Does your software do what your business needs it to do? Are your initiatives, projects or products always successful? Every organisation performs business analysis and exceptional business analysis is all about better business performance. Together, technology and exceptional business analysis is the key to superior results.

By using an expert in business analysis, your initiatives, projects or products actions will be created for you to the highest of standards. Also bringing you a far lower risk of failure.

Giving piece of mind when you know you have;

• A greater engagement of the business at multiple levels
• A very good result in alignment with your strategy
• Better chance of making new changes stick
• Decisive and informed project decision making.
• Improvement of projects or initiatives.
• Instigating change in support of improved technology.
• Improved business results.
• Higher return on investment.

Proper business analysis engages and empowers stakeholders. Thus enabling them to deliver value to customers in better ways.

Here’s the thing about business analysis.

It’s all about helping more companies to think about the “why” before going ahead. Preventing a technology project or initiative providing little or no value to an organization. Here’s an example of a proper business analysis. We were engaged to analyse a cash handling business process after an audit report. This report raised concerns over staff counting cash. The goal was to improve the process to create increased security controls.

Results of our first executive stakeholder meeting-

We proved through strategic questioning, most of the company’s customers were familiar with credit and loyalty credit cards. By understanding the requirements and the context of the organization we were able to provide a solution.  Therefore, increasing the opportunities available.

Furthermore, it reduced the use of cash. Rebranding the internal customer card created an environment with better compliance reporting and customer patronage. The cash handling process was the issue, but the processes around it provide the solution.

Example #2-

Another client requested us to assist with the use of a barcode scanner. This scanner would be for inward and outward goods at their warehouse. To begin with, we completed an initial analysis of the stock handling process. As a result, we found using barcodes was going to require a large overhead to put into effect.

Reason being…

• Over 40% of outgoing stock in the original packaging.
• 10% of stock was individually prepared for dispatch.

We found the Return on Investment (ROI) would be negative. For this reason, it was not a viable solution. Our business analysis resulted in the client making the decision not to go any further. The business outcome was that we were able to provide high value to the client.

Example #3-

Another client sought a solution to manage the approval process and documents. These were associated with their major energy capital projects, having a value of up to $100 million.

We performed the business process automation analysis. We also mapped the future state processes. In addition, explored the business and functional requirements through a series of stakeholder workshops. Using aspects of our method, and customized templates was in line with the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABoK®). Based on these documented processes and requirements we developed an automated workflow solution.

The outcomes of the process automation solution were-

• Increased consistency of the approval process.
• An automated audit trail for the approvals.
• An increase in the tracking of documents, resulting in a greater efficiency with approvals.
• A reliable mechanism for staff to determine the status of payment requests and payments.
• Reduced time by eliminating manual and resource wastage on printing and manual approvals.
• And reduced physical file storage.

In the final analysis, the outcome of minimized approval delays reduced the external contract resources required for approval processes. Within six months, the cost of developing the solution was paid for by using the automated workflow.