How to Automate Business Processes: 3 Pieces of Advice to Help You Succeed

Over the past few years, organizations have been seriously pursuing business process automation to take care of repetitive tasks, reduce human error, and drive process efficiencies. However, many organizations have unintentionally created new inefficiencies because of oversights in their implementation strategies. 

What kinds of oversights? They have invested piece by piece in quick-fix automation solutions that only address an immediate need. These narrowly scoped solutions didn’t scale, preventing the organizations from realizing the full benefits of automation. Not only that, but this approach meant managing increasingly complex automation journeys that felt disjointed to employees and customers, rather than making their lives easier. Thanks to these islands of automation, IT teams have become burdened with high maintenance costs, complex upgrades, complicated integrations, misaligned governance, unnecessary contracts for overlapping tools, and a lack of skilled resources to manage multiple vendors for standalone initiatives. 

But there are smart ways to get past common pitfalls that can get in the way of automating your manual business processes. Follow these three guidelines on how to automate your business operations.

If you have multiple process automation tools that don’t work well together, you’ll run into substantial challenges when trying to automate your manual processes. Using standalone systems for different automation tasks is part of what’s led to such difficult management for IT teams and stunted growth for business leaders. A platform that unifies these technologies enables you to use the best-fit tool that works well with your data and enables automation-native operations.

Adopting a strategy built on a process automation platform empowers you to integrate a full range of process automation technologies, which work seamlessly to automate manual processes, streamline complex tasks, and improve your business operations. You can choose the best-fit technology for the task and bring in digital workers to participate in workflows alongside humans. 

You’ll have elements like artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), business rules, and process modeling all in one place as you find new candidates for automation and design processes for your organization. And by using a comprehensive platform, you steer clear of the high costs required to maintain different automation software, complex integrations, and the need for skilled resources to manage each separate instance of your automation technology.

Automation needs a solid data foundation to succeed, and a platform approach gives you that foundation while enabling easy access to your data. Platforms should allow you to access enterprise data throughout the your business regardless of where it lives, with well-defined structures and properly enforced security.

Tip: Look for a business process management platform that offers a data fabric. While there are plenty of data management solutions out there (data lakes, data warehouses, data meshes, etc.), the strategy that offers the fastest and most effective interaction with data regardless of where it's located, is a data fabric.

An automation-native operation means that the operation runs on an automation platform and employs an automation-first approach. To be automation native, your organization needs a platform that enables users to collaborate in any aspect of business operations. With automation-native operations, automation experts, citizen and professional developers, and end users have a central place they can collaborate, aligned in a way that ensures automation needs are met and that user experience and business outcomes meet expectations.

Finding an automation platform that breaks down or significantly reduces the barriers of AI adoption and addresses real-world use cases will serve you well. These AI-augmented tools can deliver even better results for streamlining your processes. You should also ensure the vendor will deliver AI in a way you can trust—by protecting your data and your customers’ data privacy.

When you’re ready to begin your end-to-end process automation journey, the road ahead may not be clear. Starting small and then expanding can be a great way to test and refine your digital process automation strategy without taking on too much risk.

Look for automation opportunities with well-defined and measurable outcomes, where you can achieve success quickly while still making an impact on the business. Then, use those successes to evangelize buy-in and broader use across the organization. Delivering successful automation results can spark interest from other areas of the organization, driving new automation projects and earning buy-in from leadership.

Case in point: TELUS—one of the largest telecommunications providers in Canada, with more than 17 million customers and $9.1 billion in annual revenue—took an iterative approach when it decided to find a better way to meet customer expectations quickly. TELUS found that their annual planning process was so slow and cumbersome that it was impacting their ability to deliver customer service. 

They already had a history of building intelligent automation solutions using the Appian Platform, so they leveraged that knowledge to create a unified digital planning system. The new application boosts customer satisfaction, generates cost savings (preventing up to $42 million in misaligned capital exposure), and has saved more than 7,200 hours for workers—making the entire process easier and improving employee satisfaction on top of it all. 

Vested interest from executive-level leadership is essential for successful end-to-end process automation initiatives. Involving all stakeholders—including employees, customers, and partners—early on in the automation planning and implementation process helps ensure that the business automation approach is aligned with the needs of the business and leads to better representation as it is evaluated by leadership. With a platform approach and early automation successes, you’re well-positioned to gain this buy-in and bring your success to the next department or process.

Think through how you can use and scale automation in a well-governed manner in your department and across departments. One way to do so is to create an automation center of excellence (CoE). This internal business unit is typically dedicated to defining and enforcing the policies governing end-to-end automation initiatives. A CoE takes the lead on responsibilities like selecting a process automation platform, training employees, reviewing automations before they go live, and overseeing ongoing maintenance and optimization.

An automation CoE can help leadership build support for automation among employees by educating them about how automation can reduce manual tasks and improve operational efficiency, while ensuring teams follow development best practices. The CoE can also help establish business goals, coordinate automation projects across business units and identify and vet reusable components for future projects.

If you want to follow these guidelines and create a business process automation program that reaps the benefits of BPA—and avoid the pitfalls that get in the way—think through these three questions:

• Can I orchestrate, automate, and optimize my business processes from end to end? 

• Where can I start to get a quick win and gain buy-in for my business process automation (BPA) initiative? 

• Am I creating a foundation that will allow me to expand my BPA program past just one process?