the road to automation

“At TecnoFor we have lived through many stages. Glorious seasons, like the takeoff of ITIL or Jira, and very hard seasons, like the economic crises that put us in real trouble. A lifetime. But in all circumstances, one idea has always remained in TecnoFor: first the process, then the technology”, says Pablo Grueso, CEO of TecnoFor.

“These years have treated us well. We have had the support of clients, colleagues, collaborators… who have allowed us to grow a lot. In size, we are already more than 70 professionals, as in experience and vision. They have given us the strength and recognition to take a step forward as a consultant, and define the vision of our company through our own discipline: Process Intelligence”.

But what is Process Intelligence? It is a new consulting discipline based on understanding and managing a specific area of ​​an organization based on the processes it executes.

The activity of a company is complex in nature, and this complexity is growing exponentially as activities increasingly intersect and interconnect. This results in a great sense of chaos when trying to run a business, plus the fact that when a change occurs in one part of the company, unforeseen effects arise in other parts. Hence the natural need for a map of our own company.

Process Intelligence is executed through six steps, which mark the path, in the form of a maturity model, towards process automation:

1. Identify processes: This concept, which may seem simple at first, becomes extremely complicated when we are in a context as changing as the current one. That is why resorting to techniques such as Value Stream Mapping will help us to do it in a systematic and consistent way. It is essential to conceptualize our activity in the correct degree of abstraction, so as not to fall into an ambiguity that does not help us in management and neither land at such a low level that, with each small change in your company, you have to rethink your process map.

2. Visualize processes: One of the most useful practices that Agile methodologies have introduced in our daily lives is the importance of visualizing work to make us aware of it. From a simple Kanban board to collaborative tools, we have all experienced the difference in understanding about a complex activity when we make it “tangible”. Visualizing a process always allows us to model it with much more precision, and detect the interdependencies between processes.

3. Run processes: consultancy has traditionally been criticized for providing diagnoses or solutions in a powerpoint that was left abandoned in a manager’s drawer. Our current fast-paced world no longer allows us to build a strategy layer separate from operation. We need to translate changes to workflows directly onto the tool people will use to complete them. Therefore, it is essential to have tools that add business power but are easily moldable, such as Atlassian Jira, so that changes in processes can be transferred almost immediately to the day to day.

4. Analyze processes: when you see the difference between what you think happens in your company and what really happens, it scares you. The processes are designed starting from ideal situations, from the most probable case and, at most, some variants and exceptions are introduced. Our human capacity has serious limitations to go further in a “handmade” job. But we no longer have to limit ourselves to diagramming based on opinions; we are surrounded by tools that represent our workflows and, thanks to techniques such as Process Mining, adding information from the different tools on which a process is executed in a platform such as UiPath, we can graphically see bottlenecks, rework , back doors that bypass control steps…

5. Robotize processes: today we could not drive a car without the assistance provided by technology. To the same extent, we can no longer manage a company’s processes without relying on task automation. Concepts such as RPA, Robotic Process Automation, are already fully introduced in repetitive processes of large companies, and their popularization in all kinds of activities is being extremely fast. Being able to reduce the time required for an activity will allow us to provide a better service as well as minimize errors and free up time from the people who were executing them for higher value tasks, in order to be able to analyze the workflow instead of just executing it repeatedly. In this case, the challenge will be found in the selection of the appropriate activities, for example, with less variability, which we will have achieved with the previous phases.

6. Scale processes: the goal of automated process management goes far beyond capturing efficiencies. The limitations that we find ourselves with today when designing new business models have to do with the ability to execute more quickly and economically, and on the other hand, with the talent available in our organization. Operating based on automated processes provides us with the resources to be able to introduce innovation without the need to revolutionize our companies, freeing up capabilities that our organizations already have.

The accelerated evolution of technology is introducing many challenges around us, outside and inside our organizations. Fortunately, this same technology can help us overcome these challenges if we can use it to reduce the noise and focus on what is most important in each moment.

TecnoFor is a technology-based consultancy focused on process automation

TecnoFor was born in 2004 as a technology training company, a vocation that it has not lost in any

moment, and their love of knowledge is seen in everything they do. Now, after a few years of great international growth and coinciding with the launch of Process Intelligence, it redefines its meaning:

First from the name itself, becoming TecnoFor = TECHNOLOGY FOR, thus focusing on the purpose of technology: Technology FOR, because as Pablo Grueso, CEO of TecnoFor, points out, “without being at the service of people, technology is only an expensive whim”.

Second from the image, eliminating the logotype and enhancing visual simplicity. Simpler, closer.

Eduardo Galeano said that “we are what we do to change what we are”. TecnoFor has the solid body of a company that has been in the market for 17 years, added to the heart of a start-up, agile and alert, which has allowed them to become what they are today: a technology-based consultancy focused on process automation.