| | JUNE 201919CIOReviewTHE RISE OF BPM IN THE UTILITY SPACEBy Greg Flay, Chief Technology Officer, Strategic Planning and Technology, Austin EnergyThe BPM ImperativeThe electric utility landscape is changing, and the change is coming so fast that utilities are challenged to keep up. The sector is implementing revolutionary changes to process management in order to adapt to a new consumer paradigm of "quick, easy, and cheap", three words that are not typically associated with utilities. Fortunately for utilities, there are a number of tools and technologies that exist to help them on the journey to "quick, easy, and cheap." These tools assist with all facets of business process management, including process definition and modeling, optimization and automation, measurement and control, as well as execution.Process Mining: Revealing What We Actually DoThe classic starting point for business process management is the definition or modeling of current state business processes. Anyone who has had some experience at doing this knows that this can often result in a kind of tragicomedy as folks who have worked side-by-side for years will have different and sometimes contradictory understandings of the current state business process. Business process mining skips this often painful and awkward exercise by extracting information directly from application event and transaction logs to uncover the "real" process as executed, along with all of its many variants. Not only does this reduce the time required to define current state, it does not incorporate any observer bias.There are three general use cases for process mining. Process discovery answers the basic question of how transactions actually flow through systems. What is the ideal process execution path and where do users stray from this path? Once an officially sanctioned process has been defined, process mining can be a tool for auditing compliance with this process and determine what exceptions occur and how. Lastly, the optimization capabilities of process mining tools can be leveraged to identify execution paths that are quicker or lower cost than current state.An electric utility offers several areas ripe for process mining. With the high dollar amounts and long lead times typical within the utility sector, procurement can often be a focus area for improvement. Applying process mining tools to the purchasing system can identify process bottlenecks that lengthen procurement lead times unnecessarily or give rise to situations where costs associated with expedited shipping occur. In autility call center, applying process mining to customer and phone system logs can identify call paths, specifically escalations, which can result in poor customer experience. In the field, process mining of service work orders systems can help to identify errant process paths that could lead to longer work execution times and a resulting poor customer experience.CX INSIGHTS
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