Automation - Letting Humans be Humans

Almost every large corporation is indicating that automation will be the strategic direction their development will take in the future.

This topic features heavily in many of today’s conferences, and software producers talk about a whole range of new features and opportunities. It may seem like there is not much to add, but in this article, we’ll try to summarize the advantages, as we see them.

Automation. That's the buzzword that has been on everyone’s lips. Why? Human beings have always tried to make their life and work easier. They started by inventing new tools, innovations, and machines.

Today, however, the majority of work performed in many organizations involves tasks performed in IT systems rather than physical work.

Corporations have gone global. Smaller companies with a number of applications implemented new systems, while keeping the old ones. They began to offer new services. Thanks to all of this, business processes now involve far more data, and have become much more complex.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, organizations will save 30% of their operational costs by linking hyper-automation technologies and remodeling their processes. The report also states that by 2025, more than 90% of enterprises will have an automation architect; a significant increase from the less than 20% that have one today.

Any changes that occur in an organization are liable to result in a certain degree of fear and resistance.

This is even truer when we talk about automation. Every time automation appears on the agenda, employees start to feel insecure. It is, therefore, extremely important to try and understand things from the employees' perspective and present the benefits of automation in the right way.

First of all, the biggest and most obvious benefit of automation is the time that is saved and, as we all know, time is money. In terms of actual savings, it has been proved that intelligent automation cuts business process costs by anywhere from 25% to 40% on average.

When we automate things, we save time in many different ways:

• Automatic orchestration reduces delays caused by time spent communicating. As one team finishes its work, the next team receives the information they need.
  
  
• Access to reports/data can be ‘live’ because reports can be auto-generated instead of being prepared manually.
  
  
• Thanks to task automation and internal communication optimization, response time to clients is shortened.

The next step should be to extend their responsibilities so that they can use their potential to the full. This should enable them to develop their professional skills further, increasing their job satisfaction.

Doing repetitive things involves some risk of error. That doesn’t mean that it eliminates it altogether; however, provided that the logic behind the process is well-defined, the risk of logic error will be reduced significantly.

What is worth mentioning is that automation very often forces business units to create appropriate documentation of the process. We could say that automation imposes order in the organization. This is also linked to another aspect. Let’s imagine that a complex process that includes a lot of regulations, stages, etc. is handled manually.

Moving on, automation technology also allows you to discover new aspects of the processes you use. As an example, thanks to tools such as process mining, you can now find bottlenecks in your processes based on the data from your systems. Using automation makes you aware of the weaknesses in your process, and the optimal and negative paths. 

Based on those short descriptions of potential benefits, you might start thinking about processes that you would like to automate. 

In order to get started, you must consider the following:

• Which repetitive tasks are time-consuming?
  
  
• Which processes are very complex?
  
  
• Where do we have communication issues between teams?
  
  
• What tasks are boring for my employees? What other important tasks should they be focusing on? Which departments have the highest employee turnover?
  
  
• Do any of our processes involve a long response time to our client? Where can we improve customer satisfaction?
  
  
• Where do delays occur in data accessing? Where do we need to accelerate reporting?

This is just a glimpse of how your company can approach automation in the future. The whole point of digitalization is to facilitate our daily work.

Demand for employees is growing, and we should try to automate as much as we can to allow people to focus on tasks that are engaging and innovative. It should increase employee satisfaction and efficiency, and decrease costs.