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Summary – By underestimating workflows, companies risk silos, duplication, organizational resistance and flying blind. End-to-end modeling, process mining to uncover gaps, value-focused redesign, bottleneck prioritization and establishing process owners with flow KPIs are essential to align operations with strategy.
Solution: architect your workflows via a targeted audit → process mining → modular redefinition of the value chain → continuous, iterative governance.
In many companies, digitalization focuses on tools, organizational charts, or strategies, without ever questioning the processes that drive everyday work. Yet it is the workflows—often implicit, inherited, or fragmented—that link strategic ambition to operational reality. Ignoring their importance leads to breaks between teams, redundancies, resistance, and blind management.
To succeed, one must adopt an end-to-end vision, architect processes around the value created, establish clear ownership, implement continuous governance, and measure flows. Only an intelligent redesign of workflows makes transformation real, sustainable, and capable of continuous evolution.
The Risks of Implicit Workflows
When processes remain informal or inherited, transformation stalls despite new technologies. The lack of visibility into workflows creates silos, duplication, and friction points invisible to decision-makers.
Fragmented and Inherited Processes
In many organizations, workflows evolve through restructurings without ever being documented. Teams adapt each step according to their best practices, with no global coherence or strategic alignment.
This fragmentation results in wasted time and a lack of clarity: each department has its own version of the same process, making changes difficult to manage and align.
The legacies of outdated solutions or unupdated industry practices further complicate the implementation of unified tools. The dangers of lacking technical documentation within your IT systems hamper team skill development and scalability.
Duplicate Work and Team Disjunctions
Without clear mapping, some tasks are performed multiple times or follow suboptimal workarounds. Everyone re-enters, rephrases, or overlaps others’ work, leading to frustration and inefficiency.
A large Swiss logistics company discovered during an audit that two departments were each capturing the same data for different reports, doubling data-entry costs and extending the reporting cycle by 30%. This example illustrates how a lack of process transparency generates unnecessary effort and slows decision-making.
The result: longer lead times, increased error risk, and disengaged employees struggling to understand the real value of their contributions.
Resistance and Lack of Standardization
Informal processes give way to personal methods and individual preferences. Everyone defends their habits, making the transition to unified workflows hard to adopt.
Without proven standards, digital initiatives often rely on isolated pilots. When it’s time to scale, technical and organizational divergences derail projects.
Lack of guidelines on collaboration and information-sharing practices leads to costly trade-offs and backtracking, undermining confidence in any transformation initiative.
Building an End-to-End Process Architecture Aligned with Value
Rethinking workflows goes beyond documentation: it involves modeling real flows, identifying waste, and redesigning value streams. Process architecture must follow value creation, not the other way around.
Mapping Real Workflows through Process Mining
Process mining provides an objective snapshot of actual workflows by leveraging the digital footprints left by information systems. Gaps between the ideal process and the real process become clear, revealing undocumented workarounds.
This approach helps prioritize redesign initiatives based on volumes, lead times, and errors, guided by the digital roadmap guide.
A mid-sized manufacturer used process mining to analyze its order approval cycle. The study revealed resubmission loops that increased processing time by 40%. This example shows how data can guide trade-offs and focus resources on the most critical links.
Defining Redesigned Value Streams
Instead of mechanically transplanting existing workflows, you should rebuild value streams around business objectives and customer expectations. Each step must be designed to maximize utility and minimize handoffs.
The redesign draws on operational insights, user needs, and industry best practices to formulate an end-to-end, modular, and scalable process blueprint.
This contextual approach ensures that process architecture stays aligned with evolving corporate strategy and operational priorities.
Prioritizing Friction Points and Bottlenecks
Not all processes are equal: some inefficiencies have a greater impact on customer satisfaction, cost, or responsiveness. Mapping should include metrics such as throughput time, error rate, and unit cost.
By targeting bottlenecks and measuring their financial or operational impact, organizations can focus redesign efforts on high-leverage quick wins.
This prioritization, combined with a clear roadmap, fosters sponsor buy-in and ensures a controlled, step-by-step scaling of transformation.
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We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Establishing Roles and Process-Centered Governance
Clarity of responsibilities and regular governance forums are essential to anchor workflows over time. Without process owners and rituals, everything becomes vague once the novelty fades.
Process Owners and Clear Accountabilities
Each workflow should have an owner—a process owner or Chief Digital Officer—responsible for its performance and evolution. This cross-functional role ensures coherence across teams and prevents governance from getting lost in silos.
The process owner maintains procedures, facilitates feedback sessions, and approves change requests within a predefined framework.
This formal accountability boosts engagement, secures decision-making, and provides a single point of contact for all process-related inquiries.
Continuous Governance and Cross-Functional Rituals
Beyond the launch phase, it’s crucial to set up periodic steering committees bringing together the IT department, business units, and finance. These bodies review key performance indicators, approve initiatives, and adjust the roadmap.
Process review workshops led by process owners promote collaboration and the capitalization of best practices.
Flow-Oriented Metrics and KPIs
To manage workflows, you need flow-based indicators (lead time, error rate, cost per transaction) rather than functional or project metrics.
These KPIs must be accessible in near real time and automatically drawn from information systems to ensure optimal responsiveness.
Continuous monitoring of these KPIs allows for the rapid detection of deviations and the initiation of corrective actions before blockages become entrenched.
Workflow Redesign: Beyond Simple Digitalization
Simply transferring a paper or manual process into a digital tool without rethinking it results in ineffective digitalization. Innovation comes from redesign, not technological copy-paste.
Identifying and Eliminating Waste
Applying Lean to processes means eliminating any activity that doesn’t add value: document shuffling, re-entering data, redundant approvals, or unnecessary wait times.
By integrating this approach from the design phase, you significantly reduce idle time and improve overall workflow fluidity.
A Swiss transport company revamped its billing process by removing three manual approval steps and automating invoice delivery. This redesign halved the billing cycle and improved cash flow.
Testing and Iterating New Processes
Before rolling out a new process chain, it’s recommended to run a small-scale pilot.
This iterative approach limits adoption risks and fosters gradual team maturity using advanced Agile methods.
Adjustments made after the initial testing phases ensure a smooth experience tailored to the real-world context of end users.
Embedding Redesign in Culture and Skills
The continuous redesign of workflows must become reflexive, supported by training and change management. Teams need to understand optimization logic and know how to use modeling tools.
Skill development in BPMN, process mining, and Lean techniques is an investment that then permeates all transformation projects.
This enables the organization to gain sustainable agility, evolving processes according to needs and opportunities.
Turn Your Workflows into a Lever for Continuous Transformation
Rethinking your end-to-end processes, defining explicit roles, establishing flow governance, and integrating iterative redesign are key steps to make digital transformation tangible and sustainable. By aligning each workflow with value creation, you eliminate waste, strengthen collaboration, and accelerate decision-making.
Whether you’re a CIO, CTO, transformation leader, or executive, the mission is shared: embed workflows into strategy, organization, and culture to create a lasting competitive advantage. Our Edana experts can help you map, rethink, and manage your processes from diagnosis to industrialization.
