Improving Process Intelligence with Camunda Optimize

When applying automation to your business processes, it’s easy to assume huge efficiency gains, but it is not always simple to be sure you are truly achieving your goals. Without effective process intelligence, understanding whether you are currently on track and discovering ways to further improve can be challenging.

Camunda Optimize provides integrated process intelligence through reports and dashboards. You gain visibility into your process health and performance using the analytics gathered from past and current process instances.

Common ways to evaluate performance are confirming that you are meeting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and verifying your automation rates.

• A Key Performance Indicator is a goal that your organization is working to achieve. This might be hitting a target number of claims processed daily or reducing the time a claim takes in a certain department by some percentage.

• Automation Rate is a type of KPI that measures the percentage of tasks or processes that have been automated within a business framework. It points to how an organization has optimized workflows and reduced manual effort.

Optimize provides just the right features to help you validate that your business is staying on track to meet your business process goals.

Process KPI Wizard

The Optimize KPI wizard is a new way to build a KPI Report quickly and efficiently. The wizard contains predefined KPIs that can be selected and it guides users through any desired customizations and then generates an Optimize report.

Let’s go through the steps to build a report together.

Throughput time process KPI report

To create a KPI report using the wizard, access Optimize -> Collections and choose to create a new Process KPI from the menu.

The wizard will move you through the creation process with simple prompts and configurations. There are two options, for this example, select “Throughput time” so you can determine if we are meeting our KPI around faster processing.

Select the process of interest from the menu provided and click “Next step”.

Now the wizard displays information to help you determine what type of report you want to review and allows you to set up metrics.

You can set the KPI to be above or below a threshold. For example, if your goal is to process more claims per week, then you might want to select “above” and set your target—like 100 for a target and weeks for units to reflect 100 claims per week. Alternatively, if you want to reduce the time it takes to process claims, you would select “below” and enter your upper threshold target, like 10 days.

You will also need to select the endpoints you are measuring. This option gives you great flexibility. Suppose you only want to measure the number of applications you accepted against a target. For instance, let’s assume we want to confirm we are processing the acceptance of new applications in five and a half days or less.

The mandatory filters are very important. In our example, we want to track accepted applications, not those that are rejected, so we are only going to select the top end point.

If we were interested in all applications, rejected or approved, you would select both endpoints. Once complete, select “Update filter” to continue.

Now you have the opportunity to determine what data to use to evaluate. This can be over a specific period or after a particular date.

In this case, we will select “Rolling” to capture the last year.

When you complete your process KPI configuration, click the “Create process KPI” button.

Now you have a report that you can add to a dashboard that details the Process KPI you have created.

Note: The list of predefined KPIs will be extended with upcoming releases.

Automation rate process KPI report

Similar steps are given to present an automation rate report that can also be used in your dashboards. In this case, you will select the above target. Assume that you want to automate 85% of your process. For example, you can select both endpoints and a rolling timeframe and choose above a target of 85.

Additional data sources for process intelligence

You may have a process that starts or interacts with other processes within or outside of the tenant in order to have a more holistic view of all your data and metrics. You can simply add data sources to your collection(s) and select the processes from the appropriate tenants to include in your collection.

These additional sources can be used within your dashboards to deepen the insight into how your organization is matching up against its goals.

Human Task Analytics

To best understand where your processes can benefit from automation and how your processes perform, you must review how tasks are handled within your processes. With Optimize, you can evaluate your task performance using human task analytics.

You can select human tasks on a heatmap and then measure targets on that map. For example, you might have a target to decide on an incoming application—accept, reject, request more information—within 24 hours. You can set this target in Optimize and see how that task is performing against your KPI of 24 hours.

You can also aggregate the duration of user tasks in various states (“Assigned” or “Unassigned”) by the Assignee or Candidate Group. Using this information, you can further delineate what might be affecting your metrics.

As shown, the time it takes to process the tasks is within the KPIs assigned to each. However, the time the task is in an “Unassigned” state, it is waiting for someone to claim it. This is adding significantly to the overall task time. Now you have an idea of the bottleneck, you can work to address the time that the task sits waiting to be picked up for processing.

Try it out

With these added capabilities to Camunda Optimize, you are well-positioned to track and evaluate your processes against the company KPIs.

Sign up for free today and get started with everything Camunda has to offer, including the process intelligence you need to be sure you are not only orchestrating processes, but achieving your business goals as effectively as possible.