Given that companies now need to automate offers and operations to optimize existing processes and generate better experiences and value for customers. But businesses are not getting maximum value and efficiency just by adding automation. Your level of maturity is what matters.
Knowing your level of maturity will help you identify opportunities for automation growth as well as evaluate the risks and challenges associated with larger, more sophisticated automations. For example, as automation solutions cross departments and combine diverse technologies, risks of data loss and integrity may increase.
Assessing the maturity level of your automation
In most automation maturity models, there are three distinct stages:
- Task -focused stage: In this first phase, simple manual processes are automated and typically generate significant efficiencies at the individual level. These automations are typically done using robotic process automation (RPA) bots.
- Group/department focused phase: At this stage of the maturation process, automations go beyond the individual, connecting teams or departments within a function-focused app such as Salesforce, ServiceNow or a business process automation platform. These systems have built-in capabilities to create workflows that automatically route tasks to different team members when an event occurs, such as a sales lead turning into a solid opportunity. .
- End-to-end phase: Once organizations have reached the most mature level of automation, they will develop end-to-end processes that span multiple departments or the entire enterprise. The process of registering an order in one system, checking inventory in another system, and finally triggering the shipping process in a third is a common example. Integration-focused business automation platforms enable this level of automation.
Increasing the maturity of your automation solutions
Once your team understands its current state, it’s time to take steps to advance the automation strategy. Here are four tactics to focus on:
1. Connect applications and processes
Immature approaches are focused on simple tasks. This is a good place to start, but to get the most out of automation, it needs to grow. To turn these task-based automations into automated workflows, applications and systems need to interact with each other. The continuous addition of connected systems provides the opportunity to build increasingly complex, end-to-end workflows.
As more processes are connected, you will need a platform to manage the increasing complexity. Fortunately, vendors in various enterprise IT segments are interacting with business process automation (BPA) suite offerings that include library integration and automation and workflow capabilities. This trend provides support for organizations developing their strategies and confirms the importance of automation paired with connectivity.
RPA bots are very popular because they are powerful and easy to use. This is both a blessing and a curse because RPA is often used when it shouldn’t, leading to poorly designed processes.
Designed to mimic human behavior in navigating the UI of an application, RPA is very crisp and immeasurable in an organization. When an app’s UI changes, RPA can break. If there are multiple RPA bots that depend on each other, a targeted UI change can cause the entire process to stop. It is also difficult to define the breakdown point of the RPA to adjust, which is contrary to the automation goals of simplifying workloads.
3. Use more AI
AI can be useful in integrating less organized information into process automation. For example, AI can recognize characters in a paper document using optical character recognition (OCR) or understand the meaning of a document using natural language process (NLP) and convert unorganized information into digital forms. can be processed automatically by computers.
With access to more data and more data science tools, predictive models can also be more easily integrated into unsupervised automated processes for simple decision making. This more sophisticated implementation of AI could free up more expensive human resources to focus on tasks of higher value.
4. Develop symbiotic relationships between humans and computers
As automation techniques become more sophisticated, people are less involved and may no longer be in the middle of the process. This does not mean that people are no longer needed. People still need to ensure that sophisticated automations do not interfere with edge cases that challenge established operating patterns, making them too complex or nuanced for a machine to handle.
Enabling people to interact with machines efficiently is an important part of a very mature system. The most sophisticated automation techniques will allow people to manage edge cases without having to leave the environment or application in which they are currently working.
Automation techniques will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated. The secret to the success of automation is to balance processes that allow machines and employees to work together effectively to achieve business goals.