Two birds with one stone:  SaaS application design and business process reengineering

The goal of business process reengineering (BPR) is to redesign how an organization conducts business in order to improve critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed.  A company can spend a great deal of money on consultants to develop an implementable BPR retooling plan. But if you are are migrating your application to SaaS, BPR can be a natural “by-product” of the user interface/application design process.

Typically, application design and UI are viewed as a medium to access a software’s functionality. But optimizing the user interface for a SaaS or business application is not simply about enhancing usability. The UI is also the tangible part of business process itself.  The way a user interacts with the application should tightly map to the workflow and business objectives.  Streamlining and validating the application UI necessarily means streamlining and validating the business process.

For example, Catalyst was tasked with the redesign for the UI of a bond trading application that handled billions of dollars in securities a year. As part of the application design, we re-evaluated the real-world workflow corresponding to the business scenarios of trading bonds. We worked with stakeholders to identify the business objectives and map the existing process. By focusing on high value scenarios and applying the right conceptual models as a foundation for the UI, we were able to not only streamline the number applications screens,  but also could help the firm streamline the process in the real world. (i.e BPR).

Importantly, the user-validation techniques we applied to the UI, could also be applied to the change in business processes. With UI and processes tightly coupled, we could iteratively refine both to quickly achieve meaningful business enhancements.

The factors that drive companies to understake BPR - addressing inefficiencies. improving customer service, streamlining processes to cut costs, or improving reporting and analysis are also the by-products of well-designed user interface and application design. This is particularly true in the design of SaaS applications, where the focus is on providing a service and addressing the full customer life cycle.