You’ll be hard pressed to find an area of business that automation hasn’t touched. From complex financial workflows to everyday HR procedures, more and more organisations are tearing down their manual processes and reinventing them in the name of efficiency.
Through business process automation (BPA) software, organisations can:
- Reduce errors and delays
- Increase productivity and operational efficiency
- Optimise resources and free up time
- Improve customer satisfaction and retention rates
- Extract high-value, accurate business insights
- Enhance employee engagement levels
However, it’s important to understand that automation can only glean these results if you implement it in the right way. Otherwise, your efforts may end up in the 30-50% of automations that fail globally.
To help you avoid this fate, we’ve compiled a practical eBook that’ll help you understand, evaluate and implement BPA effectively.
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7 steps to creating a business process automation strategy
Automating without a strategy is akin to shooting blindfolded. If you’re lucky, you may hit your target every now and then. But, 99% of the time, you’re more likely to miss (not to mention cause more damage in the process).
In the first half of this eBook, we’re going to take that blindfold off and realign your aim. The following 7 steps will help you identify your priorities and plot a successful automation strategy:
Step 1: Goal setting and process selection
Every automation, no matter how small, must be tied to a tangible goal. Without this, you’ll struggle to know what success looks like.
The best place to start is with your overarching business objectives. What are you looking to accomplish in the next quarter or year? Are you hoping to increase customer retention? Improve employee efficiency? Reduce burn out across your teams?
Guided by this information, pinpoint manual processes that actively work against your business goals. Perhaps your ticket submission process is too complicated for customers. Or maybe your auditing procedures are siloed and take up too much time.
Once you identify these inefficient processes, you can devise SMART goals. These are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives that will guide your efforts and determine whether your automation efforts are successful or not. Examples may include minimising data errors, speeding-up ticket resolution times, or reducing hours spent on manual data entry tasks.
Step 2: Narrow down your process selection
Before you get ahead of yourself, remember that you don’t need to automate every process. Some require too much human intervention to automate, whereas others may be too low-value or ad-hoc to justify reinvention.
The aim is to select processes that:
- Have a high business impact.
- Benefit your people – whether that’s your customers, contractors, or employees.
- Are repetitive and eat up a lot of time.
- Are rules-based and have clear inputs and outputs.
Good candidates for automation are typically processes like invoice management, software license requests, and customer support tickets.
Step 3: Process mapping and analysis
Once you have a list of contenders, it’s time to get granular. Map out your processes in detail, using a process map or flow diagram.
This should finely outline every step of your workflow, including:
- Inputs and outputs
- Timelines
- Dependencies
- People involved in the process and typical handoff stages
- Permissions and compliance requirements
Once complete, parse through these process maps with a finetooth comb. Where are the inefficiencies and bottlenecks? What prevents your workflow from functioning smoothly or achieving the results you’re looking for?
To ensure you don’t leave any stone unturned, reach out to relevant technical and non-technical stakeholders. This will give you a more rounded view of what is and isn’t working – not only for your operations, but for your people too.
Step 4: BPA tool evaluation
At this stage, you can start to research and assess potential BPA tools. This is a critical step of your automation strategy that you cannot afford to skim over – especially when you consider that almost 60% of businesses regret their last software purchase.
So, to give this step the attention it deserves, we’ve dedicated the second half of this eBook to helping you find the right platform. Feel free to scroll down if you’d like to access the advice now.
Step 5: Plan a staggered implementation
When kicking off your automation efforts, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and simple.
Begin with high-value, low-effort pilot projects and test them in a controlled environment. Run the workflows through simulated scenarios and jot down any faults in the process. Are there any inaccuracies in the outputs? Any inconsistencies in the handovers?
Once your team is happy with the proof of concept, you can launch your process and then scale up your efforts incrementally as you go.
Step 6: Change management
Only 43% of employees believe their organisation is good at managing change.
Without effective change management and a carefully optimised implementation plan, you could face the same challenge. Which in turn could lead to poor adoption rates, disengagement and low levels of productivity.
To keep your employees motivated with your process transformation efforts:
- Discuss your project before kickoff and during implementation. Using engaging internal communications, geared towards the business benefits of your process transformation, you’ll be able to win buy-in across your organisation.
- Provide e-learning training and knowledge base articles. For many employees, the greatest hurdle of any change initiative is the learning curve. To ease this, provide clear and descriptive training materials on your new BPA tool and your automated processes. If you opt for an all-in-one digital workplace solution, you’ll be able to craft e-learning courses and training materials within the same platform. This can be far more convenient for your users.
- Check-in regularly. Gauge how your employees feel about your new process transformations and the BPA tool itself in 1-1 sessions and focus groups. You can also distribute anonymous surveys to source more unfiltered feedback.
Step 7: Monitoring and iteration
To achieve long term BPA success, you must continuously monitor and improve your processes. Only then can you turn good processes into great processes, which in turn will lead to better business outcomes.
To support this continuous improvement approach, rely on your platform’s analytics and reporting capabilities. This will provide you with the insights needed to understand where your processes are falling short and how you can improve them. For instance, if your customer tickets regularly breach the agreed SLA, it may indicate a resource allocation or handoff problem.
The BPA buyer’s guide: 10 things to look out for when choosing a platform
Let’s revisit step 4 of your BPA strategy plan: tool evaluation.
In this segment of our eBook, we’ll reveal the 10 crucial considerations you need to keep in mind when choosing your automation platform:
1. Platform features
While each provider will offer varying features – and sell them in different ways – you can expect to find the following capabilities in most BPA tools:
- E-form and workflow creator
- Statuses
- Field conditions
- Field visibility settings
- Triggers
- Service level agreements (SLAs)
- Automated changes (based on triggers)
- Notifications
- Text customisations
- Thank you pages for post-process completion
- Analytics and reporting dashboards
2. A user-friendly interface
Why make things more complicated than they need to be? A highly technical platform will certainly get the job done, but it’ll require extensive development expertise on your end. If you have little technical resources to spare, this can significantly impact the agility of your automation efforts.
That’s why it’s better to choose a user-friendly platform that anyone in your business can use. This means prioritising vendors that offer:
- No-code interfaces for building e-forms and workflows
- Drag and drop functionality
- Templates for common processes, such as compliance audits
Your vendor should also provide a wealth of knowledge base articles, courses and 1-1 onboarding sessions to help you get to grips with the platform.
3. Scalability and adaptability
Think about your long term needs when choosing a BPA vendor. Ideally, your platform should scale with your business, no matter your data volume or user count.
More than this, the tool must be able to adapt to your specific needs. It’s no use in purchasing a platform that can only automate your simplistic tasks and none of your unique, business-critical processes. Without a tool that can handle any workflow, you could be holding yourself back and stunting your potential ROI.
At Claromentis, we’ve developed a BPA platform with no limitations. From everyday admin workflows to convoluted processes, such as electrical danger notification procedures, our tool can turn any task into a slick e-form or workflow.
4. Administrative control of your processes
Robust, role-based access controls and admin settings will help you to maintain process governance, as well as bolster your data compliance and security efforts.
On the Claromentis BPA platform, admins can:
- Control who can access, edit and create processes via highly configurable permissions settings.
- Hide certain fields and status updates from those who don’t need to see them.
- View process version history and access audit logs.
5. Seamless integration with your tech stack
The easier your new platform integrates with your existing tech stack, the better. This will not only mitigate change management challenges, but can reduce costly ad-hoc development costs too.
With that in mind, choose a platform that provides:
- Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities for seamless and secure user access.
- The ability to integrate with multiple data points, including APIs and plugins.
For existing Claromentis customers, we’d strongly recommend using our BPA platform, InfoCapture, for your process automation and management tasks. (If you don’t already!) The tool is available as part of every Claromentis package and is integrable with our intranet, learning management system, and project management tools.
6. Platform support and bespoke development
Underutilisation is a common occurrence when it comes to software investments. Indeed, over half of enterprises waste 10% of their annual budget on technology they don’t end up using.
This isn’t just poor financial practice – it’s also a missed opportunity.
Without utilising the full extent of your BPA platform, you could miss out on all of the goals you set out to achieve. And that’s precisely what we want you to avoid.
The best way to extract the most value out of your platform is to rely on your vendor’s support team. At Claromentis, we provide the following support services to ensure you maximise your ROI:
- One-to-one trainings and onboarding support
- A knowledge base full of application-specific, step-by-step articles
- A 24/7 customer support portal with a self-service ticketing system
- InfoCapture consultancy support
And, if you ever feel totally out of your depth, our in-house development team is always on hand to help. Simply tell us what problem you’re trying to solve and we’ll build a custom integration, application, plugin or workflow to solve it.
7. Flexible deployment options
Are you looking to deploy your automation platform in-house or in the cloud?
For the majority of businesses, a SaaS deployment is preferable. However, if your business deals with strict regulatory requirements or legacy infrastructure, an on-premise deployment might be a better fit.
Not all BPA providers will offer the latter, so be sure to check early on in your vendor evaluation journey.
8. Remote and mobile access
In today’s age, mobile accessibility isn’t just an expectation: it’s a necessity.
Take frontline industries as an example. For retail and healthcare organisations, remote access to a BPA platform and other digital workplace applications is vital for connecting employees and communicating important information, such as stock levels and upcoming appointments.
Consider your customer experiences, too. For processes like mortgage applications, it’s far more convenient (and competitive) to provide mobile-friendly forms and applications.
9. Reporting dashboards and analytics
As we mentioned previously, following a continuous improvement approach requires concrete data.
Most BPA tools will automatically create reporting dashboards using primary data pulled from your processes. These statistics can help you better understand how your processes are being used and highlight areas for improvement.
10. Trusted social proof
Last, but certainly not least, make sure you pick a BPA vendor you can really trust.
This means going beyond vendor-written content and sourcing unbiased, third-party resources. According to recent research, businesses that experience the least amount of buyer’s remorse tend to source their vendor shortlists from trusted software review sites, such as Capterra and G2.
In addition to this, we’d recommend checking out:
- Customer case studies, particularly those that belong within your industry.
- Vendor certifications, including ISO 27001:2022, ISO 9001:2015, and HIPAA.
- Information on your vendor’s support services.
- Technical documentation, including platform features and deployment requirements.
Overcoming the final hurdle: Making your purchasing decision
There’s no quick and easy way to make a software purchasing decision. (Though we wish there were!)
However, if you follow the tips within this guide, you’ll find yourself one step closer to finding a platform that offers the adaptability, scalability and functionality you need to drive your business forward.
With that in mind, we’d like to introduce you to InfoCapture.
InfoCapture is a no-code business process automation software without limitations. From complex compliance procedures to everyday administrative tasks, the platform empowers your technical and non-technical users to automate any business process, no matter how unwieldy. The result? You can transform error-prone processes into competitive, results-driven automations.
The platform comes as part of our 4-in-1 digital workplace solution, Claromentis. This means that, unlike any other BPA tool on the market, you also benefit from:
- A feature-rich intranet that can enhance employee communications and engagement.
- A customisable learning management system to upskill your people and ensure process compliance.
- A transparent project management tool to organise workloads and boost team productivity.
With these platforms in your toolkit, you can maximise the success of your process transformation efforts and your technology investment.
Eager to find out more? To get a behind-the-scenes look at InfoCapture and the full Claromentis solution, book a tailored demo with one of our experts.
About Claromentis
Every business has its unique challenges. So why opt for a generic solution?
For over 25 years, Claromentis has helped companies across the globe to revolutionise their workplaces and bring out the best in their people.
Our highly customisable, 4-in-1 digital workplace solution empowers your teams to collaborate securely, solve complex problems and streamline manual processes. Actively helping you run a more efficient, productive and profitable business.
