Consider the entire process, not just the parts that can be easily automated. Make sure the improvements to the entire process are sized to justify the investment in automation. Additionally, it often makes sense to avoid making multiple changes to the same process in succession, when a more comprehensive overhaul can be performed at once. Imagine you’re trying to automate as much outbound email as possible across your company, but your long-term plans also include a CRM upgrade with increased automation. To minimize disruption, it may make sense to implement both changes at the same time.
Consider digging up a road to replace a burst water pipe, repaving the road, then digging up the road again six months later for a planned sewer repair. Wouldn’t it have been better to just dig up the road once and do both tasks in one go? Same amount of time? Consider upstream, downstream, and adjacent business processes. For example, if you use software to automate calculations, can the software process inputs sent by email that were previously handled manually? And what will be the outputs of the automated process? Will someone have to explain or interpret them?
Think about how your entire company functions. If you focus only on automating individual processes, you risk ignoring opportunities to transform your business. For example, a key benefit of automation is that it frees up employee time. If you make purely data-driven decisions about which processes to automate, you’ll easily miss the broader benefits your employees can achieve with that extra time.
These long-term benefits can easily outweigh the impact of short-term efficiency gains. If automating a process will give your team more time to develop products that could carry the future of your company, automating that process should be a top priority.
It’s important to establish clear roles for the people involved in implementing, maintaining, and working on your automation processes. When a task is performed by a robot, you can’t assume that all other steps in the process will remain the same. People need to be held accountable for making sure things are done right and that no steps or exceptions are missed. Responsibility should be assigned for managing the inputs of the automation technology, monitoring the results, handling exceptions and errors, and handling the output.
Let’s take the example of a company that automates its invoicing process. A good accounting system can eliminate a lot of manual work by automatically creating invoices, totaling the charges for each invoice, and adding customer contact information. However, you still need to create billing and customer information, and you may still need to review invoices before sending them to customers. Here’s how the division of responsibilities for managing your new automated invoicing system might look:
The sales team is responsible for taking orders and making sure the customer data in the CRM system is up to date.
The invoice specialist is responsible for telling the automated system when to generate invoices, reviewing them for accuracy, and approving them before the system automatically sends them to customers.
