We have some excellent technology companies in the Solent area, and tonights meeting demonstrated that….
In our third webinar of 2021, TechSolent organised a presentation from Skore (www.getskore.com), a Portsmouth based SaaS provider who provide a platform to map business processes and identify efficiencies / improvements. Craig Willis, one of the founders, gave an overview of why they created the platform and the successes they have had with their clients.
Skore capitalises on the ubiquitous problem of process over complexity and inefficiency, and chucks out the old “complex flow chart” approach to ask some of the more fundamental questions about a given process:
- What outcome are you getting from a task?
- Who is doing the task?
- What value does that task deliver?
Without thousands of diamonds, arrows, symbols, colour coding and swim-lanes on a page, it gives an overview of each task within a process, and allows you to drill through to the next level of depth through a few clicks to see the “sub-tasks” at each level. This 3d view of how things work allows a quick identification of where problems are occurring, or things are poorly managed.
More importantly, by attributing resource and values to each tasks it shows some of the more advanced elements of process mapping “out of the box”. Easy to digest graphics and analysis which shows if individual resources are over or underutilised, total cost of a process and total cost of wastage are some of the reports that this sort of mapping can show you.
Craig explained that a lot of businesses use other software tools to document process flows, but they are almost as bad as the old plastic flow chart tool everyone who did Design/Tech at school had in their rucksack. The complexity of having to show decision trees on a single dimensional diagram is very difficult to consume, having a multi-layered / drill down approach gives you so many new lenses on a process.
The presentation was under the banner of “how to do 4 years work in 4 weeks”, and Craig gave some examples of where their approach to process improvement has successfully saved clients money and time in terms of more efficient processes, and in terms of the process of mapping processes itself! As full disclosure, I am a user of Skore for my business, and as you can probably tell am a big fan (I’m not on any commission or benefit from the platform).
The key takeaway for me of this discussion was that a simple approach to process improvement is the most effective, the old “Keep It Simple Stupid” mantra works. The other key point is we have a lot of very cool tech companies, such as Skore, on the patch who have a lot of benefit to offer in driving macro and micro improvements to the world.
Thanks to Craig and Jon Petch for walking through this innovative use of technology, and to all the attendees for their interactive engagement. Next one in May, which I’m not sorry to say I’m a bit overexcited about. Watch this space.
PHIL CLARK