A failure point for many businesses that allow automation to fizzle out in their company, is blindly starting with the hanging fruit, i.e., HR or accounting. While these areas often lend themselves nicely to automation due to their structured nature, automation is not a one-size fits all. Some companies miss out on maximizing the impact to their business by starting with the easy route and not doing the due diligence of aligning their automation initiatives with the overarching business goals.
Injecting intelligent automation strategically into a company is the key to the program’s longevity, scalability, and success.
When determining an optimum process to kick-off your intelligent automation journey with it’s important to solicit input from all levels of the organization. While automating a trial balance might be an easy time-saver for your accounting department, at the top-level, the executive suite might be striving to mitigate a non-compliant external audit report from the previous quarter or fiscal year. Understanding the high-level business initiatives and organizational road map for the next 1, 3 or 5 years is a huge driver of identifying areas where intelligent automation could have the highest impact.
Likewise, if your operations department is hemorrhaging money due to lack of productivity, this could denote a high-impact area for Intelligent Automation within your company. Connecting with the integral members of your company that are responsible for managing and performing the day-to-day operations is key for successful ideation sessions.
There’s a reason you hear buzz words like “tedious” and “mundane” so often when the topic of intelligent automation comes up. RPA and AI are designed to take the burden out of human work; when we look closer at the parts of the core business functions that we dread, or the tasks that make us cringe just thinking about tackling, there isoftenan opportunity to relinquish some of the burden by leveraging automation. When investigating pain points, it’s important to quantify it through:
There’s a ripple effect that occurs when intelligent automation is leveraged to solve pain points. It fosters a better employee experience, thus increasing buy-in from all levels of the organization. When staff members welcome automation rather than fear it, this helps drive more ideas and use-cases for the automation pipeline, which ultimately secures the longevity of the overall Intelligent Automation program.
Ideation sessions and pain point gathering are only effective when performed skillfully. Another common failure point for organizations that are new to automation is attempting to take on the full implementation spectrum in-house. From a costperspective, this can seem to be the most attractive and low-risk approach when starting out, however in business we are limited by our knowledge – meaning we don’t know what we don’t know. Pairing up with the right implementation partner is the vantage point you need when selecting the right process to maximize your ROI in intelligent automation. Intelatron’s project managers are all Lean Six Sigma Black Belts. When hosting ideation sessions and investigating the strategic approach for injecting intelligent automation into our client’s organization, we start by performing key Lean Six Sigma practices, like the 5-whys, to pinpoint process breaks, waste or “muda”, and draws out opportunities to streamline. Intelatron builds custom ideation workshops for prospective clients to meet with key members of their organization and investigate optimum areas to automate. Through these sessions, we uncover and provide a custom starter package to launch your intelligent automation journey – which includesat minimum: