Business automation is becoming a more popular strategy at a variety of organizations and companies due to its benefits of saving time and money on manual tasks, according to an article from CIO. In fact, automation can be a more accurate and faster method for completing some of the more simple tasks at a company.
This gives staff members more time to complete some of the more difficult, complex, and higher value projects at an organization. However, business automation can be a challenging process and needs to be done right. To prevent problems from improper implementation, managers will need to copy the following strategies to ensure they accurately implement business automation.
“This is after all a disruptive technology, and most managers don’t want their department and/or team to be disrupted,” Frank Casale, founder of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation & Artificial Intelligence (IRPA AI), told the news source.
To learn how to successfully make your business more automated, keep reading our strategies below.
Strategy 1: Measure the Value Potential of Business Automation at a High Level
According to a McKinsey Digital article, when building a case regarding the business decision of automation, it is vital to assess the value potential of the major IT activities related to this endeavour.
As much as 70% of Enterprise IT activities can be connected to business automation. There are several areas where managers and data analysts can measure the value potential of automating a particular process. These areas are outlined below.
- Addressing Customer Requests and Incidents. The majority of customer issues begin with a customer service help-desk request and are usually considered to have a “low difficulty” level of 1. Nonetheless, there are many issues that are at a higher level of difficulty such as level-2 or level-3 problems and are usually passed to more specialized IT teams to handle resolving. These are often more costly to fix. Categorizing and sorting this process of the difficulty among customer requests can offer a real assessment benefit for a company.
- Performing planned, necessary activities. Another area to measure the value potential of includes automation of planned activities and simple tasks such as upgrades, backups, or more complex topics like fixing security audits. As much as 20% of the cost for IT teams can take up by completing these tasks manually.
- Completing new applications. Creating and delivering new applications can take up as much as 20% to 40% of IT effort, which means this is the biggest source of value among IT teams. Along with developing new applications, IT teams are in charge of testing and hosting.
Strategy 2: Define Specific Ways to Understand the Use Cases Needed to Implement Business Automation
The best ways to implement automation technology can vary greatly depending on the relevant business activity, which means it is vital to define the “root causes for issues,” according to the McKinsey article.
The root cause of customer service requests may not be easily understood, which means identifying the ones that are most well-suited for automation can become a challenge. Sometimes a specific problem such as someone not receiving emails could be as simple as a lost password or as complex as an email-program issue. While about 80 percent of “reset password” problems can be automated, more complex challenges may need manual solutions.
Customers today are also looking for a quick and easy digital user experience in terms of having their problems resolved. This is why modernizing and digitizing of business processes is such an important part of running a company.
However, the use of text-mining technology that can read tickets addressing customer service issues could define the exact insight needed to fix the problem. In fact, one team found that there are three particular categories that a number of these tickets can be put into, which include:
- Automatable customer service requests
- Customer service issue requires machine learning
- Highly cognitive/manual customer service requests
Strategy 3: Perform a Proof of Concept
To ensure the value of a particular business automation step is significant, a chief information officer will need to proceed with a proof of concept. Incident processing is a useful place to start since companies that have implemented automating capabilities in this area have seen cost savings as high as 30 percent.
In this case, there are a variety of customer service request tickets that can be easily positioned as a proof of concept especially due to already-automated systems on more advanced technology such as resetting passwords, ordering equipment, and setting up access for new employees. Creating a proof of concept requires the following:
- Workshops with IT experts in order to understand where to apply automation processes
- Carefully selecting a business automation platform
- Receiving all needed approvals from the IT team
- Incorporating iterative design techniques when developing the automated programs
- Continually monitoring and documenting the results to ensure value attainment
Strategy 4: Develop Automation Capabilities to Scale
It is important to essentially build a new culture around business automation at your organization in order to properly embed automation “at the heart of the IT organization.” In order to build automation capabilities to scale, it is important to adhere to the following three factors.
1. Ramp up past successes to new parts of the IT processes
2. Reach out to leaders and managers across other departments to get the word out about the benefits of automation
3. Learn about more advanced aspects of business automation
What Artificial Intelligence Should Do for Your Business
Artificial intelligence (AI) is part of nearly every technological process surrounding our world today including most products or services for sale as well as part of important business problem solving applications, according to a McKinsey&Company article.
Some typical areas where AI can be useful for your business is in deep-learning techniques, which are becoming more advanced. This includes the delivery of improvements in accuracy in terms of prediction and classification.
“Deep learning uses large-scale neural networks that can contain millions of simulated “neurons” structured in layers. The most common networks are called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). These neural networks learn through the use of training data and backpropagation algorithms,” the research paper from McKinsey&Company stated.
While data labeling can become complex due to human errors when categorizing data, reinforcement learning can be a process that allows algorithms to learn tasks using trial and error methods.
Big data (and business intelligence) include larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources. Common data processing software is often not advanced enough to handle the volume of information in “big data” sets. While working with huge amounts of training data sets can be difficult, one-shot learning is a technique that can be used to decrease the need for massive training data sets. This process allows AI to better understand a subject when given a small amount of real-world examples and situations.
Adopting AI can help business managers stay ahead of the game and keep up with new ideas and processes. It can help business leaders become trailblazers in their given fields and stay informed about all of the possibilities regarding business automation.
The Benefits of a Time Intelligence Tool
When it comes to business automation, you will find that there are also a number of benefits that can be achieved with the use of a time intelligence tool. For example, a task management tool can help automate tasks. These tasks include running project templates to check for errors or areas for improvement as well as generating reports and calculating the hours employees have worked on a particular project.
In addition, a team task management tool can help you better organize your tasks, schedule weekly meetings, distribute tasks among team members, and prioritize the most important assignments.
In fact, task management software significantly improves prioritization in such ways that it boosts productivity at a company and helps motivate employees. For example, this tool can help track the time employees spend working on projects, can assign breaks into their schedule, simplify a remote working schedule, and improve task delegation.
How a Task and Work Management Software Program Benefits Businesses
You will find that a work management software program like the Runrun.it tool can greatly benefit your business. For example, it improves communication by creating a simple way to leave comments and assign tasks.
In addition, the Runrun.it work management program helps managers organize the workflow by tracking time spent on particular projects and the amount of revisions a document undergoes. Best of all, a work management software program can help you measure performance among all team members and generally improve performance. This makes a big impact on enhancing productivity for the company as a whole.
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