As organizations begin to evolve and become complex over time, it is imperative for them to be mindful of manual versus automated operational functions and capabilities. Adoption and continuation of a manual approach can take up a significant amount of time and resource, impacting organizations in many ways.
Ever so often, organizations forget about
complex processes they currently have in place, which becomes the limiting
factor for the organizations’ ability to grow, move forward and gain a
competitive advantage. In order to tackle this challenge, automation tools and
capabilities can allow organizations to further refine and improve their
overall efficiency.
Everything, including the underlying
business strategy and organizational transformation, begins at the top. A solid
business strategy must incorporate a technology view together with an
understanding of resources and capabilities in order to create a competitive
advantage. Organizations should be aware of the right mix of resources and
capabilities, allowing in return, the right mix of automated vs. manual
processes.
Automation and automated tools can further
enhance an organization’s capability to grow rapidly and effectively by
reducing redundant work and tasks that otherwise would slow down an
organization’s speed-to-market model. It is relatively easy to procure and buy
an automation tool these days, which can assist to automate structured data
immediately and effectively. However, in order to maximize the benefits and
increase capabilities including scalability of the automation program, a proper
automation approach must be adopted in phases.
The first phase consists of understanding
and defining the strategy for the program, developing a concrete business case
for the automation program, understanding the efforts required and the business
problem that is being solved. This is typically part of the Initialization Phase,
where a pilot program is set and a project management program is strictly
followed. In this phase the organization is at the initial stage of
implementing the core foundation of an automation program, as it is reviewing
and understanding the structured data and processes in order to solve business
specific process. The business process would be very specific to a single
department or a line of business. This is the period where an organization is
discovering the initial automation capabilities by defining, designing,
developing, testing and deploying a simple automation program. An organization
may procure an industry wide automation tool and implement through a pilot
program that otherwise would have required someone to manually process. For
example, an accounts payable group is looking to automate their batch reporting
on invoices that would be payable in thirty days. This would typically involve
an Invoice Specialist to manually pull out data from the system and transfer to
another reporting tool; all of which can be automated through an attended or
unattended robot running reports in the background through an RPA tool.
However, in order to fully reap the benefits of such tools, organizations need
to go a step further to scale up an automation platform to include Intelligent
Process Automations (IPA) such as Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language
Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other cognitive capabilities
that would allow organizations to become more agile. This is where part two of
the phase plays a big role: the industrialization phase.
Phase two, the Industrialization Phase,
is an approach whereby organizations would look to further exploit their
existing datasets, processes, tasks including unstructured data for potential
opportunities in order to gain competitive advantage. This is where many
organizations typically explore complex technologies such as Machine Learning
(ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other
cognitive capabilities that would allow organizations to gain even further
competitive advantage. Using such data science tools would allow extracting,
processing and analyzing to generate useful and key information. Organizations
who would have adopted such advanced tools would already have a
well-established Robotics Process Automation (RPA) tool in place, with an
established center of excellence at the line of business and enterprise level. For
example, Netflix, a very simple everyday content viewing platform and
production company, consists of multiple subscribers across the globe, uses a
subscription-based streaming service. In order to understand their customer
data base and personalize content for each and every user, Netflix uses many
complex algorithms as part of their machine learning capabilities. As such,
organizations that tend to adopt such complex tools and technologies typically
have a mature capability in place allowing for complex transformational
journey.
Phase three, the Institutionalization Phase;
primarily focuses on further expanding and maturing the center of excellence by
having an expanded governance structure and managed services in place in order
to allow a business-as-usual deployment of automation programs. At this stage,
many organizations would have a robust center of excellence spanning across the
enterprise with “plug and play model” available for the entire organization to
rapidly deploy multiple automation tools and programs cross-functionally to
reap the benefits as required. They would also have specialists and subject
matter experts available to assist them as part of their individual automation
journey.
The automation program structure begins with
an understanding of the organization’s requirements through needs analysis,
having a well-defined strategy with clear understanding of the business drivers
and a well-defined scope, prior to selecting any tool. Once a clear
understanding of the requirements has been established and scope has been
identified with an automation strategy in mind, it is imperative for this to be
communicated across the organization with a purpose for a need to establish a proper
transformation program. In order for any transformation program to work
successfully and positively, this requires senior leadership involvement and
stakeholder buy-in early. Furthermore, proper communication and management of
employees through an effective change management strategy is strongly advised.
This will allow for a seamless and efficient adoption and sustainment of new
tools and capabilities for all impacted parties.
Call to Action for Vendor Managers
When is comes to automation, it is very
imperative that there is a fundamental sound understanding of the business
requirements and a clear understanding of the automation tools in the market. Automation
tools offer variety of capabilities and options. However, there are several
limitations of such tools which must be taken into consideration before acquiring
and deploying, which can ultimately stagnate growth of the organization. Furthermore,
as these tools start to cross-functionally grow within an organization it is important
that Vendor Management has seat at the table as part of Automation Center of
Excellence group; to monitor and control on the overall vendor performance with
an 360 view.
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