Automation Helps the Bottomline
In the Digital Transformation era automation is crucial to an organization’s growth and success. To stay competitive today you must automate and streamline. However, there are many mistakes to avoid when tackling business process automation in your organization to ensure it is a successful and beneficial transition.
Failing to Define an Automation Strategy
Having an automation strategy is key to keeping your organization’s process automation journey from spinning out of control. Too often organizations set out to automate business processes without thinking it through or developing an organizational plan. They form teams and committees, select evident, high visibility processes and dive right in. This approach can have multiple negative consequences such as wasted hours on development time, a never-ending timeline of completion, and negative downstream effects on other processes. Most importantly, the result can be underdeveloped, poorly designed processes that may have less advantages than the original processes themselves.
Automating Too Much Too Soon
While it may make sense to automate a large portion of your organization’s business processes, doing too much too soon can have negative consequences. Overwhelming your organization with new tools and technologies is a good way to lose buy-in from your teams while also burning them out. When your organization has decided to move forward with automating processes, select a couple of early adopters that make sense and then highlight their successes. Seems obvious, but this builds momentum, gets further organizational buy-in, and permits teams to see the success allowing them to accept the new tools on their own terms.
Ignoring the end-users
Your end-users are usually the reason a process exists and how the process gets executed. They are your front-line workers that are living and breathing the processes every day, which inherently makes their input very important. While end-users are usually a part of the planning committees or brainstorming groups, they are often left behind after the strategy and planning phases have concluded. The development phase begins, and it is the architects/organizational leaders that are making assumptions or building a solution that doesn’t always meet the needs of the most important customer, your end-users.
While your internal customers may not have the necessary expertise from a development and deployment standpoint, they are crucial to getting the process right the first time and keeping it right as the process evolves. Therefore, keeping them engaged at points prior to their involvement in user acceptance testing is critical.
Missing the Bigger Picture
When starting out automating organizational processes, it is wise to identify the biggest pain points and on which to focus. However, it is also a good idea and often overlooked to evaluate where those processes fit in the bigger picture (i.e., the so called “mega processes”). Zeroing in on a process and not analyzing the bigger picture around that process can lead to scalability issues in the future. Remember, more times than not a process is usually a piece of one or more other processes that are part of the organization’s success.
Avoid the Pitfalls
Failing to define a strategy, automating too much too soon, ignoring the end users, and missing the bigger picture are all obstacles along the road to automating your business processes. Engage with Abel Solutions to avoid these pitfalls and start increasing your business productivity and profitability.
This Abel Insight written by Abel Solutions’ Jaison Barnes, Manager Business Process Automation
