In 2012, Chris Hurn and his family returned home from a vacation at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Florida. Somewhere between checkout and the drive home, his young son's stuffed giraffe, Joshie, had been left behind. That night, the boy couldn't sleep, so his father told a little white lie: Joshie was fine, he was just staying a few extra days.
Later that night, the hotel called. Joshie had been found. Hurn thanked the staff and asked if someone could take a photo of Joshie by the pool, so his story would hold up. A few days later, a package arrived. Inside was Joshie, along with a photo album. Joshie lounging by the pool. Joshie at the spa. Joshie driving a golf cart. Joshie working a shift in the hotel's loss-prevention office.
Joshie made it home, and the hotel had created something far more valuable than a resolved lost-and-found case, a story the family would tell for years.
By Every Metric, a Cost Overrun
Now imagine the same situation handled by a well-run corporate process. A lost-and-found ticket is created, the item is matched, a shipping label is printed, and the ticket is closed. Fast, compliant, measurable. Nothing about that process is wrong. It simply has no room for a photo album of a plush toy.
Measured against that process, the Ritz-Carlton underperformed. A photo shoot takes longer than a shipping label, costs more, and pulls staff away from other work. By every metric we track, the photo album was a cost overrun. Yet it is the only part of the story anyone remembers.
That is not an argument against process management. Decades of standardization and optimization, from process mining to cost-per-invoice benchmarks, have helped enterprises run reliably at a global scale. But improving the process we have is not the same as exploring the process we could have.
From Convergence to Divergence
At SAP Signavio, we want to complement continuous process improvement with something we call Process Inspiration.
Traditional process improvement is predominantly convergent. It identifies pain points and reduces waste, variation, and underperformance. Process Inspiration adds a divergent perspective. Instead of only asking how a process could perform better, it asks what else that process could make possible. What new revenue could it create? What experiences could it introduce? Where could it build trust? The answers rarely come from fixing existing problems.
Some companies have already turned such answers into new business. Uber looked at a process designed to move people and asked what else it could move. The answer was dinner: by late 2025, its delivery business generated nearly as much in gross bookings as its rides business.
Qantas spotted a different opening. A flight booking tells an airline, often before anyone else, that a customer's home is about to be empty. So, in 2017, Qantas teamed up with pet-sitting platform Mad Paws, rewarding frequent flyers for booking a sitter while they were away.
Process Inspiration isn't about cluttering processes with offers or encouraging deviation for its own sake. It's about giving the discovery of new value the same attention we already give to eliminating inefficiencies.
From Inspiration to Opportunity
Making that discovery systematic is where the research of Prof. Michael Rosemann, one of the most recognized voices in business process management, comes in. His work distinguishes three stages. First, an opportunity type is an abstract pattern of potential value. Second, an opportunity point is where that possibility becomes relevant in a specific business process. And third, an opportunity case is one where it has been sufficiently contextualized and evaluated to justify an experiment.
Think back to Joshie. Creating emotional reassurance is an opportunity type. Finding a child's forgotten toy is an opportunity point. Designing a personalized return experience with appropriate discretion, resources, and boundaries presents an opportunity case. The objective isn't to mandate photo albums for every lost item. It is to make the underlying opportunity systematically discoverable.
When Ideas Become Cheap
AI changes the economics of inspiration in two ways. Discovery becomes systematic: rather than waiting for a spark of creativity, companies can test opportunity types such as Uber's process generalization or Qantas' first-data advantage against every process they run. And delivery becomes personal: instead of a single offer at a single step for everyone, an opportunity can be recognized in each customer's context.
At SAP Signavio, we have always treated process management as a discipline that deserves research, not just software. That is why we're excited to explore this future together with Prof. Rosemann, who is spending his sabbatical with us studying the shift from convergent to divergent process management. An early prototype is already available in our SAP Signavio Lab Space, with pilot customers helping us shape its development.
When ideas become cheap, judgment becomes the bottleneck. We want to help companies separate genuinely novel and relevant opportunities from ideas that are already business as usual, strategically misaligned, or simply unrealistic. The goal is to make Process Inspiration part of the broader transformation lifecycle, from understanding how processes perform today to discovering, evaluating, and testing what they could make possible tomorrow.
The Giraffe Was Not an Accident
The Ritz-Carlton was the first service company to win America's highest award for quality, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, twice.
It also had built a system for the moments no process could script. A database of guest preferences helped staff notice what mattered. Every employee could spend up to $2,000 to make things right for a guest, without asking permission. The $2,000 was not generosity. Co-founder Horst Schulze estimated that a loyal guest was worth about $200,000 over a lifetime. And in a short daily meeting at every property, staff shared stories of exceptional service, so one moment in one hotel could teach employees everywhere.
AI can now help companies build exactly these kinds of systems, not for one resort, but across thousands of customer moments. The future of process management is ready when a giraffe turns up.
We are just getting started. In an upcoming post, we will show the kinds of opportunities our prototype already surfaces, from an insurer that turns a claim payout into a platform for follow-on services to an AI-enabled, low-cost variant for price-sensitive customers.
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With special thanks to Lukas N.P. Egger and Prof. Dr. Michael Rosemann for their input and the discussions that helped sharpen this piece.
References:
- A few days later, a package arrived. Inside was Joshie, along with a photo album. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hotel-customer-service-2012_b_2334696
- By late 2025, Uber's delivery business generated nearly as much in gross bookings as its rides business. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260204947622/en/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2025
- In 2017, Qantas teamed up with pet-sitting platform Mad Paws, rewarding frequent flyers for booking a sitter. https://www.travelweekly.com.au/article/qantas-gets-behind-travellers-and-their-pets/ and https://www.madpaws.com.au/blog/qantas-partnership/
- The Ritz-Carlton was the first service company to win America's highest award for quality, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, twice. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/1999/11/two-manufacturers-two-service-companies-win-1999-baldrige-awards
- Every employee could spend up to $2,000 to make things right for a guest. Co-founder Horst Schulze estimated that a loyal guest was worth about $200,000 over a lifetime. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/?p=18376
- In a short daily meeting at every property, staff shared stories of exceptional service.
https://customerthink.com/data_nothing_personal_ritz_carlton/