Apromore: Helping Firms Make Good Choices in Turbulent Times

The first quarter of 2024 has continued to be marred by macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility. These factors, particularly the latter, look set to intensify as the year goes on. 

Last week, we spoke to Nigel Adams, Senior Advisor at Apromore, who discussed how the company is helping businesses find paths to improve existing processes, ensuring maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

By achieving this, organisations can still have success despite the persisting global turbulence both politically and economically. 

Apromore: Smart processes for smart organisations

For Adams, the question businesses should ask is not when the macroeconomic environment will improve, but “how they can make better quality decisions while volatility persists”. 

“Today, the tools that many organisation use, such as high-level modelling tools, are inadequate,” Adams says. 

“These tools are based on aggregates and averages, which have been useful in the past because back then it was harder to get anything more effective.  

“Whereas now we've got tools like process mining, which delivers a much richer input set into that decision-making because it captures real process behaviour, and that's not been possible before.”

But what does this really mean? Adams gives an example: “There was a Royal Commission in Australia around four or five years ago and the CEO of a mortgage lender said that a mortgage process in question for failing was really complicated, with over 4,000 steps involved. 

“The reality is there are 35,000 pathways through those 4,000 steps, and it’s the outliers that create issues because processes don’t fail at a high level, but down in the weeds and in outlier areas. 

“So this is an example of running processes without full control, and if you manage things this way then every day is a surprise and your teams are constantly firefighting. But once you can see the processes using process management techniques, you can take control. 

“It frees up your space to start looking for opportunities, and then you can use better data to inform those models and take advantage of the big shifts happening in the environment.”

This is where Apromore’s use of process mining solutions can be leveraged in support of organisations navigating economic volatility. 

“A financial services firm may be wondering whether interest rates are going up or down, what is likely to happen with the US dollar or the repercussions of activity in the Red Sea and Middle East," adds Adams.

“What our solutions can do is show repercussions and potential consequences of various macroeconomic changes. In a bank, you may have some customers who want to fix their mortgage before interest rates go up. 

“In volatile times, it often leads to attrition as people don’t want to take out loans, and people end up in hardship over a period of time. 

“With process mining, you get an insight and understanding of how the behaviour of these macroeconomic effects works and changes over an extended period. This is something that's very difficult to capture in a spreadsheet alone. 

“But with tools such as ours, organisations can actually capture that behaviour and simulate different combinations of market conditions very quickly, which hasn’t been possible before. 

“These insights can be fed into strategic decision-making models, and help organisations succeed in difficult, volatile macroeconomic environments.”

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