#75 Keep Business Process Automation flowing and The Automation Guys Community

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. And as always, Arno and myself will share our thoughts on all things process and automation. And in today's episode, we are talking about How to keep business process automation flowing. So what is that all about? So yeah, well, I'm sure we all want continuous pipeline of new automation use cases to tackle within our departments in the business. But how do we actually generate and where do we generate that, that, that thriving pipeline of automation across diverse lines of our business? So from our experience here at The Automation Guys, and as well as from many our customer success stories, we have extracted some tips to help you drive a healthy use case pipeline for process automation. So yeah, let's dive straight in. Arno, do you like to kick this off?

Yes, sure. Very, very good topic. I think it's one thing to start, but also when you start your automation journey, you also want to keep the initiatives flowing. So, you know, and, you know, when it's time to expand your reach after those first wins, there are typically in my mind two methods we see out there automation leaders employ to go find those next use case automation or the next use cases. So generally speaking, the one is general crowdsourcing, and this is a really strong play for high volume of ideas. So, you know, you reach out to users and ask for input on what we should automate next. So very typical kind of suggestion inbox, and theoretically this is helpful to discover where pain points are for We are end users, yet when automation criteria aren't meticulously outlined or outlined in these sort of outreaches, the inbound suggestions can range from things that's far too simple to things that's non-feasible. So, you know, just a bunch of ideas that aren't, you know, the quality you use cases that you want or necessarily need at that point. You know, crowdsourcing has got a place. It can serve you at some point in your automation journey. But, you know, as you're currently building up your pipeline, you know, there is other methods in your armory that may serve you better. And, you know, this is all to do with the second initiative, which really revolves around business line partnerships or line of business partnerships. Departmental partnerships, you know, but effectively this approach is sort of a go-to recommendation for sourcing high-quality automation ideas with big return of investments. And then the whole idea is that you go out and you establish one-to-one partnerships with key stakeholders in lines of business. And this could be a key stakeholder in finance, HR, sales, marketing, And, you know, they will have a very, very keen insight into, you know, how their team functions and also how automation can transform their part of the business and then collectively the whole business. So again, you know, once you help these individual lines of businesses with their automation initiatives, you can start to partner with other lines of businesses and sort of rinse and repeat this process. And it is, it is, it is, has been proven that it is a very, very effective way to build a rich pipeline of these automation projects that will contribute to successful metrics in your overall automation program. So again, you know, talked a bit about relationship building, and I think this is where we just want to be a bit more specific on the types of people that we want to talk to and the types of partnerships that we want to create and effectively, you know, use that to our advantage to get some ideas and sort of help those automation ideas, you know, turn into automation projects that will drive business transformation.

Yeah, that's cool. And after we have captured all these great ideas, it's really time to think about the next steps and look into that pipeline and do a bit of process discovery. And what is the reason for doing process discovery? So it is really the aim to unearth a 360-degree view of how users do their work across the enterprise, the different departments. Yeah, and then in the start and sometimes the accelerated phases of your automation programs, you may be able to review end-to-end processes manually, especially if the processes are very, very simple. And yeah, your line of business partnerships mentioned above are quite mature and trusted. But outside of those exceptions, processes are too complex and also broad to review manually, and humans are too close to the day-to-day work to have that clean, yeah, pair of eyes, fresh set of eyes. You will need the help of a process discovery platform. So a bit of technology there to help you, especially if you're large. Large enterprise, the volume of process to review is just, yeah, it's huge. And yeah, maybe also the ideas from all the different departments is like a huge, huge list and you have to drill deeper and deeper into that. The tool will help you there. So yeah, it is a software, it's a tool that helps you gain insights into the business processes and it uses elements of data mining, process mining, and machine learning to extract that data from the different sources and looks at it, analyzes it, and visualizes the process. Basically takes very often sort of a key identifier, a timestamp, and what that task was all about. And based on that timeline, it can put a lot of good information together and can visualize that quite nicely. And then, yeah, with that, you will identify inefficiencies, you will see all the different variations of your process. The bottlenecks in your processes, and then from that you can make your decisions. And using a process discovery platform is of course that increased process visibility. You have that clear and comprehensive view of your processes across the organization, not necessarily just one department. You can apply— once you have that technology, you can just basically let it loose and get into all the systems. And then once that is done, it just captures all that information and you get the good overview of all the processes in the organization and making it really easier to identify those bottlenecks I just mentioned. Of course, benefits are also improved process efficiency by identifying these inefficiencies and different variations of processes. Yeah, so you reduce reduce your waste effectively and increase productivity, increase the bottom line. And of course, with better processes, your staff will also be very happy about that. So they don't have to do stupid redundant steps. And so, yeah, so that will definitely increase staff happiness as well. And better process— with better process, so better decision-making, of course, is one big benefit here. So you have that data-driven insight. So it's just, yeah, we think this is this and that. No, it's clear data. And with that data, you can make these right decisions, informed decisions on how you improve the processes and how you allocate all your resources within the business. So really, really cool to get that out of a process automation tool. And of course, combined all of those things, it will help to reduce the risk for your business because it's not just finding inefficiencies, finding the vulnerabilities as well. And yeah, so you can really get rid of all the errors and non-compliance you have found. And yeah, enhanced collaboration is another big step. So with the platform, facilitates that collaboration between the different teams and departments by providing really that shared view of all the processes in the business. So everyone's talking about the same stuff. Yeah, and enabling teams to work together on those initiatives and take then the next step. Arno, right?

Yeah, I guess it is sort of, you know, you've We talked a bit about relationship building, we talked a bit about process discovery. Again, then it's sort of the next step would be to look into the future. So, you've curated these partnerships, you've generated a really nice pipeline of all these nice use cases, you've made your line of business partners transformation heroes, and you've also instituted the process discovery. Accelerate the identification of your automation opportunities. And you still have, you know, these future waves of automation ideas to capture. And I guess this is where it comes full circle with the crowdsourcing method. That's when you can sort of bring it in. You know, you will still face the same challenges we touched upon earlier once you open up the use case suggestion box. So, I'll say again, it's very important not to, you know, not only set the standards and expectations of idea submissions, but also to reiterate those parameters over and over again. So, they need some sort of guidance. So, you know, don't throw crowdsourcing away because you're scared you'll get a ton of rubbish back. You know, go through those initial methods, bring this in and sort of, have it more structured. You know, we always look at automation, and, you know, key driver is to have a strong return of investment potential. It shouldn't be too overcomplicated, and it, you know, it should drive value for the company. You know, and one idea is to set up a dedicated email for submissions because it's so easy to send an email, and it could be automation ideas at the companyxyz.com. You can of course create an online submission form that's hosted inside your company's intranet, you know, where you capture some, some ideas that people can submit. Also, you need to send out a newsletter. You need to promote, you know, that you're calling out for, for idea submissions for automations, just to, to get people aware And of course, you know, your responses should thank people even if the idea is not a good fit. So you could say something like, you know, thank you very much for your time to submit your automation idea. You know, we like all of these things of the idea, but unfortunately we can't move it forward because it doesn't currently— the person that submitted it or the big thinker, you know, perhaps again, it could be a company-wide email to say, you know, Peter Smith has just submitted the top automation idea and we've just saved 1,000 hours because we solved this ABC problem, you know, congratulations, Peter. And then have a call to action to say, you know, who wants to be the next Peter? You know, submit your idea to us. So again, these are 3 sort of fairly simple, manageable tips that will, you know, help you to build a rich automation pipeline for your automation program. You know, as you move through each of these steps, you know, remember to continue to reinforce trust in automation and to always elevate, you know, all of the people that you work with, your partners, the heroes who lend a helping hand towards use case generation because that's really important to drive pipeline and to ensure that, you know, business process automation keeps on flowing. It's a repetitive program that just needs to keep on rolling.

Yeah, and I guess also to mention is once those ideas are in and they have been selected for implementation and then if it wasn't sort of an idea which took like 9 months, 12 months to develop, maybe a bit shorter time frame and implemented successfully and it's used within the business and has been successful. And even those kind of news obviously will then help to get even more ideas in, because then they see it's not just, okay, initiative to collect ideas, but they already hear from within the business, we are doing X, we're doing why we're doing that, and it's really working, it's really saving us. So, so yeah, like you mentioned, it's just an idea and it has saved, saved that in the department. And the more and more of those things are actually getting implemented and leaving that idea stage, yeah, so it will, it will be like a fire going through the, through the company. And, and on that negativity you just mentioned there, Arno, I think it's starting to disappear where people think, oh, automation is taking our jobs, etc. Which is proven not to be the case. But yeah, so, so that really, really helps small projects get them, get them done. Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's exciting. And there's—

yeah, and I think, you know, the internal promotion of this will result in an automation culture that starts to form. So people will think about automation first when they look at problems. I also think that this is a great place or a great way to create a very lightweight process automation center of excellence where you've got good quality ideation suggestions, even the process mining that you touch on going into the one side, If it is crowdsourcing that you use for, you know, sourcing automation ideas, you can even provide people that suggest these ideas access to templates to capture process flows, process maps, you know, to really start to almost create a bit of a sort of a pipeline or factory that you can drive the pipeline with, but it's still still structured, but it's not a full-blown center of excellence because at least you are capturing good quality ideas, you are vetting them, you— the ones that proceed forward in the automation pipeline towards actually a project, that's when you sort of encourage those, those people to submit better details in standardized templates So that's easier then to actually implement the automation itself. Of course, from a process mining perspective, that will give you some very, very good insight into what to go after in terms of automation. And then, you know, the partnerships you follow with your lines of business partners, they will actually tell you what they feel is wrong. They will tell you our onboarding process is broken or offboarding. So you don't really need any anybody to tell you that or to suggest fixing that, because that sort of is just something that comes from a department head. We don't need a process mining tool to go and discover that for you. Yeah, I think you kind of COVID all of the bases using this, this, these, these simple steps. And, uh, you know, hopefully over time, as you promote, um, this with inside your business, like I said earlier, you would start to see that automation culture forming, and hopefully you will get more investment from management in the program. You can grow the team and you could kind of, you know, like I said, this is sort of a lightweight center of excellence, but you can then turn it into a full-blown center of excellence over time that feels really, really good quality automations inside your business.

Now you just mentioned that was, so you're just asking these department heads or within the department, everyone should definitely know. And that's, yeah, that's definitely true. Yeah, within those departments, but as soon as it sort of becomes more cross-border, cross-departmental, and it's a longer process where someone is just doing a piece of it, then definitely indeed. Those tools like for process mining are really, really cool because it pulls all this different information from different chunks of the process into one source of insights. And yeah, luckily we talk about low-code and no-code here a lot, and process automation doesn't have to be complex. Oh no, it can be complex, but not necessarily like a huge, huge thing, huge burden to get started with. And the same is with process mining nowadays. We know for all these systems. We know there's a Salesforce, we know there's a Dynamics, we know there's an SAP, we know there's— so lots of these system-critical platforms, ERPs. So they had already like connectors in these systems. And then when you get started with those process mining tools, just okay, there's my SAP system, there's my Salesforce system, there's my this and that system, and here's maybe a custom or legacy system. But it's so easy to get that, get, get that going. And This is why it's so exciting after these ideas. It doesn't need to be like a massive undertaking to actually get started and get these benefits very, very soon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you mentioned templates out there for companies in the business, and I also potentially, and that will help to build these pipelines even more. And I think also understanding on the topic itself, what automation workflow and process and all that means. And this is why we have at The Automation Guys created that sandbox where we can also sort of learn what automation could do. Getting your hands dirty and discussing some other use cases in automation with sort of like-minded people, then go to theautomationguys.net and sign up for the— sign up to our community and Yeah, and more and more ideas are flowing, I'm 100% sure. Yeah, so that's it for today's episode, and thanks a lot for listening. We will be back very soon with another episode, and until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process InnoVations 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!