Measuring efficiency
The advent of automation and artificial intelligence will require a prequel in every organization that wants to undertake an automation journey – the need to determine what is disposable. Measuring the efficiency in every process, every worker and every event will gather huge momentum over the next few years.
Challenges in measuring a productivity
Every industry is different and so is every organization within an industry. Identifying potential bottlenecks or quick wins is not an easy task. The exercise will require a mapping of entity vs events in any process-based workforce setting. Having a canonical model within different business units of an organization is another challenge that companies will have to deal with. The underline domain knowledge embedded in a process and associated events is not easy to surmount.
An API-led approach in measuring productivity
We wanted to tackle this issue using an API-led approach. The first step was to devise a canonicalization approach for entities, events and processes. This is huge undertaking for many of our clients because the notion of events and processes are not well defined in most of their environment. For example, one of our manufacturing customer wanted to identify slow moving nodes in the process flow. We worked with their domain expert and identified events, event stations, work force, work force to event relation and various other object-action relationships to solve the problem.
We created micro-services to capture each and every event happening in a process. Each workforce was equipped to call our APIs using their handheld device or in many cases, the event was captured through the action of itself. A major portion of the work was developing analytics as APIs. These APIs were able to identify the problem zones in a process-oriented workforce environment.
We used one of our preferred tools of choice – Mulesoft Anypoint platform to develop this solution. Over the last few years, we have delivered digital transformation solutions to our customers using this technology and it was an easy decision to go with it for this time as well. Mulesoft’s API-led approach and capabilities gave us the shorter runaway that we needed to provide the solution in a much faster than usual timeline.
The best part is that our workforce productivity measurement solution has evolved into a viable product that can be utilized in most of the industries with some simple customization. If you are thinking of an API-led approach to find hotspots for your future automation or just mere improvement in the setting, we would love to hear from you.
