Almost 60% of CEOs expect global growth this year, up from 38% last year and 18% two years ago, according to a new PwC survey. The most interesting thing to come from this survey is that 42% expect to increase headcount this year and they’re saying that gen AI is responsible for more increases in headcount than decreases. More than half of CEO’s surveyed (56%) reported efficiency gains, one-third saw profitability (34%) and revenue (32%) increases, all attributed to the development of gen AI.
While GenAI has made a monumental impact in business, it isn’t the end-all answer to achieving growth, which at the end of the day is the main goal of most companies. In fact, if you ask any CEO or business leader what keeps them awake at night, their answer most likely will be their never-ending quest for achieving sustainable, profitable growth.
It doesn’t matter whether you provide financial services, build products, develop pharmaceuticals or deliver healthcare, the leader of each one will say they have this same issue, and spend days tweaking elements of their operation as they look for something in the numbers that grows revenues.
Accenture, along with retail payment system analysts and global economists, advocate incremental progress – small yet strategic measures to optimize profits and propel organizations forward – as one of the keys to consistent, year-on-year growth.
Global annual economic growth typically ranges between 2% to 4%, so firms set a baseline target of 6%. It’s known by some as the ‘race to six.’ According to Deloitte, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) – realistic attainable growth a company can maintain without financial and operational obstacles or borrowing – averages around 5%.
When it comes to SGR, maximizing revenue growth and sales is paramount, and finding where that optimum growth rate is within the organization is the goal. If you’re hitting 12% or more, you’re doing something nobody else is.
Defining success and where to discover it
Once your team is aware of the challenge and you’ve set goals, the first step is to dive deep into the organization to identify growth opportunities. This helps gauge the scale of the task ahead. You need to examine all aspects of the business – product, quality, support, sales, partner ecosystem – to find ways to make a significant impact. While many look for a silver bullet, real-world solutions require a more comprehensive approach.
Harness the big data across your organization to gain real-time insights on workflow and customer impact. Sectors like property, health care, pensions and finance use this method to identify trends and optimize resource allocation. Seek data that provides visibility across the business to orchestrate it – utilizing specific data patterns and optimizing interactions with various data types (including structured, unstructured and semi-structured) to improve process accuracy, such as in document automation.
Orchestration involves coordinating and managing these business workflows with processes, which in turn consist of multiple automated tasks across various systems lasting seconds to minutes to days or even weeks. This approach enhances efficiency and accuracy, leading to better overall performance and growth.
Optimizing workflows through automation and orchestration
By connecting multiple tasks, you can immediately take on larger workflows and manage complex tasks more easily – saving time and increasing efficiency, especially with data and paper pipelines. Process orchestration provides total visibility and control over the entire workflow, making automation easier to deploy, manage and optimize. Adapting to change or refining products in complex markets requires automation and orchestration to capitalize on hidden opportunities and achieve gains.
This strategy involves thorough examination and collaboration across departments, allowing the C-suite to identify inefficiencies and implement solutions to enhance performance. By using data-driven insights, organizations can quickly connect and automate processes, leading to significant productivity gains through digital tools that reduce complexity and enhance customer and employee experiences.
What this calls for is using business process management (BPM) to achieve ‘end-to-end’ automation. To drive success in achieving growth, automation and optimization of individual processes and tasks must be done, but also an investment is required in orchestration to connect those processes across the organization. This translates to a digital system for managing all the work in an enterprise done by people and digital workers. In addition, insights and analytics are required along with a healthy dose of process re-imagination to make this a reality.
Initial cost savings and productivity improvements from automation can be reinvested into reimagining processes, fostering innovation, and developing new products and services. This approach also unlocks new avenues for revenue growth and profitability without cutting human capital expenses.
By speeding up and improving accuracy of services while ensuring humans are carrying out more strategic, interesting work, this type of repeatable enterprise-wide improvement will lead to long term success.
Prioritizing patient Care through automation and orchestration
While orchestration and automation are the centerpiece of any growth strategy and can handle the logistical and scheduling elements, health care providers can spend more time facilitating patient intimacy when the patient most needs it.
People in the health care industry exemplify the importance of patient intimacy. A nurse, trauma doctor, or anesthetist’s primary focus isn’t insurance codes and paperwork; it’s helping people and finding satisfaction in making them healthy again. Health care workers want patients to have a good experience
One example is the National Benefit Service (NBS), a U.S. healthcare provider whose goal is to simplify health care programs and retirement plan administration. They transitioned to a unified business operating model, starting with immediate chokepoints like paper flow. By fostering an automation-first culture, they matched automation processes to the customer or employee journey.
NBS went from 20% to 80% of their processes running through automation. Better patient services led to all-time high customer satisfaction scores, and more process transitions are planned. NBS’s unique approach began with orchestration before automation, connecting processes like claims processing. This expanded into benefit onboarding, speeding up onboarding six-fold and enhancing their competitive advantage.
Assessing growth
How do you measure success and continue to improve? Which metric do you focus on, are you doing it right, and with the right mindset? Metrics are part of the journey. Most start with cost savings, but it evolves over time with intermediate steps.
There are many business metrics, but a great long-term indicator is Net Promoter Score (NPS) improvement. It’s the key indicator for securing lifetime customers as values increase. NPS metrics take years to influence at a company level and needs time at a transactional level. Business teams need intermediate metrics to monitor performance and course correct, such as time to market, process cycle time, and accuracy.
NPS, an indicator of long-term brand and customer satisfaction, showing high scores (8-9) mean delighted customers who recommend a vendor. Achieving this score requires exceptional service and customer experience.
Adopting a growth mindset
Growth isn’t just about hitting a number. It’s about going wide and looking deep into the organization to identify growth opportunities or customer behaviors, reimagining processes and task management to optimize performance.
Only by embracing a process improvement mindset with end-to-end orchestration can you then look at generating new revenue streams and improving profitability of existing streams. Through this one simple innovation, not only can an organization unlock better products and services, but customers also keep coming back for more as we’ve freed experience and support teams to deliver outstanding service.
These aren’t new avenues of revenue growth and profitability, they’ve potentially always been there, but hidden from sight. Now they’re increasing productivity that also impacts the bottom line.
Harnessing the power of automation, orchestration, and behavioral insights, enables CEOs to better chart a course toward sustainable success in an ever-changing world. And that, ultimately, is how you win the race to 6% or more, as all the good competitive leaders I’ve ever seen never stop striving.
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