Discover How Automation Assessments Can Improve Your Processes
"A lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires."
- Bill Gates
In today's competitive market, you cannot afford to have inefficient processes—as the business grows and production scales, efficiency begins to drop. The financial impacts of these inefficient processes have a cascading effect.
Businesses are counting on automation strategies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and scale quickly.
A global survey by McKinsey showed that 66% of business leaders from a cross-section of industries were piloting solutions to automate at least one business process.
With the right automation strategy software, businesses can now achieve a reduction in errors rate, design speedier workflows, and find easier ways to manage and measure business processes. And speedy, efficient processes are the way forward for successfully meeting business requirements and corporate goals and achieving customer delight.
There are many repetitive tasks in the AP or finance department, such as record-keeping, book entries, invoicing, and budgeting. These become prime targets for automation, freeing up time and mind space for finance teams. Automation also leaves CFOs more time to focus on strategic tasks, such as mitigating risk and predicting future financial outcomes.
How do you know if your business needs automation?
Do you often wonder whether you've sufficiently automated your business processes?
Let's look at some signs that show your company should consider process automation:
Are your team's actions often misaligned with the organization's strategic objectives?
Are there gaps in communication between departments that lead to missed steps in a workflow or delays and bottlenecks in completing a process?
Are the processes in your organization not standardized? This can lead to mistakes, waste, and rework.
Are your managers making decisions based on intuition alone? Your company will miss out in terms of competitive advantage.
If you answer yes to several of these, your organization must evaluate their readiness for process automation.
What is a Process Automation Assessment?
Process automation assessment refers to a detailed analysis of your organizational processes in order to discover, qualify and articulate processes that are ripe for automation.
An automation assessment is one of the few first steps to automating your business processes.
Some processes can exist in organizations for decades without being critically assessed. Therefore, before you try and automate, it's imperative that you step back and take fresh look at your current process.
McKinsey estimates that, in about 60% of occupations, at least one-third of workday activities could be automated.
However, you must carefully evaluate which processes qualify for automation and to what extent they can be successfully automated for measurable benefits.
One of the top three reasons why organizations fail in scaling their automation initiatives is that they choose the wrong processes to automate or don't know which processes will create the most impact if automated.
A successful organization doesn't automate just because the process is repetitive or mundane—but instead builds an informed strategy with measurable outcomes.
According to Waleed Kadous, Head of Engineering at Anyscale: "It is important to choose automation projects that have measurable benefits, especially at the beginning."
Choosing which processes to automate is a vital step. Therefore, a formal automation assessment is essential in all digital transformation initiatives.
Do you need a third-party service provider to conduct an automation assessment?
There are many benefits to using a professional business process consulting company to do automation assessments for your organization.
If you use an inexperienced team to carry out an assessment or do it in-house without the necessary expertise, there is a high risk of automating processes that do not provide the right benefits or, even worse, finding out later that the process you have selected cannot be automated for some reason.
Business process management consultants articulate a comprehensive objective and use a structured methodology to identify the right processes. Their focus is to provide an automation framework while avoiding any technology bias.
For example, not everything can be solved by RPA or automated workflows. A combination of technologies often results in leveraging the maximum benefit of automation.
The objectives of automation assessments
Identify processes that are good candidates for automation
Rate or rank the processes for automation
Estimate effort and schedule
Articulate the business case with benefits, ROI projections and budget considerations.
Benefits of implementing business process automation
Process automation tools deliver an array of benefits to an organization of any size:
Streamlined workflows
Decreased costs
Increased collaboration
Enhanced agility
Maximized efficiency
Improved compliance
Are you ready to automate your business processes to leverage these benefits? But there's one more important step before you implement process automation —and that is to consider the impact of automation on people within the organization, manage their expectations and remove any apprehensions in employees' minds.
Aligning your automation strategy with your people policies
"The best automation approaches make existing employees feel like they've been given a superpower."
- Waleed Kadous, Head of Engineering at Anyscale
Mundane work makes employees feel like machines and leads to burnout and turnover—explains Puneet Mehta, CEO of AI company Netomi. But when they are empowered with automation, they can focus on higher-level tasks, and their satisfaction levels rise.
However, many employees have negative associations with the term 'automation.' A survey by PwC across 32500 respondents revealed that 60% of employees worry that automation is putting many jobs at risk. That's why providing transparency around the automation initiative is important to decrease the fear that automation will replace jobs.
Your employees are the key to successfully implementing your carefully crafted automation strategy.
CXOs and managers must put to rest their employees' apprehensions about automation and articulate policies to support administrative workers whose jobs may be affected by automation. For example, re-assigning such workers to other departments or more value-added functions will benefit workers and the organization.
Your roadmap for success in your automation journey
Does your organization have a well-defined automation strategy?
A systematic approach to process automation follows these key steps:
Identify functional areas of operations that will benefit from automation.
Create detailed SOPs that clearly define each process that is to be automated.
Prioritize the areas or processes to automate based on the measurable impact they will potentially have on customer experience or the operational improvements they will create.
Ask Revolution Data Systems for an automation assessment today.
RDS automation assessments: Some use cases
Let's look at two use cases for third-party automation assessments:
Example 1: Finance & HR processes
We identify key process areas of improvement in your Finance & HR departments. These may be repetitive or mission-critical tasks currently being performed by your staff, such as entering, reviewing and validating data from paper documents. We can automate invoice payables & approvals processes and HR tasks, leveraging our workflow automation solution, AppEnhancerr.
Example 2: Document management
A document controller typically manages document digitization and routing on a daily basis. Once repetitive processes are automated, the document controller can be re-assigned to performing more value-added tasks such as:
Using workflows to expedite document routing
Manage documents across their lifecycle
Review and apply retention policies for legacy documents to support the company's paper-based processes.
RDS: Process automation to scale efficiently, optimize costs, & improve your business bottom line
We help your organization develop and implement an automation strategy across departments and technologies, capturing and ingesting documents with document capture software and mapping out and diagnosing any problems in your current workflows.
We deploy best-in-class document management solutions such as OpenText AppEnhancer to manage data and documents and set the stage for your automation initiatives.
Our Business Process Management consultants analyze your business processes end-to-end by modeling how they work in different scenarios, executing improvements, monitoring the improved processes, and continually tweaking them for optimal results.
Our approach includes high-level planning for implementing automation strategies, starting with the assessment and selection process.
We work closely with all key stakeholders in the automation journey, including CTOs, CIOs, business heads and hands-on platform users and administrators. Our advice and recommendations help organizations demystify process automation and overcome challenges and negative perceptions of automation.
Contact RDS for process automation assessments, consultancy, and workflow automation solutions.