The drive for intelligent automation is ever persistent in the world of SSOs. SSON Analytics “GBS and Shared Services State of Industry Survey 2022” showed that digitizing data (39%) and leveraging automation platforms (37%) are top objectives for the year. However, despite this drive for digitization and automation, 38% of respondents had less than five business processes completely automated.
During last week’s IA APAC event, speakers discussed various topics related to automation and efforts to improve business processes. This analysis will point out some key takeaways to help your business continue successfully automating processes.
Getting Employees Ready For E2E Process Integration
During the opening panel conversation of IA APAC, Tauhid Abdul Jalil, Principal Consultant of Southeast Asia for Laive, and Tim Johnson, Head of Automation for Suncorp, discussed the value of getting employee buy-in for end-to-end (E2E) process integration.
No longer are business technologies operated solely by IT departments. In a modern business, every employee needs to understand how technologies work and how they can be utilized to improve the efficiency of a process.
“Employees are the ones that understand what customers want and how they want it,” Johnson said. “It’s on business leaders to understand what technologies are best for each team so they can meet the demand from customers.”
Johnson and Jalil both agreed that the democratization of technology has become essential in improving E2E process integration. A business will no longer find success if the IT branch is the sole practitioner of technology implementation. Leaders need to ensure employees at every level are knowledgeable in the technologies that make the processes they work on more efficient.
Although the idea of preparing a large number of employees for new technologies might sound daunting, Johnson says that as technologies have improved, so have their training platforms. Employees now have the ability to learn these technologies at their own pace, which can help increase willingness to implement technologies into processes.
Jalil followed up by saying employees learning and implementing technology into an E2E process shouldn’t be the final objective. “Even with an E2E process automation, there should be checkpoints throughout the workflows,” Jalil said. “Employees should be checking the accuracy of the automation and making sure it is learning and continuing to grow in the way that was intended.”
When concluding, Johnson added that employees and business leaders need to be comfortable with failure when implementing automation to E2E processes. It could very well be the case that more automation strategies don’t provide the benefits they hoped to bring. But if these failures are anticipated and accepted, process managers will be willing to continue trying new technologies to determine the best fit.
Process Mining vs. Process Discovery: Choosing The Best Fit For Your Organization
Process Mining and Process Discovery are expressions used a lot when companies begin analyzing their processes for improvement. However, many businesses might not know what strategy is best for them.
During IA APAC, Chris Ellis, Director of Pre Sales for Nintex, and Ziv Ilan, Head of Professional Services and Alliances, sat down for a fireside chat to discuss the best option to create an automation blueprint for your businesses needs.
Both Ellis and Ilan agreed that before a business can determine whether Process Mining or Process Discovery is the best fit for them, they need to have a firm understanding of both terms.
According to Ilan, Process Mining tends to analyze processes using company forms and databases. However, the databases and logs Process Mining uses don’t always capture the full picture of how a process is working. This is where Process Discovery can provide additional insight.
Process Discovery brings automation to the front-end of the process analysis by observing user data and feedback. “In many cases, log files and system files only provide limited visibility of the process,” Ilan said. “Not every action the user is doing during the process is going to be generated in those log files. So, in a way, there are a lot of blindspots in Process Mining that Process Discovery can help fill.”
Many large companies, such as financial institutions, who were using Process Mining in the past have now turned to Process Discovery to gain further insight into their processes.
Regardless of which one your business decides to utilize, both Process Mining and Process Discovery can be a tool to pinpoint processes that need improvements. However, Ellis and Ilan believe it is imperative your company clearly communicates what problems they are trying to solve before obtaining and implementing one of these techniques.
What You Can Learn From Kmart and Target’s Automation Drive
When you think of grocery giants in the US, Kmart and Target are typically two that come to mind. Companies operating on a large scale usually have thousands of processes that need to be maintained, updated and automated.
Keldo Gliana, an Automation Practice Owner for Kmart, was tasked with automating several of these business processes. During IA APAC, Gliana detailed the strategies he used to automate 60+ business processes for Kmart and Target successfully.
When faced with such a large task, Gliana focused on ensuring the details and strategies were in place before even bringing in automation technologies.
Gliana and his associates started by establishing a vision for automating processes. “From day one Kmart group made a large investment in hiring our team and building an engine that looks at business requirements from across Kmart/Target and develops them,” Gliana said. “That acted as a flywheel to enable subject matter experts across Kmart to begin developing automation for themselves.”
Gliana’s next step was to bring in a team that could begin automating processes in a fashion that could be applied across Kmart. “It’s important to start a team with champions,” Gliana emphasized. “You want skilled and talented developers, as well as automation and RPA engineers that can hit the ground running and will quickly show a return on investment to the company.”
Once the team was in place, they began getting to work, determining which technologies would best serve each business function and implementing those RPAs across Kmart.
The benefit of having an organized team with clear goals became apparent when Gliana looked at the value they delivered across Kmart and Target. Gliana’s team managed to save millions for customer support teams by leveraging new technologies, cut millions in costs by automating new processes, and improved the overall experience for both customers and employees.
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, make sure you complete the Intelligent Automation 2022 Benchmarking Survey to see where you sit with your peers.