The sweet spot of Gluu

There will always be a discussion about the value of a new software introduction to a company. Perceived value, expected value, future value and timelines for the real value. Our VP Customer Success Tor Christensen recently had a keynote presentation on this topic. This article is a distillate of the Q&A and discussions that followed. 

The premise is simple: “If I have 100 repetitions of a process every day – isn’t it annoying to use Gluu and click “Completed” on every task in the same process?” The answer is, of course: “Yeah – that sounds like a waste of time – don’t do that”.  

But! If it is a critical process and you actually need 100 proofs a day to satisfy an auditor or the Legal team – then the answer becomes a clear: “Maybe!” 

When introducing criticality to the equation a complete answer becomes a bit harder. Because then there is a field of opportunities within: “High or Low repeatability” and “High or low criticality”. And there are even a lot of grey areas in that field. This article will discuss that playing field. 

On the lower end of the question, we have: “What about tasks that occur rarely? “ Well, those are – “ad hocs” and they don’t make much sense to register inside of Gluu, as they will never be repeated. At least if you easily can prove that they’re completed correctly and to the best of the company standards. But that requires bright employees rather than good processes. If you can save the evidence in an email or on the Sharepoint it’s fine. If not, you can consider using Gluu for the sake of storing evidence. 

Furthermore, tasks with low criticality that are done more than once, are something you should consider if you want to do at all. There might be a service for that out there, but from a business perspective, you should consider if you can avoid them. 

Back to the initial question: Those processes that repeated 100 times or even more a day could be registered in Gluu, but you should strongly consider to fully automate that business process. ERP systems are probably your best choice for this.
And even for that conclusion there is a but: It could make sense to map and create the high-frequency process (well knowing that people won’t follow it to the last word every time) if you have it for training and education purposes. New employees could benefit from understanding how to do it and then start from there.

So, there are both an upper and a lower limit. 

Where is the sweet spot for using Gluu?

The Gluu sweet spot is in the “reasonably critical” and “more often than once” – “but not super often”- area. That calls for a visualisation: 

Gluu brings you the most value in the semi-automation area. And all digital transformation journeys will at some point be in this area. Some are going towards automatisation, some are not – and that’s fine. Close to full automatisation there’s even RPA as a great possibility, so you don’t have to leave out one option, just because you’re using another. 

Businesses are evolving and so should their IT landscapes. And if you take the knowledge from your customer’s semi-automated processes as input for an ERP tender project you will have a much stronger definition of what is needed. Looking for more information about RPA? You can read how to set up RPA in our article. 

The benefits of semi-automation

We are in 2020, so not automating your processes (to some extent) is not really an option anymore. However, organisations often think that only with full automation they get full value: lower the labour costs and increase production.  

This is a very common misconception. 

We have seen many organisations that sprint towards full business process automatization with a huge IT software solution to support it. Many forget that once you have implemented an IT solution you are now at the mercy of the features provided by the software. What if your problem can’t be solved there? Or that outside changes affect the requirements for your delivery – and that the software that used to be a perfect fit now can’t deliver? 

Implementation of new IT systems (usually ERP) is usually an enormous leap in the digitalisation journey. But they change the question from: “What business problem do you want to solve?” to “can you fit your problem into what IT system can deliver?”.  

Keeping things semi-automation brings a lot of value as they: 

1. keeps your business processes agile  
2. gives space for continuous improvement 

If this is where your organization is heading towards or is already, Gluu is a great solution for you. 

Final thoughts

There are definitely limits to semi–automatisation. Do not click on “I have completed the task” a 1000 times a day. That is the upper limit. Between “semi-automatisation” and “automatization” there are potential benefits in using RPA to carry some of the workloads. 

And do not use the time to define a process or task for a problem that only needs solving once. That is the lower limit. Criticality requires critical thinking. If you need our experience please do not hesitate to reach out and book a demo with Gluu. 

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