Automation is a hot topic among businesses. It’s supposed to save businesses time and money while ensuring that customer service is of the highest quality.
However, not all attempts are successful. This blog covers “What is a best practice when approaching an automation effort?” and answers some of your FAQs regarding this subject.
Table of contents
What Is A Best Practice When Approaching An Automation Effort?
Before getting into the details, let’s warm up with this small question and see which one is the correct answer! We will have four options below:
- Focus on cost reduction
- Obtain new resources
- Make your current procedure better before automating it
- Remove technical support team
The correct answer is to make your contemporary process better before automating it. But why is business improvement important?
A significant number of businesses that intend to automate their process fail to do so because they fail to fulfill this requirement. Business process improvement is the most fundamental step before automating your business.
As a matter of fact, your company will face serious problems if you try implementing automation before improving your current processes. You can make things automated, but if the process were wrong in the first place, all attempts would only make it worse.
In short, automating something that is not streamlined is a recipe for disaster.
What Are Other Elements That Make An Efficient Automation Effort?
Involve all the members in the decision-making process
When considering automating a process, you must get your team involved in key decisions. Yes, managers and experts are vital, but everybody has something to contribute – your employees may have insight on different aspects of the process than you do.
Take their observations into account and decide what aspects would be most beneficial to automate first. So make sure you work with your team to brainstorm new ideas.
Prepare and retrain your employees
One of the main reasons organizations cannot attain what they want to when they automate their business is because they have wrong notions. The problem is that they think they can automate without retraining anyone.
More than half of business managers realize that they have to retrain or replace some of their employees before the process. Because when human labor is automated, they have to do something else. They have to work on the new automated processes, which require retraining.
In this case, retraining is the process of preparing your team to work with the new technologies. It will also make the employees feel that they are not getting replaced by machines. It will give them confidence that the organization is improving, and they are a part of it.
Understand the interdependency of workflow
For most businesses, their workflows are never completely standalone but always interlinked. Due to the complexities of connections, when one thing is changed, it can have a domino effect on related processes., especially when old legacy systems are not connected to the latest automated information technology solutions.
One benefit of understanding the interconnectivity between processes would be an ability to understand what systems support specific parts of your business at any given time, therefore ensuring that you adhere to all compliance standards as required by applicable regulations.
FAQS
What are the most obvious benefits of automation?
Developing a strategy before automating anything is an action that involves goal-setting and careful planning but will help you improve your performance and increase productivity.
It enables the company to focus on the most important tasks and concentrate on the highest value projects while not worrying about time-consuming, mundane, and repetitive tasks.
What is its biggest drawback?
The main disadvantage is worker displacement. As more jobs get automated, there will be less and less demand for human jobs. The workers displaced from one workplace may need to find jobs in the new workplace, which causes a lot of stress for employees.
What is its simplest form?
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is the easiest to deploy and the least expensive software application, which performs a task or a series of tasks without human intervention. It is a rules-driven event-driven software that performs predefined tasks.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, there are many different ways to approach automation. It’s important to evaluate your options and decide what works best for your unique situation.
Hopefully, this article on “What is a best practice when approaching an automation effort?” has given you some useful information. If you have any other questions or comments, please reach out to us anytime!
Last Updated on 3 years by admin
