Step 2:
We will train your business users on how to use the system and create processes, remotely
Step 3:
We will support you in creating new processes that meet the demands of remote working
Our focus with ESP is to provide you with a business process automation solution that can automate all your processes that are currently handled manually and that require approvals, to help alleviate any remote working costs that your business will take on.
While we maintain our promise listed above, we understand that customers may have some underlying questions regarding the solution and so we’ve compiled what we anticipate would be the most common ones:
For more information on ESP, feel free to contact us here.
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If you are currently struggling with a process workflow that doesn’t necessarily ‘flow’, you are not alone. From our extensive experience with customers from different countries and across various sectors, we realised that there had been a serious hurdle that is holding back companies from achieving highest efficiency in their business operations.
All organisations, whether they are SMEs or huge conglomerates, have processes in place to achieve their business objectives. These processes require a significant amount of resources, system infrastructure, & personnel.
What’s happening is that as this world is almost fully transforming into a digital one, carrying out those processes manually becomes more of a setback than anything else.
Team members become burned out from repetitive tasks, requests get stuck with personnel who are unable to respond for different reasons, issues in processes go undetected and cannot be traced to a source, and as a result, the completion of processes is delayed and efficiency is hindered.
While the above factors pose powerful arguments for adopting an automation solution, there needs to be a certain level of discipline to overcome obstacles that may come in the way. These obstacles can mainly be related to cost or people.
Cost poses a major question mark when wanting to undergo such a transformation, whether it’s a financial or opportunity cost. While business owners may have oppositions due to the costs of implementing an automation software, they will eventually learn that costs savings are along the way in the long run.
However, companies that have taken the first step towards finding the right automation solution should understand that cost savings are not the primary reason to automate processes but rather to improve service to end users. With an improved quality of service, the operational costs associated will also improve and thus companies will achieve their ROI.
We created “The Enterprise Submission Platform” (ESP) keeping in mind the most common customer pain points including:
ESP is a linear workflow system that was created by the Exceeders team to enable function owners that want to automate their business processes more control over creating and managing these processes in a guaranteed short period of time.
The best part is that the task of managing and updating any feature in ESP can be done by the business users themselves, so this eliminated the need to involve the IT Department or even the IT Service Provider in maintaining and updating the system.
Problem |
Solution |
Automation is costly |
ESP has a simple & competitive pricing model |
Automation is time-consuming |
ESP enables creation of processes in minutes & can be up & running in just one day |
Automation requires tedious work with service provider |
After your team is trained on ESP, you will be fully proficient to use it on your own |
Automation systems are rigid/don’t offer much flexibility |
ESP is very highly customisable and can be built to fit your environment |
Automation systems cannot be integrated with other systems |
ESP can be integrated with other software programs & offers APIs |
Resistance from Employees |
We will provide awareness sessions & trainings to prove the value of ESP & how it will make your work easier |
Want to learn more about how you can cut costs and boost operational efficiency?
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We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
In light of that, it is imperative to always look forward in anticipation and not just wait for a trend to start “trending”. We have created a list of what we speculate to be the major technology trends of 2020 that everyone should keep an eye out for.
No matter how much technology advances, it is agreed that no single tool can replace humans. Most organisations out there are already familiar with automation, which involves automating simple tasks that require processes with predefined rules and structured data. The idea of HyperAutomation, on the other hand, involves a combination of tools that together result in the creation of an organisation’s digital twin, which allows for the automation of more complex work.
According to Gartner, combining robotic process automation, intelligent business management software, and AI enables organisations to visualise how functions, processes, and key performance indicators interact to drive value.
Allowing this digital twin to become an integral part of the HyperAutomation process as it provides real-time continuous intelligence about the organisation will enable more informed decision making. Successful automation involves several key factors: discover, analyse, design, automate, measure, monitor, & reassess.
An example of a tool that is designed based on these factors would be Exceed’s ESP.
While Blockchain was first developed back in 1991, it came to life with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. The idea of bitcoin mimics printed currency in the transactional sense, but instead of being regulated by a central bank or government, bitcoin is regulated by a network of computers. Blockchain is the protocol on which bitcoin is built.
In the simplest terms, Investopedia defines Blockchain as “a distributed, decentralised, public ledger”, which translates to digital information (blocks) that are stored in a public database (chain). While blockchain is beneficial in peer to peer transactions and small-scope projects, it remains immature for enterprise deployments due to technical issues.
However, market speculations anticipate it to be fully scalable by 2023. According to research conducted by Gartner, “true blockchain will have the potential to transform industries, and eventually the economy, as complementary technologies such as AI begin to integrate alongside blockchain.”
Can Machines Think?
AI involves designing “human-like” machines that are able to perform tasks requiring intelligence. Machines are built to mimic processes and tasks that involve recognition of images, speech, or patterns & decision making. Those processes include acquiring information and rules, using those rules to reach conclusions, & self-correction.
Unlike traditional coding, the computer creates instructions for itself using machine learning algorithms rather than having humans write those instructions. To demonstrate the effect of AI, take google translate for an example.
When it first went live, google translate used to have more than a million lines of code (human-created instructions). Currently, google translate has 500 lines of code due to machine learning. However, while it is expected to overtake every industry, one must understand its limitations.
Knowledge in AI comes from data, and for the machine to be accurate, it must read from accurate data. While businesses have been understanding what AI can and can't achieve for the past few years, it expected that the future points towards a time where machines are appointed not only all of the physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution, but also the mental work involving planning, strategising, and making decisions.
Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/
https://www.simplilearn.com/top-technology-trends-and-jobs-article
We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
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