Why do you need business process automation?
It is a very important question. Optimization of business processes of a company has a significant meaning. If processes of a company are of the same kind, there is a possibility of frequent mistakes. And in order to prevent such mistakes, you should use automation of business processes. Most companies come to a conclusion to eliminate mistakes by means of automation.
After understanding of automation objectives, you need to explain them to employees. Doing that, you will reduce resistance of personnel. The second significant thing is that personnel should make a lot of efforts (starting from changing of their customary order) in order to make optimization of business processes successful.
What to optimize?
There are three basic stages of business process optimization following one by one in this order:
- The first and basic stage: optimization of business processes of a company by means of automation;
- Automation of data gathering. It is started right after automation of a business process which is going to be gathered data about;
- Automation of the analysis of data got.
That’s why before implementation of automation you should know what you are going to automate.
Proper way of business process optimization
There are at least two possible ways of business process optimization by means of automation:
- Massive implementation. This way is for companies which use accounting systems and business processes are established. Data in such enterprises is usually kept in several bases. Taking into consideration difficulties and even impossibility to integrate all this data, massive implementation of automation system is chosen. It means that a new system is installed instead of existing systems. There are usually several stages of such implementation: business process audit, forming of requirements to the system, the architecture of the system is built, the system is developed, tested and, finally, a pilot version is launched.
- Quick automation. That is automation or improvement of one not very big area of activity. This method is quite popular in small or young companies which business processes are not well-established. Quick automation does not require audit: chiefs usually know problems and weak points and how to solve them. After improvement of business processes and their automation it gets possible to start the following stage, similar to the first one. The main disadvantage of such an approach is that it is impossible to build the architecture of a single automation system, as different blocks will stop correlating with each other in some time.
Who is responsible?
It is obvious that IT contractors and management need to find a person responsible for automation. This manager should be able to understand objectives of management and to be able to explain them to IT contractors, in order to avoid misunderstanding.