NEVA Discover helps clients take a data-driven approach to redesigning processes

The Situation: Thanks to decades of technical and process debt, enterprises face a battle to streamline their business processes. The process mining and process discovery products market has exploded; vendors hope this new technology category will help enterprises navigate and tackle their complex processes. Recently, Yaron Bialy, Product Manager, Advanced Process Automation Solutions at NICE, and Martijn Zuiderbaan, Chief Commercial Officer from NICE’s partner PAteam, joined us for a videocast. We discussed NICE’s latest process intelligence offering, NEVA Discover, and how NICE believes enterprises must take a data-driven approach to designing their processes.

The pandemic forced a pivot to hybrid working, pressuring enterprises to understand their internal processes better

It’s been some time since we vacated our offices, forced to work from home thanks to the pandemic. For enterprises, this presented a logistical nightmare. Executives were forced to redesign their operating models overnight and enable their workforce to securely work from the safety of their own homes. Meanwhile, their corporate offices sat dormant. However, hidden deep within the chaos were opportunities. A complete pivot in enterprises’ ways of working gave executives a perfect chance to deep-dive into their internal processes and identify new efficiencies.

In the videocast, Martijn Zuiderbaan of PAteam explained:

Work from home really drove the need for enterprises to re-invent how they work and examine all of their processes.

—Martijn Zuiderbaan, Chief Commercial Officer, PAteam

While manual examination can bring some success, optimal results require analysis of every process step, which is difficult to accomplish without technology; many enterprises are turning to process intelligence products for support. One such offering is NICE’s NEVA Discover, an artificial intelligence (AI) fueled desktop analysis product.

NICE hopes NEVA Discover will help enterprises leverage data to underpin the redesigning of their processes

NICE describes NEVA Discover in Exhibit 1 as an AI-powered desktop analytics solution that it hopes will help enterprises gain real insight into their business processes. Yaron Bialy of NICE explained that NEVA Discover was developed after recognizing organizations were still relying on manual methods of examining their processes:

The old way of doing things is flawed: getting together in one room to talk, sitting behind employees’ shoulders, and monitoring their calls. It requires time and effort—and still provides limited data exposure.

—Yaron Bialy, Product Manager, Advanced Process Automation Solutions, NICE

He observed that as enterprises move beyond the inefficient practice of analyzing their processes, they look toward products like NEVA Discover to provide enhanced insight and generate the data needed to redesign their processes. In particular, he explained that NEVA Discover’s ability to deliver always-on process monitoring was one of its key differentiators, which NICE believes its competitors struggle with as they rely on collecting and storing millions of images to map a process. In contrast, NEVA Discover collects metadata directly from users’ desktops—every click and keystroke—to provide always-on process monitoring to develop transparent and scalable insights, allowing enterprises to redesign their processes.

Exhibit 1: NICE designed NEVA Discover to help enterprises identify bottlenecks in their processes and then solve them, with or without automation

Source: NICE, 2022

A global logistics company leverages NICE’s NEVA Discover to identify automation opportunities within its operations

PAteam’s Martijn Zuiderbaan told us about one of its clients, a large global logistics company, implementing automation across its global business to help drive new efficiencies. However, due to its size and scale, it recognized there might be further automation use cases within the business. It looked toward process mining and discovery tools to help identify them.

In its early pilot with NICE’s NEVA Discover, this logistics company identified that once it had deployed automation in one location, the information was often siloed and not shared with other locations. Many locations were still manually completing processes when others had already developed automation tools to tackle them. To solve this, the company introduced improved internal communication to ensure every location was leveraging the same automation tools and operating at the same efficiency.

Not only that, but finding and solving this issue proved to the logistics company that process intelligence products aren’t just for simply identifying automation opportunities. In this example, NICE’s NEVA Discover identified a simple broken process—the logistics company locations not sharing success stories—which was quickly amended to deliver efficient processes globally.

The Bottom Line: Taking a data-driven approach to underpinning your processes with the support of products like NICE’s NEVA Discover can drive new efficiencies across every enterprise

Enterprises should consider multiple different products and approaches to taking a data-driven approach to redesigning their processes. NEVA Discover could go some way to helping organizations achieve this; however, the process intelligence market is growing so rapidly that NICE must ensure it stays on top of the latest market innovations and continue investing in enhancing NEVA Discover. NICE should also develop best practices and change management methodologies to help clients get maximum value from its offerings, as process intelligence is such a new technology category.