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Are your processes right and do your people follow them?

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Are your processes right and do your people follow them?

Posted | Updated by Insights team:

Publication | Update:

Mar 2023
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process flow diagram on a computer
Image © Khanchit Khirisutchalual | istock

With a former public sector background, Patrick Parker (Director at CGR Ltd) reflects on the benefits of bringing your process flow out of diagrams & policies into living collaborative systems

Process connects the flow of data, decision making and action between people – the lifeblood of any enterprise. Process wraps around every area of your governance: audit and compliance, risks and issues, incidents and investigations, disclosure and reporting. Therefore it is critical to control that process in a simple, consistent, auditable and reportable way.

And yet, in many cases, it can be none of those things. Your teams may be able to point to beautifully crafted Visio diagrams of process flows with return loops and deviation pathways. But how do you know whether your people have seen, understood, and followed them?

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Need for consistency in the process flow

How can you be confident that the right sign-off and approvals have occurred? How can you trace process history to see what was added, changed, or approved, when and by who? Without guaranteed consistency in the process flow, how can you compare the status of various records on a like-for-like basis, so that you can see at a glance how many actions are active or overdue or be confident that an action was verified before closure? If you depend on use of standard office applications for process management, there are impacts. You probably rely on hope that your processes are being followed, administration effort is higher, and data confidence can be lower. Your teams can end up in a quagmire of manual data checking, communication, and comparison to generate a picture in PowerPoint that is inevitably incomplete and lagging – hardly an ideal foundation for decision-making. I have led teams facing this dynamic in a former public sector life! They end up drowning in the ‘what’ when you need them to be helping with the ‘so what’.

Are the processes right?

And are the processes right in any case? Those Visio diagrams might be the output of consultancy where output was measured by volume and complexity. On the other hand, they might result from the extended internal debate and compromise between departments. Either way, when existing processes are lifted out of diagrams or documents and mapped into a live system, where users navigate the process using buttons based on roles and permissions, the reaction can sometimes be “that’s too complex”. In reality, the system is simply shining a light on something over-complex by design – and hidden because it wasn’t being followed. A drawing can present well in theory, but the lived experience will quickly expose unnecessary complexity.

Procuring a management system

When procuring a management system, look past the front-end gloss to the process flow – how it appears to your users, and how it is built and adjusted. This will be the arterial structure of your system once deployed to your enterprise. It should clearly and simply allow you to identify all the states in which a process can exist throughout its lifecycle from the cradle to the grave, and let you define how to transition between those states. It should allow you to restrict access to those transitions for specific users, giving you complete control and consistency in how the process flows.

It should enable the history of those transitions to be clearly displayed, giving you an audit history of the process flow and approvals. It should allow those transitions to be data entry/edit points for specified fields, giving you control over when data is adjusted and by who. Finally, it should allow those transitions to trigger email notifications, reducing the administrative burden on your teams.

In-house process control

The process flow should be something your system admin users can configure and edit in-house. It would help if you were not dependent on the vendor for changes. For example, you aren’t reliant on Microsoft Support when editing a master PowerPoint slide – you should expect the option for in-house self-help when implementing your processes in a management system. The workflow should be so easy to adjust by designated system admin users that non-technical staff can learn it within hours, and so quick to adjust that it can be tweaked and tested in live workshops. That will give you the agility to work out if a process in the Visio diagram withstands the reality of users being made to follow it.

You will need to strike a balance. There will always be a need for some top-down control when creating and applying a process. Equally, the adage about footpaths on new developments also applies – don’t lay the paths until you’ve seen where the grass has been trodden down. There is an element of needing to see how your users interact with a process before you launch it. A system with genuinely agile workflows will let you strike this balance well.

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Once you have lifted your processes out of diagrams and documents into a living and collaborative system environment, inconsistency is simply not an option. Benefits then appear. You have a live picture of exactly which records are in what state at any given moment – giving you accuracy for decision-making, and efficiency by avoiding manual email chasing and PowerPoint creation. You have an audit history of process flow and approvals, which makes due diligence straightforward. You have transparency in a collaborative environment which enhances stakeholder relationships. You have automated notifications that further reduce the administrative burden on your teams – giving them back more time to help with the ‘so what’.

Foundation of governance areas

This ability to control processes clearly and simply, ideally with an engaging interface, should be the foundation of any number of governance areas – audit and compliance, risks and issues, incidents and investigations, disclosure and reporting. Process connects the flow of data, decision making and action between people – the lifeblood of any enterprise. Therefore, processes should be based on more than a Visio diagram and hope.

 

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Forecast methodology

The future outlook “forecast” is based on a set of statistical methods such as regression analysis, industry specific drivers as well as analyst evaluations, as well as analysis of the trends that influence economic outcomes and business decision making.
The Global Economic Model is covering the political environment, the macroeconomic environment, market opportunities, policy towards free enterprise and competition, policy towards foreign investment, foreign trade and exchange controls, taxes, financing, the labour market and infrastructure. We aim update our market forecast to include the latest market developments and trends.

Forecasts, Data modelling and indicator normalisation

Review of independent forecasts for the main macroeconomic variables by the following organizations provide a holistic overview of the range of alternative opinions:

  • Cambridge Econometrics (CE)

  • The Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR)

  • Experian Economics (EE)

  • Oxford Economics (OE)

As a result, the reported forecasts derive from different forecasters and may not represent the view of any one forecaster over the whole of the forecast period. These projections provide an indication of what is, in our view most likely to happen, not what it will definitely happen.

Short- and medium-term forecasts are based on a “demand-side” forecasting framework, under the assumption that supply adjusts to meet demand either directly through changes in output or through the depletion of inventories.
Long-term projections rely on a supply-side framework, in which output is determined by the availability of labour and capital equipment and the growth in productivity.
Long-term growth prospects, are impacted by factors including the workforce capabilities, the openness of the economy to trade, the legal framework, fiscal policy, the degree of government regulation.

Direct contribution to GDP
The method for calculating the direct contribution of an industry to GDP, is to measure its ‘gross value added’ (GVA); that is, to calculate the difference between the industry’s total pre­tax revenue and its total bought­in costs (costs excluding wages and salaries).

Forecasts of GDP growth: GDP = CN+IN+GS+NEX

GDP growth estimates take into account:

  • Consumption, expressed as a function of income, wealth, prices and interest rates;

  • Investment as a function of the return on capital and changes in capacity utilization; Government spending as a function of intervention initiatives and state of the economy;

  • Net exports as a function of global economic conditions.

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Market Quantification
All relevant markets are quantified utilizing revenue figures for the forecast period. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) within each segment is used to measure growth and to extrapolate data when figures are not publicly available.

Revenues

Our market segments reflect major categories and subcategories of the global market, followed by an analysis of statistical data covering national spending and international trade relations and patterns. Market values reflect revenues paid by the final customer / end user to vendors and service providers either directly or through distribution channels, excluding VAT. Local currencies are converted to USD using the yearly average exchange rates of local currencies to the USD for the respective year as provided by the IMF World Economic Outlook Database.

Industry Life Cycle Market Phase

Market phase is determined using factors in the Industry Life Cycle model. The adapted market phase definitions are as follows:

  • Nascent: New market need not yet determined; growth begins increasing toward end of cycle

  • Growth: Growth trajectory picks up; high growth rates

  • Mature: Typically fewer firms than growth phase, as dominant solutions continue to capture the majority of market share and market consolidation occurs, displaying lower growth rates that are typically on par with the general economy

  • Decline: Further market consolidation, rapidly declining growth rates

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The Global Economic Model
The Global Economic Model brings together macroeconomic and sectoral forecasts for quantifying the key relationships.

The model is a hybrid statistical model that uses macroeconomic variables and inter-industry linkages to forecast sectoral output. The model is used to forecast not just output, but prices, wages, employment and investment. The principal variables driving the industry model are the components of final demand, which directly or indirectly determine the demand facing each industry. However, other macroeconomic assumptions — in particular exchange rates, as well as world commodity prices — also enter into the equation, as well as other industry specific factors that have been or are expected to impact.

  • Vector Auto Regression (VAR) statistical models capturing the linear interdependencies among multiple time series, are best used for short-term forecasting, whereby shocks to demand will generate economic cycles that can be influenced by fiscal and monetary policy.

  • Dynamic-Stochastic Equilibrium (DSE) models replicate the behaviour of the economy by analyzing the interaction of economic variables, whereby output is determined by supply side factors, such as investment, demographics, labour participation and productivity.

  • Dynamic Econometric Error Correction (DEEC) modelling combines VAR and DSE models by estimating the speed at which a dependent variable returns to its equilibrium after a shock, as well as assessing the impact of a company, industry, new technology, regulation, or market change. DEEC modelling is best suited for forecasting.

Forecasts of GDP growth per capita based on these factors can then be combined with demographic projections to give forecasts for overall GDP growth.
Wherever possible, publicly available data from official sources are used for the latest available year. Qualitative indicators are normalised (on the basis of: Normalised x = (x - Min(x)) / (Max(x) - Min(x)) where Min(x) and Max(x) are, the lowest and highest values for any given indicator respectively) and then aggregated across categories to enable an overall comparison. The normalised value is then transformed into a positive number on a scale of 0 to 100. The weighting assigned to each indicator can be changed to reflect different assumptions about their relative importance.

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The principal explanatory variable in each industry’s output equation is the Total Demand variable, encompassing exogenous macroeconomic assumptions, consumer spending and investment, and intermediate demand for goods and services by sectors of the economy for use as inputs in the production of their own goods and services.

Elasticities
Elasticity measures the response of one economic variable to a change in another economic variable, whether the good or service is demanded as an input into a final product or whether it is the final product, and provides insight into the proportional impact of different economic actions and policy decisions.
Demand elasticities measure the change in the quantity demanded of a particular good or service as a result of changes to other economic variables, such as its own price, the price of competing or complementary goods and services, income levels, taxes.
Demand elasticities can be influenced by several factors. Each of these factors, along with the specific characteristics of the product, will interact to determine its overall responsiveness of demand to changes in prices and incomes.
The individual characteristics of a good or service will have an impact, but there are also a number of general factors that will typically affect the sensitivity of demand, such as the availability of substitutes, whereby the elasticity is typically higher the greater the number of available substitutes, as consumers can easily switch between different products.
The degree of necessity. Luxury products and habit forming ones, typically have a higher elasticity.
Proportion of the budget consumed by the item. Products that consume a large portion of the consumer’s budget tend to have greater elasticity.
Elasticities tend to be greater over the long run because consumers have more time to adjust their behaviour.
Finally, if the product or service is an input into a final product then the price elasticity will depend on the price elasticity of the final product, its cost share in the production costs, and the availability of substitutes for that good or service.

Prices
Prices are also forecast using an input-output framework. Input costs have two components; labour costs are driven by wages, while intermediate costs are computed as an input-output weighted aggregate of input sectors’ prices. Employment is a function of output and real sectoral wages, that are forecast as a function of whole economy growth in wages. Investment is forecast as a function of output and aggregate level business investment.

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