5 key characteristics an IT solution must have to be an operations management platform

Oct 21, 2016 2:23:22 PM

Filipe Janela

Posted By Filipe Janela

Managing highly critic, complex, large-scale operations is a serious challenge. Conquering that challenge makes the difference between being sustainable and lagging behind the competition. What does make a difference in an IT platform so it proves to be up for such a gigantic challenge and delivers what you need to lead in your industry?

 


 

 

In an organization that depends from performing exceptionally, processes and operations are the most critical aspects. These aspects become serious challenges when your mission has to deal with large volumes, your organizations yields a complex, multi-tier organization, when you must comply with stringent regulatory practices or when severe time or quality constraints are imposed in your performance. Every single of these aspects increases the urgency for an IT platform that is able to deal with the specificities of process management and operation optimization. In the end, an IT platform that is able to deliver process efficiency in a sustainable manner has some very different capabilities from mainstream IT solutions. And those key capabilities allow you to overcome the challenge of efficiently managing such complex operations.

 

Processes are dynamic by nature and they must adapt to the changing conditions of the world they are executed in. Sure, if you have the time, if your volume is low or if failure has a minimal impact in your bottom line, then you can use a static approach and make your world conform to the standardized nature of common, ERP like platforms.

 

But when slight differences, surgical modifications and specific, operational related views induce huge gains, you come to realize that working according to your DNA makes the difference between utter failure and colossal success.

 

This is intimately tied with the IT platform that helps you manage your processes and delivers the level of optimization and control that provides you with the framework where your organization is able to exceed in performance. So what are the key fundamental characteristics you must clearly identify in an IT platform to trust it will deliver the level of efficiency and control you need?

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Let’s look at them in more detail:

 

  • Responsiveness, as the ability to dynamically adapt responses to the changes detected in process behavior. This means an IT platform needs to be designed to react to events, not follow a module-based preset functionality; It must handle information in real time to minimize the disruption in information flow and gain precious time to cope with change management; And, depending on instantaneous conditions, it must generate dynamic responses that produce the optimal outcome: The right decision, on the right time, delivered to the right people. Being responsive is not just claiming to deliver fancy results; you must have the architecture, the design and the operation that allows you to deliver it.

 

  • Process oriented visibility is a fundamental cornerstone in an IT platform designed for operations. It’s just not enough to make nice reports and graphs. You need to make sure you can deliver process oriented dashboards that handle massive volumes of information, generated in real time and still focused on the structure of each process that needs to be managed. And the same information can be organized in a variety of ways, to provide to different roles the right information for the best possible decision-making. Furthermore, process oriented visibility means that instantaneous status monitoring, tendency inference and automatic notification must be covered. Processes require a proactive approach that is based on understanding how the process is behaving, how it was supposed to be behaving and to receive alerts before the problem happens. And to achieve this, you need a specifically designed visibility and monitoring infrastructure, focused on the process and able to cope with real time.

 

  • Flexibility in an operations management IT platform must match the need to adapt to changes in business and processes. And, as increasingly demanding scenarios are created, the pace and frequency of that change is breaking new records. Hence, your IT platform must be designed to change, it must be designed to match your need to modify behavior and provide competitive advantage to your operations. This means that your IT platform must allow you to map your process through configuration and rule-based behavior, therefore adapting quickly to changes and new requirements. If you need to provide custom made, standard modified behavior on top of your platform, then you’re engaging on a heavy, troublesome, lengthy process every time you need to change. By the time you completed one change, your reality as already outpaced your solution and your window of opportunity has closed. So, you need to be agile in defining the requirements, mapping them against your platform and producing the outcome by modifying rules and configuring behavior, relying on a standard, rich framework that delivers the concepts and allows you to align them in the precise way you need them to.

 

  • Scalability means that your IT platform must be able to deliver the same results as your organization grows, your process changes require more information and your lead times decrease. It’s just not a matter of throwing more computing power on the problem. It’s about having the right operational infrastructure that uses distributed computing, priority based processing and real time scenario analysis to better handle information and generate optimal dynamic responses. And you need to couple this with on the spot resource allocation/deallocation to cut infrastructure costs, while the platform must assure a top-level availability. After all, this is a mission critical platform that just needs to deliver in sub second response times, regardless of the load and requirements.

 

  • Integration capability is the ability your organization has, through the IT platform, to be connected to everything that is relevant for your processes, from humans to sensors, from robots to other IT platforms that have relevant information to any single activity. Your IT platform must cover mobile interfaces so it provides humans with efficient and quick access to information and collects human based information as it happens. This provides top-level accuracy, exception handling and operational efficiency. Your IT platform must cover stable, transactional, highly resilient interfaces to other systems, so you can receive relevant process info and propagate information that makes the wheels turn in your business and in your partners' landscape. Finally, your IT platform must provide connectivity to any enabled device, may it be a sensor, a robot or an automation facility, so that real time events can be efficiently used to dynamically optimize your processes and get the absolute control on your operation. Integration is what makes the difference and provides the real time enablement that pushes your processes onto the next stage.

 

 

Processware has invested years of research in creating an IT cloud platform designed to deliver unsurpassed, sustainable operational efficiency, focusing its design in these 5 key characteristics. We have tried and tested this platform on the world’s most demanding and volatile operational landscapes, where we were able to match it against expectations and other IT platforms, to prove our worth and the resilience of our approach. As a result, we’re proud to deliver an IT solution that provides our customers with the ability to rise up to ever-greater challenges, whilst keeping up efficiency, effectiveness and an ever-stronger bottom line. Check out this breakthrough, state of the art platform here.

 

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