I recently had the chance to reconnect with Jim Sinur, a former Gartner analyst and a well-known leader in business process management. To show how real-time process discovery and intelligence can boost revenue and enhance customer experience, Jim has written a blog post. His case study details how a large “quick serve” restaurant chain with over 10,000 locations in 50 countries gained complete supply chain visibility to avoid customer complaints and lost sales from out-of-stock items and missed deliveries.
Before the implementation, the organization was unable to track purchase orders through a myriad of siloed ERP systems and other IT applications. Because purchase order status could not be monitored across the supply chain in real-time, challenges and problems around order variations, shipping delays, shortages and overages could not be addressed and corrected before shipments were missed and critical inventory was out-of-stock. This resulted in significant revenue loss as well as disappointed customers.
Jim talks about how this global restaurant chain leveraged visual process intelligence to facilitate continuous monitoring of perishables and other items through the end-to-end procurement process. By implementing monitoring capabilities that track every process throughout the procurement cycle in real-time, the company was able to immediately identify and eliminate costly bottlenecks and delays before they negatively affected the customer experience.
The key takeaway highlighted in Jim’s analysis is that the combination of real-time process discovery and process intelligence translates directly into better business results. For the restaurant chain, the benefits extend beyond lower spoilage rates and reduced operational costs – perpetually in-stock, quality inventory prevents revenue loss and, most importantly, keeps customers happy and loyal. For a more detailed account of the case study, challenges and results, I encourage you to check out Jim’s piece on his blog.