Companies nowadays are always in search of how to be effective in their operations, reduce costs, and become more efficient. The best way to attain this is through the automation of processes.
Process automation lets businesses free their employees from repetitive and time-consuming tasks in a bid to allow them to concentrate on other valuable activities, improve accuracies and consistencies, and drive productivity in general. However, not all processes are equally suitable for automation.
In this blog, let’s look at the steps in understanding how to identify business processes that have the potential to be automated, keeping criteria in mind like high volume, repetitive tasks, and rule-based decision-making.
Step 1: Map Out Your Business Processes
The initial thing for identifying processes appropriate for automation is to detail comprehensively your business processes. It means documenting all tasks, activities, and workflows forming part of your operations, from customer onboarding and order fulfillment to financial reporting and HR management.
- Functional Areas: Show the main functional areas of your business.
- Sales: Break down the constituent processes and subprocesses of this functional area, showing input, output, and stakeholders for each.
- Marketing
- Finance
- Operations
Step 2: Study Process Characteristics
With a clear view of your business processes, the next thing would be to analyze its characteristics to be able to determine those that will apply to automation. Here are some of the key criteria for your analysis:
High Volume and High Frequency
Processes characterized by high transaction volumes or repetitive implementation work well with automation. For example, maybe your business needs to process a very large number of invoices or generate hundreds of reports per day. Automating them will save a lot of time and resources and is bound to enhance the accuracy and consistency of those processes.
Repetitive and Standardized Tasks
Repetitive standardized processes are also good candidates for automation. These processes are typically the same set of actions performed based on definite rules and ways of doing things, thereby lending themselves to software or robotic process automation (RPA) devices. Examples include data entry, file management, and email processing.
Rule-Based Decision Making
This also works in processes involving rule-based decisions, whereby the outcome provides a list of criteria or conditions. Business rules can be encoded in automation to ascertain that business decisions are made consistently and accurately without human involvement. Examples of such processes are credit approvals, fraud detection, and compliance checks.
Low Rates of Exceptions
As hinted before, also processes characterized by low exception rates are good candidates for automation, as with these the majority of cases can be covered by a standard set of rules or procedures. It may be true that some exceptions will require human intervention, but the automatization of the bulk of the process can still deliver an important efficiency gain and cost savings.
Step 3: Study of Feasibility and ROI on Automation
After you have found some of the aforementioned process characteristics, you need to assess them for the feasibility of automation and ROI potential.
Among the factors to consider are:
- Technical Feasibility: Can the process be automated with existing technology or tools, or will the development have to be from scratch?
- Integration needs: How will an automated process be integrated with other systems and workflows, and what data sources will it be required to tap into?
- Implementation cost: What is the up-front cost to automate the process, including software licenses, hardware, and personnel?
- Ongoing maintenance: What will the ongoing maintenance and updating costs be for the automated process, and how are they going to be handled?
- Business Impact: How will the process automation impact critical business performance measures — cycle time, error rates, and customer satisfaction?
Thus, by finding processes with automation potentials, businesses can put in place processes for automation, based on their possible impacts, and with proper analysis of feasibility and ROI, making sure they invest in the right solutions that can deliver the highest value.
Step 4: Build an Automation Roadmap
Finally, when you have identified the most important processes to be automated, a roadmap has to be developed for the same. Such a plan will detail the steps to be followed in the automation of each process and the resources and timelines involved, and identify the benefits and outcomes that could be expected.
The automation roadmap should also include change management, user training, and ongoing monitoring and optimization. Key engagement with a range of stakeholders during the process and clear communication about the benefits it will yield can help assure businesses of a smooth and successful transition to the automated future.
Conclusion
Process automation is a powerful tool that helps businesses optimize operations, cut costs, and drive efficiency. The steps above will allow companies to identify those business processes that can be automated and to lay out an automation roadmap in a manner that provides value and ROI.
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A small business struggling to get its operations streamlined, or an enterprise that is set to embark on a huge digital transformation, ExpertEase AI will prepare you for success with the right tools and experience. Be assured that with us and our automation experts, software engineers, and industry consultants, you’ve got the experience to help you implement this solution to work for and with you to effectively guarantee maximum ROI.
So why wait? Sign up for your free account with ExpertEase AI today to help you understand how you can go about automating your business processes. You will have at your fingertips a user-friendly platform, state-of-the-art resources, and strong support for identification and automation of your mission-critical processes, to save costs, increase efficiency, and grow
