Automating a process isn’t a quick fix. Before introducing new workflow technology into your workplace, you should evaluate whether your existing processes align with your business needs.
Making your business more efficient through automated workflow technology sounds simple. But with so many vendors out there, it’s easy to pick the flashiest product without realizing it’s not the right fit for your organization’s needs. Before you automate a process – and long before you purchase a technological tool – you need to understand your company’s needs and current technology environment.
How to Automate a Process
1. Fix your current processes.
Many vendors claim their products can meet all your workflow and process automation needs. Of course, that’s not true. When you decide to purchase a product to automate a process without considering your current processes and technology solutions, you’ll automate blindly. And automating a bad process means you’ll only get bad — or at least inefficient — results faster.
Instead, look at your current processes with a critical eye. For example, earlier in my career, I managed a customer onboarding process in which we sent tasks sequentially from Team A to Team B to Team C. This process was in place for years, and it survived the migration from paper forms passed around the office to spreadsheets attached to emails. But before we purchased other tools to automate processes, such as Power Apps, my team and I decided to spend some time getting a better understanding of the process.
By doing this, we discovered Team B would often forward their email from Team A to Team C without looking at the attachment themselves. Team B thought reviewing Team A’s attachment was a low priority in a tedious process. After speaking with Team B, we agreed that Team A could send the email directly to Team C, eliminating an unnecessary process step in the new automated solution.
While this is a simplistic example, if my team and I had not considered this process before seeking a technological solution, we would have included this waste, forcing the unnecessary step with technology resulting in longer lead times.
2. Evaluate Exceptions
Processes with exceptions can hold up automation. Often, companies try to build all their exceptions into their automated solution. However, it’s better to understand the root causes of these exceptions so you can eliminate as many of them as possible.
For example, a company’s expense reimbursement program might generate several exceptions. Some employees might be missing receipts. Others might accidentally submit something twice. Still, others might have made large purchases that require several approvals. Finding a way to streamline as many of these exceptions as possible will ensure easy automation.
3. Choose the Right Process Optimization Technology Solutions
While you evaluate your processes and remove unnecessary steps, you can begin to examine the technology solutions available to you. Before you proceed to automate the process, consider these three areas.
In-House Tools
Before looking for new solutions, consider what you already have. Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics, offer workflow components. Working with multiple automated workflow tools that don’t interact with each other can be challenging.
If you can select a master workflow system or find another way to bind your existing systems together, you may not need to invest in another workflow solution.
This approach won’t work in all cases (legacy mainframe platforms, too many in-house tools), which could lead to the need to consider new tools altogether.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the hot topics out there today, and for good reason: this function is often an excellent solution for those mundane, “swivel-chair” activities that seem to be the bane of everyone’s existence. RPA automates processes using bots to mimic human actions, such as entering data and performing calculations. If your business needs don’t require full end-to-end process automation, RPA might help fill in the gaps, replicating routine, repeatable and rules-based tasks.
Within RPA, there are two types of bots. Attended bots assist human workers by automating specific tasks in their workflow, helping them complete tasks faster and more efficiently. Unattended bots work in the background autonomously, reducing bottlenecks by handling repetitive processes and scheduled tasks.
Both attended and unattended bots knock out tasks, decrease cycle times and bridge integration gaps. However, RPA is not the solution for everything, especially if your tasks are constantly changing, neither routine, repeatable nor rules-based.
Business Process Management
Business process management is a systematic approach that helps organizations (BPM) understand, automate, monitor and improve workflows. By interacting with back-end systems, BPM solutions provide greater visibility into your end-to-end business processes and allow you to manage people, data and applications in one place. Through automation and collaboration, BPM tools solve problems and offer system integrations and process metrics.
Traditionally, BPM solutions have been human-centric, document-centric or integration-centric. Human-centric solutions improve user interfaces and task management programs to improve collaboration and efficiency among employees. Document-centric solutions automate processes on documents, from creation to sharing to approvals. Integration-centric solutions facilitate data exchange and workflow coordination on different platforms to create a coherent workflow experience. However, the lines have become more blurred as the products continue to mature.
A good BPM solution helps resolve process-related problems through visibility, collaboration and automation – but only if it is the right solution for your business needs. Without well-defined processes and the proper definition within the overall system architecture, a BPM solution becomes lost in the plethora of great tools that do not provide value to your organization.
Final Thoughts
Your company’s internal technology solutions are only as strong as your processes. To determine whether a process is worth keeping, consider how it aligns with your organization and whether you can make it stronger.
Once you understand what needs improvement, you can explore the technology solutions that align with your goals. By taking these steps, you can create a more efficient company ready to take on its competitors and serve its customers.
Join enterprise automation experts to learn the benefits of combining complementary RPA and BPM software engines to help your organization save time and money.
