Reasons to Automate Business Processes in Your Organization

Since the days of the automaton, workers have been searching for ways to automate the manual business processes that steal time from more important jobs. Communicating with colleagues, manipulating spreadsheets, entering customer information into a CRM... these are all examples of time-consuming manual processes that can be done better and faster by someone (or something) other than you (no offense).

If your idea of fun is copying and pasting text all day then by all means, continue doing what you're doing. Your competitors will love that. But we've got some thoughts on why you should at least consider automating business processes in your organization. Here are a few.

Reason 1: To Err is Human. It's Also Expensive.

In a compilation of error rates by business task*, as reported by studies over the last 30 years or so, error rates for medication prescriptions were found to exceed 1.6%. Data entry error rates for expert typists ranged as high as 6%. In general, the human mechanical (I.e. by hand) error rate for data entry tasks is 0.5%. Seems small at first, but what if you're entering order data from 100 online transactions into your CRM? Or, if you're compiling stock performance for 100 different mutual funds from an online investment website? What if you're changing prescription doses for 100 patients? That's 5 errors that have the potential to cost you money and maybe lives. You can expect to make 5 errors per 100 records any time you're manually changing information. The fun part is: You'll never know which records or pieces of data will be wrong. Get yourself an automated solution that enters and changes data for you automatically, and you'll never have to worry about data errors again.

Reason 2: Have Time to Kill? Neither Do I.

Here's the great thing about never making an error: You don't need to waste time fixing them. If you're lucky enough to catch an error (see #1 above), and it's a critical one, you'll need to go back and do the job again. In some industries like health insurance, where the cost of a reprocessed claim is 4 times that of one that gets approved the first time, that rework time can be a killer

Think of an automation software solution like a "digital employee" - someone who basically does the most unpleasant parts of your job for you so that you're free to do other things. Digital Employees generally work faster than humans in most web or Windows applications, so more gets done faster without rework. Even if it DIDN'T work faster, you'd still be free to perform other tasks while your software solution did all the typing, copying, and pasting. Automation basically returns 100% of the time spent on manual business process back to you so that you can go serve customers, win business, or take a vacation.

Reason 3: It's Easier Than You Think.

A good automation software solution can be installed and put to work inside of a few hours. Sure, there are some solutions out there that require coding or programming to operate, but the kind you're looking for can be "taught" to perform tasks simply by clicking and dragging your mouse to objects on the screen. The software should then present you with a narrow list of actions that work with the object you've targeted. You shouldn't have to scroll through 200 possible choices when all you need to do is click a "Submit" button.

Automation software solutions that actually work like "digital employees" use a series of steps (called a script) to perform a task. They work off of those scripts diligently because it's what you have told them to do. And they do it flawlessly. If concerns over learning curves and installation times are preventing you from automating your workflows and business processes, choose the right solution and put those fears to rest.

Documented Your Business Processes

You know you've done it. The boss has said "Let's get our business processes sorted out" So you've drafted in some Visio guy who's put together your business process documentation. Now it has been printed off, bound up, reviewed and signed by the department head. Everyone is happy, right? Wrong! It's a waste of time and money doing this because it's just paying lip service to the whole concept of business process management, and will result (usually) in a set of documentation languishing in a drawer for years.

If you think doing this is going to help you become a sleeker, more efficient, business entity then you are sorely mistaken. This will actually have the opposite effect on your users. They will resent the time they've spent helping put the documentation together, there is no guarantee that it's the right process and therefore there's no guarantee it will actually be followed.

Actually you're not alone in doing this. Many companies have fallen into the same trap of thinking that a documented process is a defined and managed one process. But it doesn't have to be like that. Let's look at ways out:

How to solve this issue

1) Don't go there in the first place.

If at all possible try to make sure that you don't confuse documenting processes with defining and managing them. If you want to get some documentation of what your processes are, bring in someone who knows about facilitating processes and get them to do the work for you. But understand yourself WHY you are doing this. If it's just to say "I've documented the processes" then you're probably doing this for the wrong reasons. If it is part of a bigger review then this is slightly better. If it is a small step in a larger Business Process Management initiative this is the best reason of all

2) Don't take the documents as gospel.

Given that you've spent the time documenting your processes, make sure this is the start of the process rather than the end. Look at how you can take the documented processes and use them as a basis for improvements. Don't look at this as the end state i.e the gospel according to St Process, but look at this as the first step in a journey to process salvation. Use the existing documentation as a springboard to build a full process documentation set - along with a process management capability

3) Ignore and start again

I know it's painful to throw away things that you've worked hard on but the fact is that unless the process documents were put together under the authority of someone who knows how to document and manage processes, the chances are they will not be right. The might not fully reflect the process as it exists. They might not be a complete record of all the items needed for process documentation. They might not even be documented according to set documentation standards. All these factors mean that it is probably just as useful to throw them away and start again using someone who knows what they are doing. As in the previous suggestion, use this as a basis to build an internal process management capability

Build the process capability

Managing processes is much more than just documenting the work in Visio. Building a process management capability involves identifying and training individuals who can expertly analyse and document current state processes, who can design future state processes and who can appropriately work a tool to store all this information in. They can identify owners at a process level, implement a governance process and put in place appropriate metrics to measure the processes.

So if you find yourself stuck with a set of hastily put together process documents, meant to define your current state, before you bind them and throw them in a drawer, ask yourself if you wouldn't be better looking at some of the choices stated above to really benefit from the power of a well designed process.