How do you know when a process needs help? Is it slow, bloated, or, worst of all, truly broken? It’s a crucial question for all leaders and teams pursuing speed and growth, to meet digital transformation goals like faster customer onboarding or faster time to market. Often, even seemingly simple business processes are more complex than we realize. Teams and individuals may develop clever workarounds to get past large and small process problems. But those solutions don’t scale, and eventually your processes and organizational speed both stall.
When should you automate a process? Let’s examine some signs that process automation is in order and explore advice for applying it as part of a broad automation strategy.
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End-to-end process automation, also known as hyperautomation, can cut through the obstacles that create bottlenecks and slow down your team’s workflows.
In everyday life, most of us already see many examples of processes that benefit from automation, such as employee onboarding and customer service request routing. But process automation also helps companies streamline the most complex, highly regulated processes, such as the automated underwriting process in the insurance industry.
In the automated underwriting insurance example, the overall answer to “why automate?” is clear: leaders must balance speed and compliance at the same time. The speed created by automation is a competitive necessity. But there are plenty of other reasons to automate—and it’s critical to know the signs that automation is in order.
Maybe you’ve experienced an accounting (or HR, IT, or sales) process that involves many “swivel the chair” moments, where a team member needs another person to fill in information in order to advance the work. Think about your own organization’s workflows and processes and whether any of these four signs of trouble sound familiar:
These warning signs signal the need for leaders and their teams to locate the root causes of issues so they can create long-term improvements. Consider these five common root causes:
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If you’re struggling with any of those signs or root problems, implementing process automation makes sense. A modern process automation platform optimizes complex processes, such as customer onboarding processes in banking, from end to end. That’s much different than simply automating a discrete task inside a workflow. A process like the customer onboarding banking example cuts across business functions, multiple software solutions, and on-premises and cloud systems. An automation point solution on its own won’t be enough.
To get the job done, choose a process automation platform that unifies an array of automation technologies, including robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent document processing (IDP), workflow orchestration, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Consider this advice for process automation success:
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