Many companies are moving to a more digital world as their customers expect them to do so. Offering digital products or services is not only about so-called front-end that is available for users but also back-office processes that are letting companies meet demands by their customers. Effective and aligned internal processes will ensure that other important parts of business activity will be truly organized and efficient bringing real value to the customers and internal clients. This is a crucial part of transforming an organization.
To make it happen you not only need to know what processes are present within the company but also which of them are ineffective or redundant and are generating unnecessary costs and risks for the business. Such a map of business processes is just a part of the whole transformation, however, most crucial if such transformation is aimed at challenging and changing the status quo.
To identify such processes, you will need to go through internal documents (by-laws, policies, and procedures) and manually extract the parts that relate to the specific activities of the company. As a next step, such parts should be divided into smaller pieces that are a phase of each process. You can imagine how painful and boring such tasks can be and how many people you will need to engage to ensure that everything is covered.
But this exercise can be simplified. Natural language processing with all its benefits may easily and swiftly search all data you need and extract it in a ‘personalized’ manner. It may also create relevant proposals and recommendations as to how to label certain processes found within the text. Of course, it will not be done completely automatically, and you will have to help the engine (system) to learn some information about the organization. It will not, however, be that painful as going through all documents manually.
As you can see natural language processing may be quite helpful with looking for certain processes and breaking them down into pieces, but it can do much more than that. A well-trained system may help you with searching any information that is relevant for your organization, be it financial information, certain clauses in the commercial agreements, or notice periods in the employment contracts.
NLP is also very helpful if you would like to make documents shorter and more transparent. This is also a part of transformation – making everything simpler without losing its nature and importance. Systems based on NLP may be able to propose certain changes and create executive summaries of documents. Of course, as with all new technologies, also NLP will need human oversight and improvements but still, it will be the shorter road to success.
