Why Flowstate
We’ve spent our careers in process analysis, design, improvement and automation. In that time, we’ve watched a cottage industry of management and operations enthusiasts grow into a substantial body of research, business knowledge and software. Today it can fairly be called Process Science.
But it hasn’t matured evenly. Process mining can now tell us, from the facts, how an existing process really runs. Yet we still have few tools for imagining and designing the processes we need next, and notations like BPMN alone aren’t enough.
Nor is there an accepted way to tame the “state-space explosion” of modern processes. The usual shortcuts make diagrams easier to read, but they hide boundary conditions and leave things out. Two of them are splitting a process into trivial sub-processes and excluding low volume complexity, modelling only the “happy path”.
The result is that the business people best placed to shape future operations are left out of designing them. What’s missing is a practical, general-purpose way to design business processes, one that turns the science into an engineering discipline. As AI enters design, that matters more than ever.
We see this as a problem of method, modelling and tooling. It’s felt most in the large service sectors: finance, healthcare and public services. Manufacturing, architecture and product design faced similar challenges, and solved them with standards, methods, ontologies and tools such as CAD/CAM. The precedent is there.
We intend to lead by example, bring together a like-minded community, and offer pragmatic solutions to these remaining industry challenges.