The race to six: Navigating the path to sustainable growth

Talk to any CEO or business leader and they'll tell you a success story, but I guarantee they'll also tell you about the one issue that keeps them awake at night – their never-ending quest for achieving sustainable, profitable growth.

And it doesn't matter whether you provide financial services, build products, develop pharmaceuticals, or deliver healthcare, the leader of each one will say they have this issue, and spend days tweaking elements of their operation as they look for something in the numbers that grows revenues.

Accenture, along with retail payment system analysts and global economists, advocate incremental progress – small yet strategic measures to optimise profits and propel organizations forward – as one of the keys to consistent, year-on-year growth.

Global annual economic growth typically ranges between two to four per cent, so firms set a baseline target of six per cent. It's known by some as the "race to six". According to Deloitte, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) – realistic attainable growth a company can maintain without financial and operational obstacles or borrowing – averages around five per cent.

With SGR, it's about maximising revenue growth and sales, and finding where that optimum growth rate is within the organisation. If you're hitting 12 per cent or more, you're doing something nobody else is.

What success looks like and where to find it
Once your team is aware of the challenge and you've set goals, the first step is to dive deep into the organisation to identify growth opportunities. This helps gauge the scale of the task ahead. You need to examine all aspects of the business – product, quality, support, sales, partner ecosystem – to find ways to make a significant impact. Success comes from multiple incremental changes that collectively enhance the entire value chain. While many look for a silver bullet, real-world solutions require a more comprehensive approach.

Harness the big data across your organisation to gain real-time insights on workflow and customer impact. Sectors like property, healthcare, pensions, and finance use this method to identify trends and optimise resource allocation. We seek data that provides visibility across the business to orchestrate it – utilising specific data patterns to improve process accuracy, such as in document automation.

Orchestration involves coordinating and managing these processes, which consist of multiple automated tasks across various systems. The goal is to streamline and optimise frequent, repeatable processes from multiple systems, applications, and services. This approach enhances efficiency and accuracy, leading to better overall performance and growth.

Harnessing the power of automation and orchestration
By connecting multiple tasks, we can immediately take on larger workflows and manage complex tasks more easily saving time and increasing efficiency, especially with data and paper pipelines. Process orchestration provides total visibility and control over the entire workflow, making automation easier to deploy, manage, and optimise. Adapting to change or refining products in complex markets requires automation and orchestration to capitalise on hidden opportunities and achieve gains.

This strategy involves thorough examination and collaboration across departments, allowing the C-suite to identify inefficiencies and implement solutions to enhance performance. By using data-driven insights, organisations can quickly connect and automate processes, leading to significant productivity gains through digital tools that reduce complexity and enhance customer and employee experiences.

What this means is using business process management (BPM) to achieve 'end-to-end' automation. To drive success in achieving growth, automation and optimisation of individual processes and tasks must be done, but also an investment is required in orchestration to connect those processes across the organisation. This translates to a digital system for managing all the work in an enterprise, whether the work is carried out by people or digital workers. In addition, insights and analytics are required along with a healthy dose of process re-imagination, to make this a reality. 

Initial cost savings and productivity improvements from automation can be reinvested into reimagining processes, fostering innovation, and developing new products and services. This approach also unlocks new avenues for revenue growth and profitability without cutting human capital expenses.

By speeding up and improving accuracy of services while ensuring humans are carrying out more strategic, interesting work, this type of repeatable enterprise-wide improvement will lead to long term success.

While orchestration and automation are the centrepiece of any growth strategy and can handle the logistical and scheduling elements, healthcare providers can spend more time facilitating patient intimacy when the patient most needs it.

People in the healthcare industry exemplify the importance of patient intimacy. A nurse, trauma doctor, or anaesthetist's primary focus isn't insurance codes and paperwork; it's helping people and finding satisfaction in making them healthy again. Healthcare workers want patients to have a good experience.

We've spent more than 12 years working with the National Benefit Service (NBS), a U.S. healthcare provider, whose goal is to simplify healthcare programs and retirement plan administration. We've helped them transition to a unified business operating model, starting with immediate chokepoints like paper flow. By fostering an automation-first culture, we matched automation processes to the customer or employee journey.

NBS went from 20 percent to 80 percent of their processes running through automation. Better patient services led to all-time high customer satisfaction scores. Now, with more than half of NBS employees using Chorus, our business process management suite, even more process transitions are planned. NBS's unique approach began with orchestration before automation, connecting processes like claims processing. This expanded into benefit onboarding, speeding up onboarding sixfold and enhancing their competitive advantage.

It's instances like this, going 'broad and deep' multiple times across the enterprise make long term growth possible. NBS is a good example that describes how workflows could be optimized through rerouting work across the business when demand spiked or when certain processes were more highly taxed. Replication is needed but so is stepping back and optimizing.

Measuring success
How do you measure success and continue to improve? Which metric do you focus on, are you doing it right, and with the right mindset? Metrics are part of the journey. Most start with cost savings, but it evolves over time with intermediate steps.

Let's be very clear, there are many business metrics, but a great long-term indicator is Net Promoter Score (NPS) improvement. It's the key indicator for securing lifetime customers as values increase. NPS measures take years to influence at a company level and time at a transactional level. Business teams need intermediate metrics to monitor performance and course correct, such as time to market, process cycle time, and accuracy.

NPS, an indicator of long-term brand and customer satisfaction, shows high scores (8-9) mean delighted customers who recommend a vendor. Achieving this score requires exceptional service and customer experience.

Embrace the mindset
Growth isn't just about hitting a number. It's about going wide and looking deep into the organisation to identify growth opportunities or customer behaviours, re-imagining processes and task management to optimise performance.

Only by embracing a process improvement mindset with end-to-end orchestration, can you then look at generating new revenue streams. Through this one simple innovation, not only can an organisation unlock better products and services, but customers also keep coming back for more as we've freed experience and support teams to deliver outstanding service.

These new revenue growth and profitability avenues aren't new, they've potentially always been there, but hidden from sight. Now they're increasing productivity that also impacts the bottom line.

Harnessing the power of automation, orchestration, and behavioural insights, enables CEOs to better chart a course toward sustainable success in an ever-changing world. And that, ultimately, is how you win the race to six percent and more.