Adaptive Case Management – Making the Switch

In this series, we discuss Business Process Management with Paul McGlynn. Switching to Adaptive Case Management can make a huge difference to your business processes, as Paul explains today.

How does case management differ from Business Process Management?

Traditional Business Process Management systems are designed by business analysts who model and test processes for specific organisational functions.

For example, a Business Process Management system for your sales department such as salesforce.com will involve the creation and testing of a pre-defined sales workflow, which has rules with rigid processes. Designed in isolation for a sales function, it will support them for a specific point in time and may or may not (depending on the initial scope) serve other supporting knowledge workers within the business such as customer care and invoicing.

It is difficult to design any system up front which will cater for every possible type of customer request across every business function.

And that, is really the point of an adaptive case management system.

It is flexible, it revolves around the business users and adapts with them. It puts the responsibility for process design in the hands of the business users themselves rather than IT staff. And this means the system can change quickly and not have to wait for a quarterly release to get a new feature.

How should organisations with legacy systems approach customer experience?

If your organisation has the legacy challenge, it becomes critical to introduce a layer of virtual process between the customer and operations. That’s where ACM can help by providing contact centre agents, branch representatives, chat bots and websites the ability to track every conversation with the customer, share all activities being carried out for the customer, integrate telematic data where relevant, and provide line of sight on ongoing issues and critically related cases.

As a knowledge worker in your organisation you are able to create and act on a process, add your own tasks and have them offered to your colleagues as suggestions, this is an area we are focusing on closely at the moment. Related cases and resolution processes can be tracked and used as a means to learn and quickly change existing processes over time.