#51 How to achieve Automation excellence with Low Code

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yeah, I think it's fair to say automation is not really a new trend, especially not in some industries. Arno and I are in the market for more than how many years, Arno? 15, 16 years?

Yeah, I think it's pushing probably 17 years.

Yeah, 17 years. Yeah. At that time, we were helping companies, small, large enterprises, financial services, insurances, and other businesses to get more done with process and automation. But yeah, it's nowadays, it's all a bit different when it comes to automation. Of course, the goal is very similar to what companies wanted to achieve back then, more efficiency, cost saving, etc. But most recently, we have seen a big shift to working alongside bots and artificial intelligence as part of our sort of workflows. And yeah, so in this new world of automation, how would you know where you stand currently as a company, and how would you know you're reaching sort of the full potential with these new automation technologies like RPA and some others? So from time to time, I think it makes really sense to do a quick review, a quick sort of check in all the different areas. And for that, we have 10 nice questions prepared for you to see where you stand when it comes to automation success. And I think the big thing is automation excellence. So I guess for all our listeners now, I'm going through the podcast. If you're not driving, I guess feel free to write down how to rate your business, or how would you— how you would rate your business on a scale from 1 to 10. 10 against these questions. I guess when you look back maybe half a year or in a year's time on that kind of review, you might have improved in some areas. So, so, Arno, what do you think is the first one up on the list?

So the first one is enterprise-level thinking. And what I mean by that, does your automation span holistically across your enterprise? Or do they just sort of exist with inside departments or within teams? With automation, what we try to achieve is enterprise-wide implementation. It shouldn't just be targeting, let's say, one department or one division with inside your business. So if you are out there and your automation program spans across your enterprise, you can give yourself a point. If you're still striving towards that, but you perhaps have automations within various departments, you haven't really joined all the dots up, perhaps you earn yourself a half a point. If you're still in the zone where automation is just scattered throughout your business and there's little pockets of automation initiatives that goes on, then perhaps you should change your thinking in scaling that out enterprise-wide, because that is when you realize your full potential. So for me, Sascha, enterprise thinking is the first one. What do you think the next one is?

Yeah, I think the next one is a good one here, platform power. We are talking about platforms, low-code and no-code, quite a lot here. So, so, so important reflection will be, are you actually using a platform approach to automating processes end-to-end? Are you orchestrating processes through a platform? Are you sort of connecting all your systems and databases, AI capabilities, APIs, the RPA integration spots, and, and And the humans within that end-to-end process, are you covering that on one specific platform, or is it like scattered around in the enterprise in different applications, or is it just one end-to-end? It makes so much more sense to look at end-to-end, look at it sort of on a platform level instead of going into the HR system and then going into these other systems. So, so one platform with all these capabilities, low-code and no-code, of course, this is sort of the trend. That will be the question you should ask yourself. Are you using a platform or not?

Yeah, sure. Now that's very insightful. And I guess if it is a platform approach where you leverage a platform, and this is automation platform, like you said, that has got business process orchestration, AI, robots, chatbots, APIs. So if you leverage all of that, I guess you are taking advantage of the power of a platform. So that in itself deserves another point in your maturity. The next one I want to talk about is democratization. Now, what I mean by democratization, it is how business and IT work together collectively and in collaboration with each other to create solutions. Traditionally, it's only the responsibility of IT. Requirements goes into IT, IT then push that through their development cycle, it gets thrown over to the fence to the business, and that in itself creates very sort of long, long periods of time before value gets delivered. If we democratize the technology, especially automation technology, with the use of low-code platforms where you don't have to write code in order to implement automations, what you are doing is you're opening up automation to the masses. You're opening up automation to business teams, citizen developers, and IT alike. So what you're doing is you're taking advantage of more people from the business size— sides, and also people in the IT side to very quickly roll out these solutions. A very important one, ask yourself the question, is it only my IT department that's involved in automation initiatives, or is it both my IT and my business teams working together collaboratively? And that's where you want to be to score a point for that one.

No, that's, that's really cool. So I think in many organizations we really still have that, that IT is making decisions on how we, how our solutions are developed. But we know by now, um, the people who are actually in the departments, they know what is best for them. Yes. Yeah, it's fantastic to, to, to get involved them like that.

Yeah.

So of course, when we Earlier we talked about a platform. So when we develop workflows and process solutions and we have one platform, or maybe even if we don't have one platform in place, but it just makes sense that there is some governance and visibility in place. So, so the question to ask here for yourself is, do you sort of prioritize strong governance and visibility across all your workflows. So everyone where you have human workforce, and yeah, of course, the— you need to find out what the— or you need to see what your bots and AI participants in the process are doing. So, so are you using that governance already for, for risk management, to checking compliance, and, and of course finding out other operational excellence sort of measures. So yeah, nowadays with all that data which is flowing through systems and databases and all that stuff, it just makes sense to visualize that and to use that data to proactively measure that risk at any time in real time.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that governance and visibility into your processes and audits is a byproduct of automation. Automation produces that almost for free. When you've got a process that runs and you are collecting data, you're leaving footprints. So if you do have an audit, we get audited, it's very easy to point the auditors at those particular records, and that would save you a tremendous amount of time to actually get through your audit process. Also for compliancy, when you get, you know, various compliancy certificates like ISO 27001 and all of these types of compliancy certifications that's out there, you are in a far better spot if you have systems of automation in place than if you have got manual processes that's well documented. So All of these things, not just the, the fact that you've got sort of better optimized processes and you have people that's more productive because they interact with digital processes. It's also all of these soft benefits that comes into play, which if you were to build a business case for automation, a lot of people look at the hard benefits, but regulatory compliancy, risk management, operational excellence that falls out of these visibilities and these transparent processes are very, very important and is something that's sometimes overlooked. So if you are using automation tools to its full potential and you do have very good visibility, and again, you can score yourself a point for that one. The next one is really important to me. It's about speed and agility. In the old days, when you have a new requirement come into your business to solve a problem, usually what would happen is business analysts would look at that, and that would then be handed over to a traditional IT development team, and it takes a very long time to actually build a system to solve a problem. These days, you need to rapidly adapt to business changes and to optimize processes and to also take advantage of new opportunities. So speed and agility is absolutely key, not just to save the business costs, but also to be able to lead with inside your business domain. If you have a competitor and they deploy digital process automation, that means that they can be more consistent, they can have better customer services, the customer retention will be better, and all of these soft benefits that's associated with process automation is going to really propel them forward, where you'll be behind. Whereas with using the process automation and the tools that's out there, the robotic process automation for digital workforce, workflow automation for human-to-human automation, uh, AI-driven chatbots, AI for decision-making, all of these things combined with the fact that it is all configurable using low-code, and IT departments and business users can work together collaboratively to quickly assemble this, give you that speed and agility. If that's you, give yourself a point. If that's not you, you should seriously look into process automation with these types of capabilities to get yourself to delivering stuff in days, maybe weeks, but not months or years.

That brings me, brings me nicely to this, to the next point, which is all about impact of the solutions developed you're developing or you have in your organization. So, so obviously when you have lots of these ideas, and Arne, as you mentioned, you can build them with lots of agility and speed nowadays. But if you have all these ideas, of course you need to make sure whatever you're building will have a certain and significant business impact, business benefit really, and it will produce potential cost savings. It will address that competitive edge you mentioned, Arno, and maybe result into that process efficiency you were looking for. So it's really important to sort of set out what the goals are of a small project, even if it's a really quick idea. But still, you need to measure that impact. And then maybe if that impact is not right, then of course you can go very easily because of the agility of low-code and no-code core platforms, you can very easily go back and then adjust and then see if, if this is the right solution or not. And you can iterate again and again. Maybe you come very, very, very soon to the conclusion, maybe that's not the best process to do. But ideally, not necessarily figuring it out that way. Maybe you use other, other tools as part of the platform. So sort of maybe process mining tools as part of their platform to figure out what is the best process actually to start off with. But whatever approach you take here, it's very important that it sort of results into some proper business benefits. So if that's not how you're doing it at the moment, I guess, yeah. So you should—

Yeah, that's where you want to be. High, high, high impact, low input. And if you organize yourself in terms of technology platforms, you organize yourself in terms of collaboration between teams, especially from IT, maybe IT partners, and also your business, you will achieve high impact quickly. You know, you'll get faster to market with your solutions that you create. And of course, that's when you start to realize the, the cost savings. Another question we ask people is, do you focus on continuously improving your digital systems, data systems, and governance and expertise to scale your automation initiatives? If that's you, then well done. A lot of businesses are still emerging in, in that space where there's areas of investment to continuously improve these elements that I've just mentioned, but not all of those are done collectively. And, you know, it can be sometimes a challenge, especially when you've got legacy systems, you've got some technical debt, but a lot of the Automation platforms out there, especially something like robotic process automation, doesn't really care about legacy systems. You can train a robot to actually work with your legacy systems, and you can build really modern interfaces for your human workforce and broker data for a digital worker to go type that into your legacy system. So there are solutions to that. Um, we talked a bit about, um, data in itself. Data is very precious. If you look at the likes of Amazon, I think they record around 500 data points for a typical shopper, and they constantly enrich that data to understand the profile of the person that is their customer. So all of these systems, automation systems, collect a lot of data. It collects a lot of data in terms of behaviors of processes, behaviors of people, how they interact with your processes. And this gives you that ability to really fine-tune your processes and continuously improve the digital sort of approach that you have for process automation. And of course, expertise is really important. It's really important to invest in automation expertise across your business. It's very important to have an automation-first thinking. So people are on board, they are on board. On board with automated thinking. They are on board with the fact that if I look at a business problem, rather than picking up an Excel spreadsheet that I start emailing around or save in a file share somewhere, I do have the tools at my disposal to create something to make me productive without actually going to the extent of spinning up a full-blown IT project. And that's the power. We need to enable our sort of, not necessarily our technical sort of teams with inside our business with these automation tools, but we also need to equip our business teams to understand what is possible using workflow automation, what is possible using chatbots, what is possible using artificial intelligence. And all of this, again, continuous investment and improving people's expertise will help you to scale your automation and also will help you to change the culture within your business to an automation-first culture.

Very interesting, Arno. And you mentioned digital and data there as a big topic. Yeah, it was historically, and in many companies still is, it is sort of a blocker for many initiatives, isn't it? Because only when you have really good data available, you can you can achieve these results much better. So this is why it's so important to get that level right. And you talked about enriching data earlier, and of course doing that manually is quite a task. So when we talk about those kind of points, there's the AI, artificial intelligence, helping us here. When it comes to automation and process automation in general. So you should ask yourself, are you using technologies like, like AI, machine learning? Are you using intelligent OCR to extract data from, from, from documents? Are you using those things to, to identify specific things in images? So processing invoices, sort of most or nearly automatically, really, and with the power of those technologies. And the more you use this, the more maybe you can improve your data, and the more your data is accurate, you have more end-to-end processing, maybe 100% automated processing. And so, which is, which is fantastic. So Yeah, using AI, absolutely one to go for these days. And if you're not doing this, have a look at this because you will score 10 with those kind of things further down the line.

Yeah, but of course that kind of leads us to the next one, which again, we seem to be a bit obsessed with this, but it is probably something that's worth being obsessed about, and it's about your customers and Do you provide industry-leading customer experience using a multitude of channels, including online, mobile? And is your products and services innovative? And for me, this is, this is kind of like the key to all of this. We've got things happening in the back office that needs to be as efficient and as smart as possible. We need to make our workforce as productive as possible, and we need to deploy a digital workforce that is very cost-effective, that does low-value work. All of that then provides a foundation for us then to use the experiences we've learned from automation, the experiences we've learned to optimize our own house, and really build extremely, extremely industry-leading customer experiences in the front. And that includes anytime a customer engages with you, it needs to be absolutely seamless, it needs to be highly automated, and it needs to give the customer a sense that you know who they are, what their needs are, and if there's any problems, that can be addressed very quickly and very efficiently. and that drives customer retention. All of this will also give you confidence that if you have a high degree of, or high, high quality customer service and the customer experiences are really high, it will give you the confidence to actually create more innovative services because the customer would know that you are highly innovative anyway because they are interacting with you, you always solve their problems very quickly, you are always there to provide a solution to anything they ask. So for them, if you bring out a new innovative service, they will be highly sort of likely to adopt that. And I think that's key. And I think this is where big companies like Amazon does this really good. They understand how digital can be used to actually create really, really good customer experiences.

Yeah, and that's, uh, and that leads us really, um, to the last, last point, the, the employees part, um, of your organization. Of course, employees are as important as your customers, and with automation, there can be There can be lots of stuff done to engage your employees, to motivate your employees, and to just make them more productive. And automation itself will make your employees more happy. I think some people say, oh, how does that work? So you're automating work maybe away from employees, but actually automation is sort of like— is helping them to get their jobs done better. And you talked about customers. I think employees can also serve customers better with all the touchpoints and the automation and what employees need to do to run the operation. I think everything gets a bit easier when you reach that full potential of automation within the organization. And yeah, I think that's a very important point. To look at. And if you, if you're still doing lots of things manually when it comes to HR and employee satisfaction, yeah, it's probably about time to look at those areas as well. And there are many, many use cases out there to address that specific area in your business.

Yeah, I mean, we, we talk a lot about one of the classic use cases for automation And that's onboarding and the whole journey from the initial publishing of a new job advert to actually onboarding employee, to ensuring they, they've got a very good transition into the business. And that whole experience is very similar to the type of experience that you want to build for your customers. But also you want to replicate that internally so that the culture of automation from day one actually gets embedded in, in your new staff. They know that the business that they are working for embraces automation and is progressive. And I guess that keeps people highly engaged, motivated, and very productive because when you bring automation into their world and experience it the first time on day one as part of their onboarding, they know that this is a business that's very, very serious about streamlining and optimizing experiences for people to make sure that they can do their job and they don't get bored of re-keying in information or working with a lot of spreadsheets. And I think it's sort of that grassroots level where it really starts. So I guess that's—

That's nearly a differentiator, isn't it, these days? If someone could publicly identify if a company is doing that or not, I guess lots of people out there would decide, I'm not working for this company, I'm working for the other, because as you said, they are really serious about those things.

Yeah, exactly. And I think it also opens up possibilities for hybrid working. I think we talked in our last podcast or previous podcast about creating hybrid working models. The job place has changed as we know it from pre-pandemic, and people are again starting to get back to the office, but that model is looking different. So we want to ensure that people work very efficiently wherever they are, and I think that a hybrid working model is best supported by automation and technology, the right types of automation and technology, to ensure that if people are working off-site, they have got all the tools to their disposal, they are connected to their processes, they are connected to other people. And all of, all of this connectivity really drives productivity and drives satisfaction of employees because they know I'm going to have a day where I'm not going to be in the office, but I've got all of my tools, all of my data, all of my process interaction at my fingertips using my mobile phone, my desktop, and all of my, you know, automation interfaces, be it your case management system or a dashboard where you can see all of your telemetry around your processes. So collectively, this also creates a sense of achievement, a sense of productivity, motivation. So all of that is positive. So again, if that's you, you can score yourself a point. If that's not you, it is time really to start looking at automation specifically in that area to drive employee satisfaction.

I hope you have scored plenty of points after after going through this questions with you. And if not, of course, yeah, there's, there's room for improvement. And it's very, very good, I guess, to repeat that reflection every now and then. So, you know, if you have improved overall, and of course you will probably see the, or feel the results as well as part of different departments, you see suddenly HR processes are running smoother, customer processes are running smoother, the business is doing better. So probably you will know without going through that, but I think it just is nice to just take a snapshot every now and then and just compare from where you have improved to today. And Yeah, so, so that was 10 questions for you to achieve automation excellence. And yeah, thank you very much for listening. And yeah, reach out to us and to myself and Arno if you have any questions about automation. And yeah, so we will be back very soon. And until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!