Automate Your Business: An Introduction to Enterprise Automation Maturity
What is Enterprise Automation?
Businesses need better ways to manage their tasks, just like they need better ways to manage their gardens. Nearly every company uses something like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to solve big, common tasks like raking leaves or mowing the lawn. But small, manual, custom tasks pile up.
Many of our clients have dozens of jobs available to accomplish these tasks, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to fill them. It's not sustainable to do it systematically. Think about enterprise automation. This is a concept that is becoming more popular as companies are no longer content to hire people for manual work. Enterprise automation is a way to fill the automation gaps that are not yet automated in ERP, CRM, billing and billing programs, or other applications.
Technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) and low-code or no-code platforms called business process management software (BPMS) enable enterprise automation. This blog series explores the differences and advantages of RPA, BPM, and other enterprise automation solutions. Taking advantage of fully enabled enterprise automation first requires planning.
4 Steps to Achieving Enterprise Automation Maturity
To achieve enterprise automation maturity, which is the long-term goal of eliminating manual tasks, you need to:
- Identify processes and pain points in a cross-functional workshop that asks the following questions. What do you do and what do you think: “There must be a better way?” Where do you usually spend your time? What is taking too long and not allowed?
- Process Re-engineering – We always encourage our customers to take a process-oriented approach to solving pain points. The solution is as simple as redesigning the process.
- RPA – Easily automate tasks such as retrieving data from applications, reformatting spreadsheets, merging tabs, and sending email reminders. BPM – BPM is better suited than his RPA when the process requires human intervention (human-in-the-loop), such as approvals, decisions, reviews, interactions with external customers, starting or stopping processes, business rules, etc. There is a possibility that BPM can also interact directly with process documentation tools, allowing well-documented process flows to be uploaded and implemented relatively quickly.
Data Solutions – One of the most common pain points I hear in workshops is multiple systems generating daily reports that employees manually consolidate, format and email to management It is necessary. Ideally, a data warehouse receives data from all systems in real time and has a visualization platform on top of it that enables executives and managers to act on the data in real time.
AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) – About 90% of today's data is unstructured. AI/ML tools are very good at handling this data and can interact directly with RPA/BPM tools. Existing Systems/Applications - Your current technology stack may already contain the solution you need. Invite your IT leaders to the workshop so you can align the desired automation with the current capabilities of your application. In many cases you don't even need to change your coding.
Awareness and training. Create an Automation Center of Excellence (COE) or Tiger team to prioritize processes and solutions, align developers, and set timelines. Many companies have established RPA-COEs that can mature to see other tools as solutions. One of the next posts in this series will discuss how to build or mature an automation COE. Use the inputs during the workshop to build a business case, quantify hard savings, identify soft savings and business trends such as: Another consideration is that in 10 years, enterprise automation will be the norm, just as Excel and ERP software are the norm today. Soon this will be table stakes.
Some soft or qualitative savings to keep in mind:
- Lead time: downstream process advantage
- Compliance: Costs and penalties for non-compliance
- Data Accuracy: Validation and Rework Costs
- Employee Satisfaction: Morale Impact
- Risk mitigation: Liability for human error
- Customer Satisfaction: Improving Customer Experience
- Labor pool availability: Reduces hiring needs.
Final thoughts
His four steps above depend on your automation maturity. Keep in mind that enterprise automation maturity is not always a linear path. Maybe he's just starting out and looking at a new low-code tool to do a POC, or maybe he's in his 4th year doing an RPA-COE. This series explores the next stage of maturity.
- Establishment and further development of an automated COE
- Scaling with process automation tools
- The next step to hyperautomation