Introducing Zaptic: A Definite Optimist’s View on the Future of Work

This is not a very British thing to say, but at Zaptic we’re insatiably optimistic about the future. To borrow a term from Peter Theil, we’d put ourselves in the ‘definite’ optimists’ camp. Unlike the indefinite optimists, – who are bullish about the future but don’t have any particular plan – we have a concrete vision for the future and believe it to be better than today.

It’s the reason we’ve built Zaptic. To mark its launch, we want to share our vision for the future of work, and to invite everyone who is an optimist to be part of an exciting journey.

So what’s our reason for being so optimistic? It’s really very simple:

–  Standards rise if accessibility and adherence to best practice processes improves.

– Every single process in the world can be improved all the time.

– Using technology, everyone can have access to the best process in an intuitive mobile experience. 

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  Our mission is to change the way people share and experience procedural guidance at work. 

Success is a process

Whether in the supply chain, customer experience management or product engineering, if the design and execution of process improves, standards rise. To take just one real world example, supply chain improvements in order fulfillment have supported today’s mindboggling levels of shopper choice, the supply of medical care around the globe, and the delivery of life saving aid to the world’s 21.6 million refugees. If the design and execution of this supply chain process continues to improve, standards of living for millions of people will continue to rise.

Let’s improve business processes

In the enterprise, the way processes are improved is called Business Process Management (BPM). BPM is an approach to designing, executing, measuring and optimising processes. In theory, it’s a great thing. But BPM is too often a siloed activity, with little impact on an entire workforce or business network. Process excellence teams evangelise lean and agile improvement methodologies, but we’ve all seen process excellence initiatives die a miserable death in employee best practice manuals, PDFs or corporate meeting rooms. By changing the way people share and experience procedural guidance at work, we can make every work activity part of an ongoing collaborative process improvement effort.

Software eats the world, one process at a time

Enterprise Software has come a long way since the silver age of on premise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Siebel salesforce automation systems. Once screwed in, these ‘systems of record’ helped to reduce the labour costs of business processes. But the software largely dictated the process, and both were centrally controlled by small groups of IT experts or specialists at great expense.

The golden age of “Software as a service” has seen the disaggregation of major ERP platforms, and the move towards self-serve, intuitive user experiences. Individual functions and their respective processes are now directly manageable by users (or “subscribers”). Function by function, companies like SuccessFactors, Salesforce and Workday have kick-started a great decentralization in the management of business processes. When considered alongside the trend of advancing automation, it’s no surprise that CIOs and business leaders are rethinking the way business processes are managed and accelerating towards a digital transformation of the enterprise.

Re-thinking the way business processes are managed

As more and more business processes are streamlined by the next SaaS solution, and tasks automated by AI or “bots”, there is a need to somehow co-ordinate all the work activities taking place on these solutions in a joined up way. Make the technologies “talk to each other”; and “bring everything into one place”, are phrases we frequently hear from customers. Neil Ward Dutton of MWD Advisors describes the challenge more prosaically, to “weave a digital thread”* through all the activities of customer experience management, operational excellence and product leadership. The business platform of the future is therefore one that will enable a de-centralised co-ordination of work activities, tools and procedural guidance.

BPM as the Digital work platform of the future 

BPM is a great candidate to form this digital work platform of the future, with the promise of converging awareness, knowledge and action across the enterprise. Unlike a CRM, for example, which is embedded in one very important enterprise process (customer intimacy), BPM can be an organising principle and interface for all work activities.

So how come we’re not all using a BPM platform at work?  The challenge is to move away from software that simply supports BPM in silo, towards software that delivers BPM as a service to each enterprise, function, or worker responsible for part of a business process . “BPM as a service” can and must be more than simply hosting process apps in the cloud which perpetuate the activity of process improvement in silo. A self-serve user experience at work must also match the fluidity, responsiveness and design we’ve come to expect in apps outside of work; a reason for the success of new tools like Slack and Quip.

Behold Zaptic – The Process Cloud

We’ve built Zaptic to solve this problem. To make it easy for any worker, function or business to partake in, or benefit from, BPM. To change the way people share and experience procedural guidance at work, and in doing so make the design, execution, and improvement of processes the organising interface to all work activities. To connect deskless workers, procedural guidance and machines in a way that empowers people to collaborate with automation.

Next-generation retail execution and monitoring in the process cloud

As an example, Zaptic is being used to co-ordinate deskless retail execution and monitoring activities for large consumer goods (CPG) companies. Process experts in the head office design and optimise field sales & marketing process, field reps or gig workers execute the activities in store, and managers monitor progress in key performance indicators like on shelf availability, promotional compliance and share of shelf. Advanced analytics are used to predict out of stocks and direct agents to the highest commercial opportunities. All the relevant information from systems of record is displayed at the point of action, and tasks automation apps such as image recognition and augmentation are seamlessly incorporated into the agent’s workflow.

Did someone mention the Gig Economy?

With a well designed process delivered via an intuitive and intelligent to do list, agents are guided through each activity with insights to help them meet the highest standards. The Zaptic gamification motivates and rewards agents, and generates a record of correctly accomplished work. We believe in a world where free agents, empowered by new levels of work flexibility and autonomy, take their Zaptic account from job to job, collecting recognition and reward for high quality work accomplished.

Digitally transforming small business with BPM as a service

From accounting to compliance, small business owners are inundated with processes to follow. If only they could be served the best practice on a plate to execute, they could focus on what they really care about – serving customers.

For example, independent retail and catering businesses are required to meet all kinds of compliance procedures, from food safety and hygiene to pest control and tobacco regulations. In the Zaptic process cloud, each process authority can design and distribute best practice to agents. Small business owners follow intelligent to do lists of things to check and do in order to stay compliant. Important record keeping is automated, producing a valuable log of standards being adhered to.

Let’s work together!

A good process can and should be executed by many agents (1 to N) rather than each agent re-creating their own process (1 to 1). Economics 101 tells us that this kind of allocative inefficiency creates a commercial opportunity for process experts; Zaptic gives rise to thousands of opportunities available to organisations with procedural expertise. By offering a new way to share procedural guidance with agents, Zaptic gives process experts a platform to scale their impact, commercialise their knowledge, and contribute to improved standards for all.

Want to find out more about Zaptic, the Process Cloud? We are always happy to talk!

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Source: 
* Neil Ward Dutton, MWD Advisors; https://www.mwdadvisors.com/2016/02/10/the-digital-thread/