Business process automation is the wave of the future. Or it was 15 years ago. Now a drive toward hyperautomation is very much the present. But why do so many automation attempts still fail? Why are outdated technologies still in use? How do you know which processes to automate? Are the bots you are buying saving you more than what it cost you to develop them? How do you know? Lots of questions, let’s get started with the answers.
The Need for Automation
Almost half the activities people are paid almost $16 trillion in wages to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology. McKinsey report for the US Department of Labor
If you have repetitive computer-based tasks being done by humans, your company can probably benefit from automation. You may also have brilliant creative people whose time is getting sucked up with menial office tasks rather than coming up with creative solutions.
Adding bots, or a digital workforce, to your organization can free up this mental capital. They increase the speed and accuracy of work, and save your company money.
At least that’s what the sales guy tells you. And he’s right, if the automations work… However, 50-70% of automation attempts fail according to E&Y 2017 Report, Robotic Report.
But we know success stories are out there, and they are huge:
A large commercial bank redesigned its claims process to use RPA. It deployed 85 bots, running 13 processes, and handling 1.5 million requests per year. As a result, the bank added capacity equivalent to around 230 full-time employees, at less than a third of the cost of hiring the equivalent staff. The bank also recorded a 27 percent increase in tasks performed “right the first time.”
Much of the failure in automation attempts comes from skipping steps in the Automation Journey.
Where to start in your Automation Journey
We know we want to automate our processes, let’s pick one to start with and go!
Sounds easy. But the level of process intelligence, actually knowing what your processes are and how well they are being followed, is staggeringly low in most industries.
Actual step 1 is Process Discovery or Process Mining. This is determining what your tasks are and their level of automation potential (their level of readiness for automation.)
The traditional way of doing this is hiring a consultant to observe workers doing their tasks. Or the slightly more updated version, Visual Process Discovery. This is having a software program take screenshots of employees working and then review thousands of images remotely. Which opens you up to issues with personal employee data, data transfer, data storage offsite, and the files are huge!
The Dawn of Intelligent Process discovery and Hyperautomation
Let us Introduce GENIE, An AI-powered process discovery platform. GENIE software is installed on users’ computers in your organization and tracks their workflows in the background without slowing them down. We don’t take screenshots, rather we track actions, actually reading the code behind the screens and determining what users are doing. We track all meaningful process actions performed by your team. Hovers, clicks, opens, closes, form submits, you name it we track it. On Excel, PDFs, custom forms, email, websites…. yah, all of it can be captured.
The key word here is meaningful. To keep yourself from swimming in a sea of too much data our system also has filters built in. You can blacklist, or exclude, certain software or websites (Facebook as an example) if those actions are not useful to your processes.
From this data, GENIE’s AI groups the actions into tasks and the tasks into processes. When we add your data logs, process mining, we can map processes across multiple departments and in various locations of your company. GENIE’s current max is 10,000 users at once.
On your Scorecard, you will be able to see tasks by department with their time taken and cost per year. It will also display the most Highly Automatable tasks and the Highly Improvable tasks.
Allowing you to focus on processes that are ready to automate rather than the process improvement and standardization first. Read more about our Process Improvement Accelerator.
In our Automation Accelerator, you will be able to see the detailed task maps created, displaying the variations of each task. The AI also creates a name and a verbal description of each task, making it easier to know what the task is meant to achieve.
Automation Potential and knowing which processes to automate first
Once we have collected the data on how processes are actually being done in your company, we can evaluate each task’s automation potential. This is the effort we calculate it will take to develop and automate that workflow.
Automation Potential is based on several features:
- Complexity of the process
- Number of steps in the task
- Number of applications used
- Types of applications used
- Level of standardization – number of variations found among your users in completing the task
The Tasks Tab shows the overall Score of each task. This is a combination of the automation potential and the potential cost savings. If a task has an automation potential of 90 but a cost savings of only $2000 per year, it will not have a meaningful ROI. Therefore, it would have a lower overall score. This allows you to focus on tasks with higher scores, ones that have higher cost saving and automation potential.
Now that you have chosen which tasks to automate, standardized the variations, and calculated that the cost of automation is worth it, you are ready to go.
GENIE will export your task maps with all the process data to your chosen automation platform to build your digital workers.
Understanding the Benefits of Automation
After your bots are built, GENIE will help you track their implementation. You can see how much time is actually freed up by your bots’ actions and the cost savings that are being accrued.
For tasks that need improvement first, you can track your human workforce’s adoption of the new process in our Enablement Accelerator. It also has a bunch of other great HR goodies.
The 7 Steps of a Successful Automation Journey
GENIE’s unique AI Process Intelligence system will walk you through each of the steps that will ensure a successful automation process with a strong ROI.
- Process Discovery – determine which processes have high automation potential
- Analyze your Results – see which tasks will be worth the cost of automation
- Process Improvement – define and clean up your processes
- Task Maps – export your task maps to your automation platform
- Implementation – deploying your bots
- Track the efficiency of your bots after implementation and calculate the actual ROI
- Continue building your Automation Pipeline
Ready to start your automation journey with GENIE? Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch to schedule a demo.
