Intelligent automation is the need of the hour today for businesses across industries. Business leaders are rapidly implementing automation solutions in their existing processes or creating new automation opportunities. By doing so, they are accelerating their digital transformation to achieve operational efficiency and productivity.
It has the potential to deliver enormous benefits for your organization, including optimizing processes cost-efficiently, increased customer satisfaction, high ROI, improved compliance, and detecting and preventing fraud and errors.
However, adding intelligent automation to your existing or new processes can be challenging—for example, inadequate or poor-quality data, technical challenges, insufficient resources required to achieve the transformation. To mitigate such challenges, your organization needs to follow the necessary steps in implementing the automation processes.
In this blog post, we have outlined critical success factors to ensure a smooth intelligent automation transformation journey for your business.
Vision
To leverage intelligent automation opportunities, you need to put a robust strategy and defined purpose in place. This could be achieving operational efficiency, improving data or process quality, or enhancing stakeholder experiences by optimizing time-to-market. Whatever the grounds, an intelligent automation strategy must be aligned to match the business’s comprehensive needs.
Accessing the Processes
The next step in the intelligent automation transformation is to identify automation opportunities that add value to your existing or new processes. For instance, you might look at the low productivity processes that can be optimized by integrating customized automation solutions. Or, you could eliminate the repetitive and time-consuming tasks by implementing an RPA automation process.
Also, before automating a process, consider which operations can be completely automated and which may require manual intervention as this demands additional time, cost, and effort. Then, after accessing the overall strategic business objectives for automation, a decision should be taken.
Evaluate
Evaluating your chosen processes is the following step in the automation journey. Simply put, you need to detect any glitches or issues with your current processes workflows.
It’s critical to fix any processes that aren’t working to streamline seamlessly, as automation cannot fix failed processes or workflows. So this is one of the important factors to focus on.
Also, it is vital to evaluate the implementation risks and steps to mitigate them. The three prominent examples of such risks are:
- Security breach or vulnerabilities.
- The potential level of disruption.
- The impact of automation stress.
Prepare
After fixing broken processes and identifying potential risks of automation implementation, you can now prepare to start with your automation solution. Implementing comprehensive solutions can reduce the risks you’ve identified previously.
Further, you can prepare your team to detect and manage security risks by updating your security protocols and procedures. It will help your IT team take corrective measures to protect your sensitive data and infrastructure from cybercrimes.
Choose your Automation Solution
The next step is to select or build your comprehensive and customized automation solution. Your choice of tool should match your pre-defined business needs. For instance, choosing robotic process automation tools can help you optimize your business operations. With RPA bots, you can mitigate manual errors and enhance business quality.
You can consider building your own automation solution that enables you to achieve your desired goals. Building your own automation solutions is possible if you have an in-house team and sufficient resources. Or, you can look for an offshore automation development company to avoid the additional cost of expanding in-house resources. This is often the best possible option, as it saves you time, and you can easily access support when needed.
When choosing a vendor for an automation solution, you need to consider their security processes, NDA policies, track record, and available support options. This can help further mitigate risks.
Delivery
To start automating processes, you need to document the accurate information in the initial phase. In addition, each chosen automated process must be documented precisely, which explains what to automate and what not to automate.
Automation solution development can start once the process design authority has approved the proposed blueprint and conducted the necessary peer reviews. Then, after the business is agreed upon, the development process and the software testing begin.
Once the robots are fully working, ensure they need the minimal effort of the operational team for manual intervention. However, a technical capability is readily available if they don’t function as expected.
Overall, there must be a rigorous, supporting IT infrastructure to ensure accuracy and continuity of automation resources.
Implementation
Implementing automation solutions is the final step in the Intelligent automation journey. It is suggested to start with a single process that carries the least risk. If it goes wrong, this enables you to fix it early and ensure system integration — without disrupting effective workflows.
Once you succeed with your automation system scalability and stability, you can add more processes.
The right implementation of automation solutions for the right process enables businesses to speed time-to-market, achieve operational efficiency and expand business capabilities.
A Digital Journey With Intelligent Automation
Your team must follow each step defined above to optimize your workflow processes or create new opportunities with intelligent automation. Once the company is fully prepared to integrate the automation solutions in the processes, start implementing them to create an advantage in the competitive landscape.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do you create an automation plan?
Steps in Test Automation Planning are as under:
- Analysis and Planning.
- Choosing Automation Tools and Technology.
- Select and Design Framework.
- Define Scope of tests.
- Prepare the Test cases.
- Implement the test cases.
- Review the test cases.
What are the three types of automation?
The types of automation can be divided into:
(1) Fixed automation
(2) Programmable automation, and
(3) Flexible automation.
What is the sequence of the RPA life cycle?
The RPA lifecycle is how automation is delivered and executed to optimize process workflow. It starts from identifying a task to automate to its deployment and its continuous monitoring after that.
Which are the steps of RPA implementations?
RPA Implementation Process
- Define processes To automate
- Conduct feasibility assessment
- Readjust
- Collect User cases
- Start development process
- RPA Process testing
- Deployment
*This post was originally posted on postingtree.com
