You are concerned about Digital Transformation being mentioned all over you. Process automation is how you start the journey into your Digital Transformation. Knowing how Process Automation works is a critical piece of information for you. We already know that Process Automation leads to success. Process Automation is all about transformations. These transformations result in faster ROI than any other transformational change you could do. Your Process Automation journey will guide you through ongoing optimizations and allow you to squeeze more Dollars from your efforts.
The Process of Process Automation
The Automation process allows you to transform your manual process into a programmed process, also called automation or bot. Bots are small pieces of software and run the same exact set of steps you can execute manually.
What does this mean? It means you can have software click on the same buttons, enter values into the same fields, and perform the same overall actions than a person does. The process is particularly convenient with repetitive tasks, where people don’t need to think about it too much. Ultimately, the major benefit is that your teams will now have more time to complete the tasks that require their abilities. Your team’s overall productivity increases with the use of process automation.
Process Selection
Once you decide you want to automate processes, you need to choose which one to automate. Here is where it gets interesting. Choosing the right process will increase your ROI. Choose the wrong one and you will probably spend more time than expected in transforming a process that won’t bring more bang-for-your-buck. You want to prioritize processes that are repeated very often and take up the most time from your team.
Taking upon a process that lasts for a week and needs to happen only once a year may be great, but it will benefit you only once a year. The most you can benefit from this automation is the 40 hours you could get back for the resource that executes it every year. Taking on a daily process that takes 10 minutes from your 5 administrative resources can potentially save you more than 216 hours of their time per year. You can look at this from an “hours perspective” and prioritize optimizing their availability. By the same token, you can look at this challenge from a “pure ROI perspective” and incorporate their hourly rate so you can get a sense of which one yields a better ROI. The ultimate goal is to automate both processes, but you want to go from most convenient to least convenient. Regardless of what that convenience metric would be for you.
There are more elements to take into account such as process analysis, feasibility study, and many other steps that are part of this process selection.
Bot Development
Now that you have selected the process you want to automate, you want to get started building the automation. Bot development is a type of software development. Not all programmers know how to do bot development for RPA. Anyone can learn, and if they have the logical inclination, they can become really good bot developers.
Bot developers will replicate the manual process in its automated form. Once the bot is ready, it’s time for testing and making sure that you haven’t missed anything. This is a critical part of the process. You want to get to this point by having captured and automated the main process and all its possible exceptions. Failing to capture an exception will mean that the bot won’t know how to react whenever the exception presents itself to the process. Given that this is going to be automated, you want to be prepared to handle all exceptions.