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Thankfully, however, there is a structured, five-step approach that we at Tecala have used with a range of our clients to great effect. These steps are:
Step 1: Process discovery
Initial conversations about the potential for process improvement are likely to already be taking place within your organisation – often around the lunch table. Staff tend to chat about the processes they use daily and the limitations and frustrations they face. Listening to your team can provide valuable insights into which processes should be targeted first and the likely benefits that will result.
Once the first candidate process has been identified, a proper discovery procedure will highlight its potential for cost, efficiency, and human experience benefits. Starting with a short discovery session with a senior consultant, we can gather information and map out the entire process as a visualisation and analysis exercise.
If the process isn’t mapped out in advance, it’s impossible to understand the impact that changing it would have on the rest of the team (as well as on the rest of the business) so getting this first step right is critical.
Step 2: Champion a single process
At Tecala, we engage with different organisations in different industries every day. The insights we gather have revealed some clear trends in the processes being selected for initial examination and improvement.
Chosen either for the immediate value they can deliver in terms of cost savings, improving employee experiences, or improving customer services, they provide an ideal place to start your automation process.
Popular processes identified as a good starting point include new employee onboarding and existing employee retention. This is particularly important at a time when there is intense competition for talent and so improvements to processes are likely to have a significant impact.
Step 3: Making a start
Intelligent business practice strategies can be approached in a number of different ways. At Tecala, we recommend an approach that starts small, but then enables you to scale up automation to other parts of your organisation. It’s important to be able to make incremental improvements as you go, both on the first process and any subsequent processes being targeted. This is why usage reporting is important to identify and remediate any issues quickly.
Because you’ve already mapped your processes in Stage two, you can cost-effectively implement automation programs so they flow through multiple business functions simultaneously.
Step 4: Supporting Intelligent Business Practices at Scale
Once you have one Intelligent Business Practice in place and producing results, it will quickly grab the attention of other teams and managers. This, in turn, can quickly lead to a large pipeline of ideas and candidate processes for improvement that can overwhelm internal resources.
The next step, therefore, is to ensure there are appropriate resourcing and support structures in place to scale up the program. Rather than going to the expense of building an internal centre of excellence (CoE) to support this activity, an alternative approach is to engage a specialist partner like Tecala that knows the intelligent automation tools inside-out.
Step 5: Keep people at the centre of your automation strategy
People are the most important part of any organisation, and an Intelligent Business Practice strategy will augment their potential. Keep a focus on what changes will mean for them at all times.
Intelligent Business Practices can deliver massive value to a business.
Talk to us today about what a strategy could mean for you.
Business process automation is a long-term strategy. In a short 30-minute discussion, we’ll assess where you are on your journey and identify the key areas for automation in your business that will streamline processes, drive efficiencies and improve profitability.
What is the best approach to take? Which automation technologies and tools will have the greatest impact and drive the best possible efficiencies?
The benefits of Intelligent Business Practices are becoming increasingly understood by organisations, yet many are still to begin the process of deployment.
