Interview with 2019 BPC Gold Winner Khoa Cao: “The best way to learn is learning from real time examples.”

Today, we are starting a series of interviews with the winners of 2019 Business Process Championship.

The first in the series with the winning process is Khoa Cao, a BPM Consultant at Couture Consulting, who created a credit card acquisition process. The business process he submitted intends to help incorporate relevant departments and systems. Also, it is aimed at improving velocity of the whole process while partially automating appraisal process to enhance performance and efficiency of appraisal team.

Bpm’online asked Khoa Cao about winning the championship and challenges he faced while designing his business process.

Hi Khoa, congratulations on your win! Have you ever participated in a competition similar to the 2019 Business Process Championship?

I have participated in some RPA contests (http://vincixgroup.com) but not BPM. Actually, this is the first and only competition regarding BPM that I (accidentally) could find online.

You designed the credit card acquisition process. Tell us more about it. What problem does it address and who can benefit from it the most?

There are three main issues in traditional credit card acquisition process: process time, human mistakes and the lack of transparency. My process focuses on resolving the mentioned problems by:

• Providing internal staff from different departments with a single environment to work on. This helps terminating transition time between systems.
• Consolidating and digitizing applications from all front-end channels into BPM. This helps de-duplicating application.
• Automating basic credit appraising and scoring to filter in-eligible application. This helps decreasing appraiser's mistake due to overload.
• Tracking application status that make the whole process transparent to customers (we can control how much information to expose), thus, improving interaction with customers.

With all that said, the customer benefits the most due to a faster and more transparent process.

What’s your preferred way of building business processes?

Firstly, I would like to capture the "AS IS" process at the beginning using the domain language and SIPOC tool. Secondly, modeling the captured process using a BPMN language on a diagram. Finally, I keep improving the diagram by identifying pain points until all stakeholders agree that it is comprehensive and good enough for its first release.

What would you advise to people who are building a business process for the first time?

You need to get familiar with terminologies in the domain that you want to build the process. You should not try to build a perfect process at the beginning because improving is a major step in BPM life cycle. Instead, make sure all stakeholders clearly understand the process and let real-time business cases tell you what to improve.

What was the most difficult part in designing your business process?

Dealing with exceptionsis the most difficult part when designing a process. For instance, with VIP customers – some companies would like to give them a special treat by skipping some steps in the process to instantly get them on-board.

Which bpm’online studio free feature was the most helpful in the process?

Exporting to various document types is the lifesaver in my opinion. It saves me a ton of time. I wish it could export to MS Word so I can edit it or copy its content to other formatted documents.

Do you find Studio Free easy to use?

Yes, it is a nice and intuitive tool. I was surprised that it is free. It took me no time to get used to and release my first process. 

To whom would you recommend bpm’online studio free?

It is suitable for any process builder, business user, BPMN learner due to its lightweight. 

Which business processes are you planning to design in the future?

If I have a chance to choose what process to design, I will pick a process in the health care industry. The first benefit I can recognize is that we can rid of ... doctor's handwriting :-D

How difficult is it to learn designing good business processes? What is the best way to learn?

Good knowledge in the particular domain of the process you plan to design is very difficult to get in a short time. The best way to learn is learning from real-time examples.