Signavio is more or less used for daily operational excellence inside the central location or entity that we work on. Regarding the other 40 countries that we operate in, we are very focused on new business models, such as dock stores, groceries, and other brand new verticals that we are looking at for new revenue models. We are designing business processes for best practices. In short, we start from an entity, we find out the best practice, and somehow match it to the technical requirements of the other entities in other markets. Then we try to modify it and roll it out.
Signavio enables us to carry out the entire process improvement life cycle in a unified hub. I can talk about one single business process that I've been working on recently. It's cash on the delivery business process regarding our riders, who deliver food or groceries to the customers. These people receive cash when they deliver the product to the customers or clients. Then they have to deposit this cash somewhere because they are not allowed to carry a lot of cash on them. There are different solutions worldwide in every entity for them. In each country, we had to find out a way to make these limits real and so we had to set up different limits, both hard limits, and soft limits. If the rider reaches the hard limit, they have to really find out a way to avoid crossing that limit. We had to design a business process that says they shouldn't carry as much as the number of X euros or dollars in their pocket.
We used this process a lot with the process owners and all of the stakeholders in these brainstorming sessions. We designed a new business process in Signavio. We compared what happened in the previous version with what is happening right now and we showed it on the simulation level. We clearly showed how the KPIs have improved, in terms of the reduction in the number of tasks, the cost to execute the process cycle, and much time it takes and consumes from our resources.
Everyone in our organization is more or less getting what they need from the functionality. We have very clear rules defined and everybody has their own relative products at their hands. So those who are process owners have their own measurements, dashboards, and KPI dashboards so that they can see how the process is doing. Those who are modeling have their own tools, with clear read access and thanks to the navigation maps, they can really easily find their way. The users who just want to see how the process is working and do their job can also find the process really easily. The navigation is improving every day.
I can give you an example of how the process intelligence hub affected the way we approach business transformation. We are working with Salesforce engineering and operations teams, who are the customers of this product. We have designed a very clear set of widgets and dashboards that show how the process is performing. We have a lead conversion time metric, called TAT. That measures how long it takes between different stages of creating a lead, converting a lead, creating opportunities, creating contracts, onboarding, etc. They are working on it because this type of performance measure is not easy to find out as it shows the transition time between phases. From Salesforce reports, you can have some level of insight about what is happening on the process, in terms of how many leads have been created and converted. The lead conversion time, opportunity conversion time, and onboarding cycles is a much easier, wider-reaching product for Salesforce.
Process intelligence is pretty new, so we are at the earliest stage. From the feedback that we are receiving from the course process owner and product users, I can say they're really interested because they have assigned people in their teams to work directly with this product. In the beginning, it was hard to catch their attention, but right now they have hired people who are basically only going to work with this product, so I can say it is going to be interesting.
In terms of identifying a process that was wrong, we ware not yet sure. The case with the Salesforce API was a little bit different. We found out hundreds of variants to one single process that we were thinking about. We are now analyzing this variance to see why it is so high. It might be human error or business process design flaws, but we are working on it. I can say it is on the next step on our roadmap.
In terms of collaborative features, we are getting there. It's really going much better now that it's gaining attention. Since it's only less than 11 months since we have begun rolling it out and the first two or three months was just finding the right people in each department centrally. After that, we started rolling it out to other countries. Now, it's getting better and I believe people are seeing the value of it much more.
Everything is valuable. If you're looking at the process documentation feature, it's really easy to use. We have official training from Signavio trainers, but sometimes I do the training myself very shortly for our colleagues. In less than one or two hours, they are already able to model the business process themselves. The language is really easy. The user interface is really easy. If you're talking about process simulation, we have customers and clients internally who are using it a lot, because they are from logistics or operations. They have numbers and KPIs behind the process. They know their numbers, so they have to see how they can improve given business processes with a change in the task sequence or a change in the numbers of KPIs. If you're talking about process mining, it is integrated into the whole solution.
You have the business process in the background that can map your event logs. We first focus on the process and then we go for process mining. It's really great that you can match all of the things inside it. If you are looking at it from the whole customer and client user interface point of view, the new collaboration hub is great because it includes everything: process mining, process simulation, process documentation, and all the GRC controls in one place. Before that, it was not like this. The process simulation was separate. You could not have it as a good collaboration of users. Now, even if you're not using a process model, you're only a user for Collaboration Hub, you can still have everything in one single place. It's much more convenient for everybody.
The product is pretty easy to use. It's pretty easy for me, from an administrative point of view. Even with the new user management interface in the Collaboration Hub, it is much easier to manage users. We have a collaboration with the IT department, where we receive information on who is joining and leaving the company, so we can assign the right accesses for all of the process modelers and we can define user groups much more easily. This allows us to set who can see what. As an administrator, it's really easy and for the users, it is getting much easier with the new release. It's really great.
Regarding the process modeling and process mining, I can see that the integration right now works pretty well. Inside the process model, you can define these indicators or traffic lights, features that are directly connected to an analysis in the process mining in the background. Process mining itself is related to a business process model, which can map events from the process itself, making it much clearer. The analysis is not a vague or unclear thing that you think is happening. You know that it's really related to a business process.
From the automation point of view, we still need to see it. I still don't see the real connection between how automation is connected to the Signavio platform. You are going to show that your new business process design is more or less automated because you have done it offline somewhere. You have removed a lot of tasks that are redundant tasks, not necessary tasks, but if we are talking about Signavio Suite being able to do some type of automation itself, I can only see the workflow in the back, but the workflow is not really the solution for us.
With the new release, I have some problems. Actually, with Signavio, many of the processes are not viewable for unclear reasons. The product itself is reachable most of the time, but some processes are not there. Some pages do not load at times.
I would expect faster answers. We sent a request to them that the minimum duration time that we receive answers should be three to four days. That's a long time.
I would rate Signavio within a or seven out of ten because I still believe there is a lot to improve.
