Step 1 of your Amazing Automation Journey

Today, businesses across the world are implementing automation in their various departments. As you're probably aware, the automation journey has been a growing trend for quite some time.  This is because businesses save a lot of time and money automating processes in the   various departments. 

Automation is a rapidly evolving industry, so it's important to stay on top of all innovations. If you are looking to implement automation in a company, it's a good start to look into ways you can save time and money in your business.

Here are the things you need to do in Step 1 of your Amazing Automation Journey:

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Identify

Exploring opportunities for automation is incredibly tricky.. There is a lot of conflicting information out there about what works and what doesn't. There is a lot of hype around automation, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong choice for your business. In fact, the automation journey can be a fantastic long-term play, especially for companies that are able to piece together a variety of different pieces of automation together to get a true end-to-end solution. The key is to make sure you're not going overboard and to focus on acquiring tools that can save your business time and money in the long run.

Moreover, when exploring opportunities for amazing automation, you should consider technical feasibility focusing on long-term value. Machines and software can quickly and easily do certain tasks. This may represent a cost savings in the short term. However, you must remember to look at larger organizational goals and not make decisions in isolation. While you may see the potential to automate certain tasks, you should consider the long-term implications. Will this initiative enhance your organization? Will it create more efficiency and lower costs in the future?

Qualify

Get a detailed understanding of the current procedure. The best way to do this is asking the person who currently performs the task to walk you through it. This allows you to take notes in real time. If there is a task you want to automate, it's in your best interest to perform this walkthrough at least once before you begin designing the automation. It helps you identify potential issues in the current process and gives you a feel on the timing. This helps prevent issues in the future when the automation journey encounters an unexpected error.

With this approach, you have a clearer idea of what is actually involved in executing the process in the current environment, which in turn helps you to come up with a better automation solution. This initial analysis helps you define the scenario for your use case in greater detail, assuring the use case covers all interactions in the process involved in carrying it out.

Assess

Automation is a great way to improve quality and efficiency. It saves time and money and improves customer experience, but you have to choose the right automation solutions. Automation is a key component in a successful digital transformation. To choose initial automation opportunities, consider how you measure various benefits of applying automation elements, so you can prove how they deliver value right away by defining their key business impact.

The most successful automation strategies focus on meeting key business objectives. If you haven't figured out the business benefit of your desired automated solution, you haven't determined the success metrics for your project, and you can't determine if it was a success.

Prioritize

There are three critical aspects to leveraging automation journey to enable continuous integration and delivery practices. The first is the business goals and objectives of the company. The second is the technical goals and objectives of the company. The third is the requirements  for the implementation of automation. 

The first two are critical, but are mostly driven by leadership in the organization. The third one is the most important when it comes to technical implementation, because without addressing these requirements, amazing automation is not possible.

Manage

This step is very important and should be planned carefully. Before anything can be done, it's essential to define the goals and then plan the actions that need to be taken to accomplish those goals. The steps to accomplish those goals should be defined as well. Next, the team should build the software and make sure it's of high quality and meets the defined goals. The validation and deployment can be difficult and can be affected by many different variables. The first variables are market and business conditions. The other variables come from the project and its requirements.

When it comes to amazing automation the approach must start with a comprehensive discovery stage. Often, people make the mistake of assuming they already know what to do when, in fact, they may not. This often leads to failed projects and problems in implementation. Only by conducting a thorough discovery can you know what to do. Through the discovery phase, you'll be able to uncover the underlying issues in the current process, build out an in-depth understanding of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to track progress, and then build out an in-depth understanding of who the users are and what they'll need to be successful. Additional KPIs should be gathered from this phase to determine success or failure of your efforts.

In summary, these are the steps we recommend you take to analyze which automation use cases to implement, determine possible pitfalls, establish customer- or user-experience priorities, define timelines, agree on budget parameters, and set business goals.

Final Thoughts

Developing and launching automation in today's world is not an easy process. There is so much to keep track of and so many moving parts.  You can easily get overwhelmed. Here's a little bit of advice to help you avoid getting lost in the shuffle: automate your business in 30 days or less. Automating your business is a great way to simplify what you're doing and get close to your end goal without sacrificing quality.  The internet has a lot of great tools that can get you started. If you want a No Code automation software, try Make (formerly Integromat). Make (formerly Integromat) is a great platform to automate your business for free.

Learning how to automate your business processes is a tremendous step towards thriving in the modern business world. Automation journey can result in increased workflow, improved productivity, greater efficiency, and higher profits, especially if you have a wide variety of processes to automate. However, for many individuals the complexity of the automation process can prove to be too much to handle on their own. Luckily, there are courses available to help you learn automation, and one of the best comes from the Make Simplified Accelerator. With Make Simplified Accelerator you can achieve your business goals through automation, learn more about the course here.