Published on October 28th, 2021 | by Bibhuranjan

How to Revitalize Your Existing Process Automation Strategy

Business is something that needs a bit of a learning curve at times. You won’t get everything done right the first time. Maybe not the second, either, if you’re counting. But what you will do is pivot. You’ll find ways to reemphasize the important parts of your business, of what you provide to your customers. Part of that journey, of that learning curve, is the way that every business must change and adapt at times to become better at automating.

Not every business automates their processes, of course, but for those that do, there are strategies in place that help with this. But not every process automation strategy is good — and not every set of automations is optimal for a specific business. As such, you need to be able to tell what works for yours.

Your Strategy Should…

Complete The Process

It may seem like an obvious point to make: your strategy should make sure all steps, all tasks are in place. However, it’s not always easy to be sure of this when making changes to your process automation. There are ways to miss important pieces of the puzzle when you think that everything — or certain things — are being handled by automation now. Always have an idea of what your entire process should encompass, step by step, that way when you implement automation (or are simply making them better) your business won’t skip a beat.

Include Change Management

Change management is important in any business venture, but the measure of its success is something that becomes crucially important when looking at your process automation strategy. Your current strategy should include detailed ways of handling these changes, whether it’s in response to a need or it’s simply your business scaling up in its operations. As the business’s technologies and processes change, it’ll be crucial for your strategy to account for what’s next.

Be Based In A Modern Architecture

Automation doesn’t always work in an existing system of processes that relies on legacy technology. In fact, it’s rare that it does, given the fact that automation is a part of modern business processes — almost exclusively. As such, your existing automation strategy needs to be based in a modern architecture orchestrating microservices together for your consistent use. If you’re automating, but you’re automating an older process with pieces that don’t gel completely with your modern tools, you’re wasting the potential of the microservices in your process, which are designed to be executed within a modern business framework alongside other such technologies.

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Revitalize Your Process Automation Strategy By…

Preemptively Optimizing The Process

So you’ve found that your business process is in need of updating — and you’ve set up that modern architecture, making sure that all your microservices are in place to account for every step, every task, every goal. Now, you need to fine-tune. This needs to happen before you’ve implemented your automation: take the time to break down the process piece by piece and optimize each microservice, each subprocess, as though each one is a cog to be cleaned for its place in a larger machine. If you start automating without preemptively optimizing each individual tool and container, without optimizing the process, you’ll find yourself unable to get the optimal results, since optimization is ultimately more complicated when the process is ongoing. In this regard, robotic process automation development can be exceedingly efficient.

Sharing Ownership of Success

However you do business, with whatever products or services, you and your team want success. You should want the same from your processes, as a result, but in many cases, someone is willing to force the ownership of that success onto one party, one department within: the business operations or IT departments, mainly.

In either case, you’d be looking at only half the puzzle pieces, unable to solve anything accurately because of the fact that each department has so much to do with the process and its success. IT teams ensure that the technologies are in place and working to the satisfaction of their defined performance goals. The business ops team, on the other hand, is focused on production, on the end product, and metrics like the time which it takes to produce. Both sides of a process are important — the technical and the operational — but if all is running smoothly from the technical aspects while the business is incapable of providing its services at the expected rate, it’s up to both parties to take responsibility for this need and come up with the solution. If your business is currently only letting one department take charge of the process automation, now’s the time to change that.

Drive Proactive Changes

Some look at change management as a reactive tool, a thing to be used when certain roads can no longer be traveled. While changes can be responsive in nature, even creating the best possible solutions to certain roadblocks in a process, change should also be preemptive. There should always be a culture of looking out for the best way to improve the process — and in turn, managing that change in a way that best serves the needs of the business.

Be Informed

It’s important to know all you can about your process, but more than that, it’s important to know how your process connects each little container within the workflow. You might currently only account for the basic essential connections between each step of the process, but in restructuring your automation strategy to be more fruitful and easier to manage, you need to actually interconnect every microservice with its various necessary dependencies, be it the regulatory data, business rules, business goals — since each microservice is its own machine, and needs to be informed in order to perform its duties appropriately.

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Tags: AI, automation, automation software, business automation strategies, machine learning

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.