To reap the full benefits of automation, businesses must have an effective automation plan in place. In this article, experts recommend some excellent ways to kickstart your automation journey and stay ahead of the curve.
Automation increases staff productivity, streamlines activities, saves time and money and provides higher efficiency, error reduction, and better uniformity, among other benefits. However, in order to reap these benefits, businesses must properly comprehend the automation process. Let’s take a look at how you may get started with automation and improve your digital corporate culture.
Businesses worldwide are exploring ways to automate their manual processes to drive efficiency, attain greater ROI and achieve digital transformation. According to new market research commissioned by IBM, worldwide AI usage has consistently increased over the last year, reaching 35% of those surveyed in 2022, indicating that the adoption of AI is set to further escalate as it continues to evolve, becoming more accessible and simpler to deploy.
In this article, we gauge expert insights on how businesses can effectively commence on their automation journeys and stay ahead of the curve in the coming years.
Ways To Kickstart Your Automation Journey
The automation process needs research, preparation, and enough communication, paving the way for higher productivity and seamless and streamlined workflows that reduce human errors. Let’s have a look at the best ways to start your automation journey.
Identify, evaluate, prepare, choose, and implement
Identify: According to Anjan Pathak, CTO and co-founder, Vantage Circle, the first step of automation is identifying the process and areas of automation. For instance, some departments are showing low productivity, and some tasks are time-consuming, creating issues at your back office. Thus, once you’ve identified the issue, you can target your automation accordingly regarding specific departments.
“Also, while you’re identifying the issues and the need for automation in the said department, you must consider the business case for each. After all, everything does not require digitization. Thus, choose wisely.”
Evaluate: The second step Pathak suggests to consider is to evaluate your chosen departments and issues. You must identify the problems associated with your current workflows.
“So, analyze the process and look for issues, inefficiencies, and irregularities. This is important because automation cannot fix broken workflows. And rather, it will act the way you want it to act.”
Secondly, you must evaluate the risks of implementing an automated system and ways to mitigate those risks, he says. Risks involve security issues, disruption, and the impact of anxiety. If your automation tool is meant to hold sensitive and confidential data, you must start evaluating them immediately.
Prepare: You’re now slowly approaching the main step, which is prepping – states Pathak. “Once you’ve identified the issues, departments, needs, and risks of automation, you can start preparing for your automation solution. You can start by reducing the risks you’ve identified until the benefits of automation overpower them.”
Communicate with your team how new roles and responsibilities will unfold. Once that is done, you must emphasize the training and help team members understand the process. This is a way to tell people that automation is not taking your job away.
– Anjan Pathak, CTO and co-founder, Vantage Circle
Here, you can change your management plan slightly to take your employees’ confidence.
Choose: If you followed the first steps of business automation, you’d land up at this stage.” Pathak adds. “There are many options available. If you’re looking for an employee engagement platform with digital R&R and employee feedback and HR functions, there are options like Vantage Circle’s AIRe framework, Bamboo HR, etc.”
It depends on which products “suit your needs the best and which will benefit you more” considering your business needs.
According to him, you can also choose to build your own automation system. “Yes, this is a valid option. All you need is a good team of front-end developers, product design, UI/UX and design team, and an amazing content team. If this is not feasible, you can look for a third-party or outsourcing option.”
Make sure you develop or build an automation system that caters to both employees and your end-users. Check for vendor track records, privacy, and security to mitigate other risks.
– Anjan Pathak, CTO and co-founder, Vantage Circle
Implementation: After all the research, preparation, risk assessment, and choosing the right automation solution, you’re finally ready to implement. This is where, Pathak thinks, you start to understand the process, where it needs improvement and its best practices.
“When using it for the first time, start small. Do not go overboard. It is always better to use an easy and small bit to recognize the areas of improvement and risks. This will allow you to test the water and give necessary feedback to the service provider on what system integration needs to be done. This will also not hamper major and regular workflows. The initial implementation is always a trial and error method”
Once all the amendments are done, you can use the automation system satisfactorily for a seamless working and employee experience, he adds.
Ensure security compliance and developer productivity
The software development life cycle (SDLC) and pipeline continue to operate at a faster speed as organizations push for new products and updates. Eric Tan, CIO at Coupa, thinks that oftentimes, security isn’t included until the end of the process but it should be incorporated throughout the software life cycle. “Developer teams can leverage automation by building security code within the SDLC to ensure compliance.”
Automated security elements and automatic testing within the SDLC allow developers to focus on other important areas within their roles such as innovation and research.
– Eric Tan, CIO, Coupa
Additionally, considering the technical talent gap, teams can rely on automation to assist with tasks that traditionally required more people and save time for more strategic work that supports ongoing business growth.
Real-time visibility into value chain data
Leaders across organizations, including those in finance, supply chain, and especially IT, need visibility into data in order to make important and informed decisions. Tan believes that automation can help businesses be more agile and efficient when data is available in real-time through syncing data in a cloud platform that is easily accessible to all departments. “Even at our company, we track and share progress on our strategic ESG initiatives due to our commitment to advancing sustainable business practices,” adds Tan. One of the metrics, Tan says, their company uses is tracking the carbon footprint closely and measuring its impact. “Our IT priorities are driven by the real-time feedback we receive from a variety of different data points including the activities of the 1.5M users on our community platform and feedback from 8M users on our supplier network”.
Back office financial readiness
With the economy in flux, organizations can use this time to get their finances in order using automation, advises Tan. “The possibility of IPOs may be on hold for now, but many finance teams are still utilizing paper checks, lock boxes, and cash receipts instead of automating invoicing or using virtual cards.” Automation allows individuals in the finance department to have more free time to focus on more strategic work, he says. “By digitizing all their documents for ease and security, finance departments are more efficient and can be prepared for audits and IPOs when the time comes.”
See More: Automation Is Key for Businesses In 2022; Here’s How To Implement It the Right Way
Improve HCM systems
Tan also suggests that human capital management (HCM) systems is an area CIOs can improve efficiency with automation. “CIOs are now involved in other aspects of the business providing strategic counsel beyond just IT infrastructure, including people operations. Manual HR tasks take hours to complete and for larger organizations, those tasks have to be automated in order to scale and meet the demands of new hire growth. “At our company as well, we up-leveled our learning and development system so employees all over the world can have access to ways to improve their skills, which ultimately results in happier, more fulfilled employees.”
Scalable customer service experiences
Using automation to improve the customer experience enables organizations to successfully scale their operations. Tan notes, “Enterprise tools such as self-service help articles, chatbots, and customer relationship management platforms use automation to answer common questions and solve issues.”
The significant uptick of conversational data available since the start of the pandemic has “allowed us to accelerate the training of our ML models. This has enabled our chatbots to help our customers find a resolution and troubleshoot before any interaction with a human. “Customer service teams can increase their levels of productivity, provide more personalized service, and focus on other priority business processes that increase customer satisfaction. They can also help more people with automation tools rather than getting sidetracked with manual tasks that require more context and time to resolve.”
Take small steps
Lekshmanan believes that like any journey, the critical step for adopting automation is to “begin with the end in mind” and “take small steps.”
Before they commence their automation journey, Lekshmanan says, companies should start by answering the following questions:
- Why is this important, and what is this going to achieve?
- What will success look like?
- Who are the stakeholders, and do you have their buy-in?
- Another critical question is – ‘Does it affect any workforce? How will the talent be repurposed if it does to anyone in the workforce?’
Like any other journey, before getting onto how and investing in tools that you might get stuck into, it is better to – design low-cost experiments that demonstrate early wins and then arrive at a roadmap for completing the automation journey.
– Zunder Lekshmanan, CTO, OpenTurf
Besides, the focus on tools should be not “What’s best available in the market” but “What’s best for me.” This is because automation solves problems that are specific to a company’s objectives and processes, adds Lekshmanan.
“To reiterate, the most important aspects are the ‘Why’ and ‘What.’ Companies have to be wary of players in the market who try to jump to ‘How.’ However, that is a false start, as ‘How’ is generally a function of economics and not a company’s business goals. Automation projects have to begin with the end in mind to yield tangible outcomes.”
In conclusion
If you follow these small yet significant steps, you’re on your way to kickstart your business automation journey. But remember, every process or department does not require automation, and some jobs are best done handmade. “Use your automation process according to your needs and decide what information it stores. Designate a set of people to look after sensitive data and conduct necessary training for usage,” concludes Pathak.
