Reduce Your Execution Time

There are two major time considerations associated with business processes - execution time and elapsed time. In many situations, people confuse these two factors and in more cases, organisations simply don't really know what these times are or understand their implications.

• Execution time is the amount of 'hands on time' it takes a person to complete a process i.e. time directly spent completing a task, making decisions or dealing with a customer etc. Execution time is usually measured in seconds and minutes.
• Elapsed time is the time from the start of process to the completion of a process. Elapsed time is often measured in minutes, hours, days and months.

Execution time can often be a tiny fraction of the overall elapsed time associated with a process. However execution time will directly impact on the type and level of resource necessary to complete an activity or to provide a relevant service.

Given the direct relationship between execution time and resources, execution time will also affect the overall cost of providing a service or undertaking a given business process. Therefore, if you can reduce the time it takes to execute a process, you will also cut costs.

Before being able to reduce execution time (or indeed any timing) you must first of all be able to identify it. Traditionally analysts will have resorted to the old fashioned stopwatch approach.

These days, particularly when measuring business processing activities we should be able to rely on built-in auditing capabilities - assuming the software you are using (such as OperaFLO) has them.

The stopwatch approach will never deliver truly accurate figures because;

• It is unlikely to capture all the relevant execution time activity (especially for complex processes).
• It will not measure activity for large groups of people over long periods of time and therefore won't capture all relevant variations.
• Operators always perform differently when some is looking over their shoulder.

Given that this approach will not deliver accurate information, the alternative approach of automated, sustained tracking across an entire team is preferred.

Once this information has been produced you have a starting point, which is how long it currently takes to execute any given process.

Armed with this information it will then be necessary to begin to analyse the process to identify why it takes the length of time that it does. It will also be possible to identify why in some cases the execution time might be lower than in others. These variations need to be identified and analysed. Once the differences are understood the most efficient method (or best practice) can be identified and applied as a standard operating procedure.

OperaFLO tracks all execution time associated with business processing. As soon as an operator accesses a record an automatic audit trail is created identifying exactly how long has been spent processing that record.

This information is easily accessible through history files or reporting tools for managers to review and to analyse.

OperaFLO is a configurable system. Once a best practice standard has been identified, the system can be configured to ensure that all operators adhere to this approach. This means that staff who have been working less efficiently begin to work the same way as your star performers.

OperaFLO has helped our clients reduce their execution time and cut costs.

Contact us now to find out more about FLOvate and OperaFLO. We will be happy to talk to about your requirements and how we can help.