admac-consultancy

"Dynamic Decision Management”, is that really a thing?

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:21:26 GMT

"Dynamic Decision Management”, is that really a thing?

Well yes it is, please read on to learn more about it!

Some Background

Admac Consultancy Services is a business partner for TCG Process and one of the many aspects that led us to signing with them is their open architecture and “agnostic” approach to third party components.

One of the solutions that’s already integrated into TCG Process’ offerings is DecisionRules.

This is a web solution from a TCG Process technology partner that allows dynamic decision rules to be configured and maintained outside of a TCG OCTO or DocProStar process.

Once set up, these decision criteria can be easily referenced by a runtime OCTO or DocProStar process via a standard activity.

Critically, the setup and maintenance of rules is performed by the business rather than IT and includes a full audit trail which is great for compliance.

Sounds good but who'd buy this?

Organisations with decision rules that have moderate to high complexity. These typically require a) auditing and/or b) continuous change and adjustment. Organisations in highly regulated markets are a good target. While OCTO and DocProStar have decision support, these are configured within the system – the DecisionRules add-on augments this and enables set up and management of rules outside of the workflow.

Examples processes

where this is relevant may be insurance claims, underwriting, loans administration and financial processing, e.g. AP and AR processing etc. Local and central government as well as healthcare would also be key targets. On-boarding customers, suppliers and / or employees and contractors would be also be a great fit.

What's the benefit for the end customer?

Once the solution is deployed, rules are configured and maintained in a fraction of the time compared with performing this within a line of business application.

Many organisations over-rely on manual decision-making as the setup of automated rules is too complex. DecisionRules addresses these specific problems: time, compliance, and over-reliance on people.

It turns out that many organisations would love the flexibility to tweak and adjust their rules criteria more frequently.

Is it cost effective?

The DecisonRules add on is considered to be attractively priced relative to competitive solutions in the "Dynamic Decision Management" sector. There's an excellent opportunity for payback and ROI for the correct scenario.

However, as implied above, it’s real advantage is helping to leverage more processes into an automated solution and in so doing, to reduce the reliance on knowledge workers for what are important but time consuming tasks.

In summary

for business processes that rely on moderate to highly complex and dynamic business rules, there is generally a solid case for BusinessRules. Furthermore, the solution can act as a catalyst for a move towards automated, intelligent process management.

Next Action, need more info?

Please let me know and I'll be pleased to walk you through the Dynamic Decision Management proposition in the light of your business operations.

Like many aspects of Process Improvement, this is an often overlooked area!

Curious about what this could look like in your business?
ADMAC Consultancy Services Ltd helps organisations like yours automate onboarding from start to finish.

�� Book a demo to see it in action.

Why automating employee and contractor onboarding is essential in 2025

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:26:00 GMT

Why automating employee and contractor onboarding is essential in 2025

Welcoming someone to your business - whether they’re a full-time employee or a contractor - sets the tone for their entire journey with you. The smoother the start, the more confident and engaged they’ll feel. But onboarding isn't just about first impressions. It’s a foundational process that touches compliance, data protection, fraud prevention, and internal efficiency.

As businesses grow, relying on manual processes becomes unsustainable. It's slow, error-prone, and frustrating - not just for HR, but for the new joiner too. Automating onboarding helps organisations simplify complexity, reduce risk, and create a better experience from day one.

Here’s why it matters - and why now.

1. Accuracy and Speed

Repetitive data entry, scattered email threads, and juggling logins across systems is a recipe for mistakes. Automation cuts through the noise. It speeds up processing and reduces costly errors - helping you deliver a smooth, professional first impression from the start.

2. Enhanced Scrutiny and Validation

Automated systems can run background checks, flag missing information, and cross-check documents far more effectively than a manual process. This ensures better compliance, avoids administrative slip-ups, and gives peace of mind to HR teams and new hires alike.

3. Privacy and Data Protection

Onboarding often involves sensitive information like ID documents, tax records, and bank details. With automation, access is controlled through role-based permissions, reducing the risk of data leaks caused by email attachments or shared folders.

4. Fraud Prevention

Credential misrepresentation is a real risk - especially with remote or international hires. Automation helps protect your business by integrating fraud detection and validation checks directly into the onboarding process.

5. Role-Based Requirements and Completeness

Not every new joiner needs the same set of documents. Whether it’s an NDA, right-to-work proof, or a professional certificate, automated systems tailor the checklist to the role - and send timely reminders so nothing’s forgotten.

6. Managing Complexity

Hiring across countries, sectors, or specialist roles comes with added layers of regulation. Automation handles the nuance - adapting workflows for academic positions, contractors with limited company status, or roles requiring background checks or security clearance.

7. Refocusing HR on High-Value Work

When HR isn’t tied up chasing documents or double-checking spreadsheets, they’re free to focus on what really matters: people. From improving candidate experience to building culture and engagement, automation gives your team room to breathe and think strategically.

8. Don’t Forget Offboarding

Letting someone go - or saying goodbye when a contract ends - is just as important as onboarding. Automation ensures access is removed, final payments are handled correctly, and any company property or documentation is returned. It protects your business and wraps up the employee lifecycle neatly.

Final Thoughts

Making things easier for employees isn’t just about being nice - it’s about being smart. A seamless, professional onboarding experience shows people you’re prepared, you value their time, and you’re invested in their success. For HR teams, automation removes the manual workload and the margin for error. For the business, it builds a stronger foundation from day one.

In short: onboarding matters - and automation is how you get it right.

Curious about what this could look like in your business?
ADMAC Consultancy Services Ltd helps organisations like yours automate onboarding from start to finish.

�� Book a demo to see it in action.

How & Why most organisations misuse MS Outlook

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:02:28 GMT

How & Why most organisations misuse MS Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is one of those pieces of software that some people love but others loathe. Some people are structured and organised, and some don’t have anything other than an inbox. It’s not an exaggeration to state that for most businesses, this is truly ubiquitous software.

My “beef” with outlook is that when it’s used to transfer business information, typically in the form of an attachment, it plays one half of a process that Heath Robinson would have been proud of.

It goes like this: users first open the email and the attachment. They then open one or more business applications and start keying information from one window to another. Once they’ve finished keying, they download the attachment to a local folder before uploading it to the transaction or case.

All too often, a user may have to do this 50 times per day . Some organise a shared mailbox scheme whereby some users pre-process or triage emails and forward them to the appropriate person or group.

My problem with this is that, in 2025, the information within these emails and attachments shouldn’t be seen by a user until it’s reached the application. The submitted information should be extracted, verified, and uploaded with minimal human intervention (other than to fix issues, discrepancies, or omissions). I have no problem with using email, it’s the human interaction that causes me so much angst.

Here’s five reasons why email automation is the way forward for any organisation that cares about its customers, information, and employees :

Information in emails is more vulnerable to leaks or inadvertent loss . An email system is the perfect mechanism to transmit information, and this can be done inadvertently or maliciously. Shared Mailboxes are vulnerable as multiple individuals can access information without an audit trail. #governance.

Keying information is time-consuming, error prone and generally a poor use of a knowledge worker’s time which can be better utilised elsewhere. Additionally, delays in keying cause downstream processes to stall. #productivity.

Downloading attachments to a local drive before saving them to an application is time-consuming, laborious, and prone to human error such as uploading the file to the wrong transaction or case. #productivity. #efficiency.

Email systems yield very little process information – process supervisors have little visibility of volumes of transactions until the work is complete. #management. #processimprovement.

Manual processing systems tend to rely on the minimum level of information needed to progress the transaction or case leaving many valuable data items untouched (due to cost and time). This can represent a lost opportunity as the receiving organisation can use that information to improve their service or perform greater data scrutiny via cross referencing. #management. #processimprovement.

Why do organisations misuse Outlook this way? Individuals don’t set out to do this and many are oblivious to two facts: the real cost of doing this way and, the options to improve.

It’s worth remembering that in many organisations, there’s a natural bias towards the status quo. Forward looking organisations perform continuous reviews of root & branch operations seeking opportunities to improve.

If you’d like to learn how email automation can transform your key transaction or case related processes and free up essential resources, please get in touch.

Who's lurking around your shared mailboxes??

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:00:27 GMT

Who's lurking around your shared mailboxes??

Curtailing the use of shared mailboxes isn't always about increasing productivity or efficiency - it should be about limiting exposure of customer information.

The risks of shared mailboxes

Using a specialist platform that incorporates unattended "bots" to monitor, understand and verify emails and attachments dramatically reduces the "attack surface" for malicious actors. These individuals which sadly often includes insiders, are keen to either steal information of exploit the mailbox for unauthorised purposes.

Secure platforms and role-based access

Such platforms provide the essential systems integration facilities as well as robust and resilient architecture that scales to meet peak volume requirements. Critically, they incorporate role-based access controls and monitoring.

A necessity for regulated industries

In regulated sectors such as Financial Services and Insurance, it's more than a “nice to have”, it’s essential for accountability of who accesses what and when. Sadly, email systems were never intended for this use case but alas, are used because it’s familiar and ubiquitous, neither are good reasons.

An alternative approach: attended processing

An alternative approach is to replace the shared mailbox with an attended process that handles the collection, normalisation and first-pass verification of the email and attachments.

Depending on the scope of the project, further unattended bots can classify and extract structured data from the newly normalised “work item”.

Once these data have been extracted, they’re subjected to business rules and / or verified against business systems information, they can be reviewed by a “human in the loop” .

The human advantage

This “human” step is critical and a refreshing contrast to the low-quality interface of a generic email client. This web browser-based interface is ergonomic and configured for specific business processes, for example:

insurance claims processing
sales order processing
reviewing and actioning customer service requests

Unlike an email client, the user is presented with information that’s already been extracted and verified with colour coding to indicate fields that require attention. For most work items, the user simply verifies the information, and it continues to the next step – export to the application.

The benefits of automation

This automated process takes around 80% less time and effort compared to manually processing documents and email messages; unlike manual systems, automated solutions are never overwhelmed by peak volume or impacted by an outbreak of the flu!

Secure your emails and reduce data leakage

So, reduce the potential for data leakage and possible exploitation of information and email, automating email triage and processing.

Want to learn more?

For more info or a short demo, get in touch.

How to Select Your First Candidate for an Automated Process?

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:00:27 GMT

How to Select Your First Candidate for an Automated Process?

As a specialist in the field of Intelligent Document Processing plus the recent intense interest in AI, I’m often asked, where do I start?

While this blog post isn’t intended as a definitive guide, here are six pointers that Admac Consultancy Services uses to narrow down candidate business processes for automation.

Complexity
Generally, if the target process is complex, it’s a candidate for automation or, partial automation. The rationale is that humans often struggle with high complexity, especially if they’re under time, resource, and / or volume pressures.
Accuracy and precision
The need to ensure error-free and “right first time” processes places enormous strain on manual processes and frankly, these sorts of processes play into the hands of automated systems. An often-expressed point in Process Automation is that you can configure a software to perform intensive verification passes that would cause a “walk-out” of human operators.
Speed and deadlines
The fact is that some (or most) of the time, operators are working under the pressure of increased volumes and backlogs – this may be caused by understaffing (for the steady state) or by reduced budgets (getting more done but without additional staff). Sometimes, processes subject to regulatory requirements to attain a turnaround within a specified SLA.
Dynamic Decisioning
Where a process involves a change of process or priority based on real time data, it becomes more complex for a user to drive the process.
Continuous Process Improvement
Where there’s a desire or need to step up to a high-quality business culture where continuous business improvement is recognised as an important goal, process automation will yield the appropriate metrics and logs automatically.
Critical “Upstream” Processes
If an important business process is held up by a process that’s run manually, then an appropriate automation solution will clear the backlogs. The moral is – look at tasks and processes that impact downstream processes.

BTW, I deliberately, excluded an obvious one: high volumes of transactions or cases . High volume in any one of the above scenarios, will generally amplify and excerbate the challenges.

I hope you find this post thought provoking.

If you’d like information or to schedule a call, please get in touch .

Are your downstream processes stalled through inefficient upstream activity?

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:00:27 GMT

Are your downstream processes stalled through inefficient upstream activity?

In business processing, we use the terms upstream to describe “feed” processes for processes that are considered follow-on, or down-stream processes.

For example, sending invoices is downstream of shipping goods. Shipping is downstream of order picking and despatch processing. Order picking / despatch is downstream of order fulfilment and yes, you guessed it. Order fulfilment is downstream of order processing and so on….

By accelerating “feed” processes, we can accelerate downstream processes too. By processing purchase orders faster and more accurately, we can speed up downstream processes which enables the business to achieve their true objectives: to increase customer satisfaction and to get invoices out of the door.

So, how can we accelerate business processes?

Automate as many manual elements of the process as possible
Processes like Sales Order processing or claims processing are great candidates for automation as these typically require significant inputs of human activity. Traditionally, sorting, reviewing, keying, and filing. These elements are excellent candidates for automation – document understanding, data extraction, data verification and exporting are well served by proven technologies. Review is the “interesting” one as there’s a school of thought that even in cases where 100% automation can be achieved, it’s sensible to include a human review. Automation rarely reaches 100% due to errors, omissions, and ambiguity. The originators of many documents and messages sometimes mess up their submissions or, provide what they believe is sufficient information.
Widen the scope of available input channels
If an organisation requires customers to place ordered via a web portal, you could be missing out on those customers who are geared-up to send machine-generated files (such as PDFs, XML or JSON).
Eradicate errors and re-work that “slip through” from downstream processes
Often, the reason for a stalled process is poor quality information or non-compliance. These cause additional steps that involve delays and frustration. Incorporating intensive data scrutiny and verification at earlier stage, means that downstream processes have greater chance of smooth running.
The right tools and mechanisms for the job
An extreme but all too common example is “cut and pasting” between applications. In contrast, a robust API based interface means that processes run faster and more reliably.
Knowledge Worker capacity
Where upstream or feed processes are over-reliant on human’s tacit knowledge, they become a bottleneck. This is allied to the automation point above – the proposition is that as automation solutions move upwards in terms of being able to handle more complex tasks and problems, the more workers become freed up to perform the tasks that are best suited to them – customer facing, decision making, process overview, and unpredictable, out-of-range tasks that may be out of scope for initial automation projects.

For more information or a discussion on how we can help free the log-jam of stalled upstream processes, please get in touch!

admac-consultancy

"Dynamic Decision Management”, is that really a thing?

"Dynamic Decision Management”, is that really a thing?

Some Background

One of the solutions that’s already integrated into TCG Process’ offerings is DecisionRules.

Sounds good but who'd buy this?

Examples processes

What's the benefit for the end customer?

Is it cost effective?

In summary

Next Action, need more info?

Curious about what this could look like in your business? ADMAC Consultancy Services Ltd helps organisations like yours automate onboarding from start to finish.

Why automating employee and contractor onboarding is essential in 2025

Why automating employee and contractor onboarding is essential in 2025

1. Accuracy and Speed

2. Enhanced Scrutiny and Validation

3. Privacy and Data Protection

4. Fraud Prevention

5. Role-Based Requirements and Completeness

6. Managing Complexity

7. Refocusing HR on High-Value Work

8. Don’t Forget Offboarding

Final Thoughts

How & Why most organisations misuse MS Outlook

How & Why most organisations misuse MS Outlook

Who's lurking around your shared mailboxes??

Who's lurking around your shared mailboxes??

The risks of shared mailboxes

Secure platforms and role-based access

A necessity for regulated industries

An alternative approach: attended processing

The human advantage

The benefits of automation

Secure your emails and reduce data leakage

How to Select Your First Candidate for an Automated Process?

How to Select Your First Candidate for an Automated Process? ﻿

Are your downstream processes stalled through inefficient upstream activity?

Are your downstream processes stalled through inefficient upstream activity? ﻿

Curious about what this could look like in your business?
ADMAC Consultancy Services Ltd helps organisations like yours automate onboarding from start to finish.

How to Select Your First Candidate for an Automated Process?

Are your downstream processes stalled through inefficient upstream activity?