Today, there's no such thing as "business as usual". To stay ahead of the game you need to improve constantly, both in streamlining processes (both internal and external) and better understanding your customers' wishes and behaviour. That is why consistent measurement of your business is the only surefire way to ensure you get the information you need to make the right decisions and implement effective changes.

You have a problem. Customers are visiting your Website in their thousands - great. But when they reach the series of key pages where they complete the big transaction - the bit you've been waiting for - only 2% actually complete the process. Catastrophe! How can you find out where things are going wrong. And more importantly, why are they going wrong? The answer is WiredMinds MindSuite...

How WiredMinds measures processes

Business processes are often complex things – extended transactions with many steps and decisions to be made along the way. However, processes all share a few things in common; they have a beginning, they have an end, they last – on average – a certain amount of time and they have various steps or “activities” along the way. And, invariably, they go wrong. In order to measure and thereby improve business processes, WiredMinds uses three key indicators.

Process Reference Time

Every process takes, on average, a finite amount of time. In addition, each sub-process or activity within a process takes a finite amount of time. By assigning a reference time to each process or activity we can calculate where things are slowing up, and therefore where time is wasted in a process and where money or potential opportunities are being lost. In an ideal world all processes would be completed within the reference time, and your business would therefore have completely calculable costs.  We at WiredMinds strive to help you achieve this aim.

To understand reference times, ask yourself the following questions:

• How long is the process from start to finish?
• Where does my process tend to slow down? Which activities take the longest within my process? Why?
• What is the percentage of processes completed within the allotted reference time?

Process Quality

We all like things to be of the highest quality, especially when they relate to our own work or our own business. That’s why quality is an essential measure in process analysis. For example, if our activities are poorly designed then our process will be aborted along the way and we’ll need to understand where and why it broke down to fix the problem. Imagine you shop online for products, add them to your basket, then you can’t find the checkout button. Our process quality has, in this case, taken a dramatic nose-dive at the “checkout” phase. Process analysis enables us to see where things are going wrong, and improve things accordingly.

To improve process quality, consider these questions:

• Was the process completed in the pre-defined manner?
• If not, where did it go wrong and why?
• Was there a particular activity during which the process was aborted?
• If the process or activity was not successfully completed, what went wrong?
• What percentage of processes were aborted?

Process performance

The question everyone wants answered is – “am I hitting my targets?” This, broadly speaking, comes under the heading of performance. For example, I want 80% of my online applicants to complete the application process. If only 28% of my applicants actually complete the form I know that I need to radically improve the process to reach my pre-defined performance target.

The MindSuite Module – how does it look?

There are two primary interfaces in the MindSuite Module.

The first is the business process modelling (BPM) tool. This enables you to define process diagrams and workflows for your business. WiredMinds provides a unique combination of graphical modelling tool and automatically generated WiredMinds tracking code that can be directly integrated into your business interface (for example a Web form, a PDF document or an ERP application window). You build the process in the graphical BPM tool, the tool generates the WiredMinds tracking code, you (with our help if you require) install the tracking code into the relevant application pages, forms, windows or document and then watch the data roll in!

The second interface in WiredMinds MindSuite is the Benchmarking dashboard where the data from your process modelling is presented to you in an intuitive format and in real time. You can therefore see at a glance which processes have been successful, which ones have been aborted and when, and you can therefore intervene to “save” potential transactions that are not going to plan. You can receive alerts to such issues via the user interface, via email, or even by SMS. In the longer term you can make dramatic improvements to your processes by understanding where the common problems and drop-outs occur.

With WiredMinds MindSuite You have the potential to make changes to your business that are so fundamental to your long-term success that you could find yourself outperforming your competition to a previously unattainable extent.

Please call us to discuss MindSuite in greater detail. We’ll be only too happy to organise a meeting and to demonstrate and explain this product in the context of your business.