Improve the way work gets done, with Dynamic Case Management
Every day, tasks and activities are performed at organizations large and small. Sometimes these collections of tasks are very straightforward and highly predictable. But in reality, more often than not, unpredictable initiatives are required to complete the work. As a result, it becomes progressively more difficult for the organization to automate, streamline and measure these activities.
The shortcomings of Business Process Management (BPM)
Thus far the approach for increasing efficiencies has been done using BPM. BPM lets the organization define, optimize, and where possible, automate overarching business processes. Sounds great, right? In theory, yes, but BPM is receiving a lot of criticism and a decline in adoption rates. Why? Because when the rubber hits the road, BMP requires huge efforts to document, implement, and execute these end-to-end processes, only to find that it’s too rigid without any flexibility for workers to deviate from the set process when required – it simply doesn’t support the way people to work!
Enter the era of Dynamic Case Management (DCM)
DCM was born based on the shortcomings of BPM and a need of finding efficiencies in complex circumstances. Think about insurance, finance, social work, healthcare, and government, for example, these industries work on cases. While working on a case, extensive interactions with other people are needed, endless possibilities for supporting documentation and perhaps most importantly – complex decisions constantly needs to be made based on human knowledge and judgment, hence the term knowledge-workers rather than case-workers in the DCM world. As each case is unique they don’t follow a “one size fits all” process, BMP simply isn’t the answer.
Both structured and unstructured
DCM isn’t just a case management tool either. DCM provides a way to manage both the unstructured and the structured work of a case. For example, the case may have a number of sub-processes, or workflows, that can be predefined and perhaps even automated to help speed up the time to resolution. On the other side of the spectrum are the ad-hoc workflows and task that the knowledge-worker can simply initiate as needs. The DCM supports both aspects.
Link everything!
Think about everything that may go along with a case – contact details, documents, images, videos, emails, conversations, data etc. The DCM now houses all of the necessary information in an online folder. This allows for a team to collaborate together on the case, have all their conversations tied to it, delegate work, track the history of the case and even link cases that are related (by the knowledge-worker, or automatically by the DCM based on detecting similarities in various cases). This means that all the people that are working on the case know exactly who’s doing what and have all the information available to them to make decisions and drive the case forward.
Visibility into the work
The best way for organizations to improve how work gets done is to analyze the way that previous work was accomplished. Anything from the completion of individual tasks, to cases as a whole, to the performance of individual knowledge-worker produces metrics. These metrics can now be displayed for management in dashboards and reports.
Automatic generation of a DCM
A DCM should be connected to other data sources in an organization and driven by rules. This means that the DCM can automatically access data applicable to a case, and if changes are made to that data inside that case, the updates can be sent back to the system of record or passed on to a different system that needs it. The rules watch the data – looking for special conditions or thresholds. It can automatically create a new case in the event that it spots a major case claim, at an insurance company for example.
What will the future hold?
We are super excited to have DCM be a part of DECK DecisionWare because it supports the way people actually do their day-to-day work. While BPM still has value we believe in dividing the giant overarching business process into smaller sub-process, or workflows, under the overarching process of a case. This means that you don’t have to spend months, or, in some situation, years to define and map your processes. Rather you define what the goal is for the case, workflows or tasks that are predictable, and you’re off to the races with a tool that supports your knowledge workers and drives their work forward. It makes the barrier to enter so much easier to overcome and your return on investment realized so much sooner. And we believe that that is the future.
DECK Dynamic Case Management it the newest module inside of DECK DecisionWare, an Operations Management Platform developed by Spieker Point that enables customers to connect data, people, and operations.