What’s your digital transformation strategy for 2019? Does it involve digital process automation? Forbes reports that “process automation is the foundation [for digital transformation]”.
By the end of 2019, Forrester predicts that 40% of enterprises will have automation centers and frameworks in place as they try to find the best way to structure their technology and workflows. With process automation being so central to the next phase of digital transformation for so many businesses, now is the time to consider what your next steps with digital process automation are for the year.
Firstly, if you haven’t started your process automation yet, identify processes that are ripe for automation first, such as support tickets, approvals for holiday leave and expenses. Mapping out these processes in a workflow allows you to recognise tasks within a process which may be suitable for automation.
“You don’t have to automate every process at once. Start with something that’s fairly common, involved multiple stakeholders and is performed reasonably often, like a purchase order.” These are wise words of advice from Forbes.
Many of our customers use the philosophy of starting small, with quick wins, then scaling up to encompass more processes. Taking this agile approach means that you can see more business impact in less time. Leading recruitment firm ManpowerGroup used Bizagi to work in iterative cycles, with BPM as a common language to help business and IT departments work together and used processes and workflows in enable sustainable business growth alongside agile development.
Within the first two years of deploying Bizagi, ManpowerGroup automated two new processes per month, with some processes being reduced from 16 hours to just three hours to complete – that’s five times faster!
If you want to unlock a competitive advantage while you digitally transform, don’t limit yourself to individual digitization projects. Real digital transformation is about digital innovation and discovery. That’s why starting small and scaling up like ManpowerGroup can be advantageous. These iterative changes can help you to achieve your overall business goals.
Your digital transformation should align your digitization initiatives with your overall business strategy. You can strategically map out your enterprise architecture to establish where your gaps are – it’s a challenge to keep your systems connected, let alone make sure they support new ways of doing business. Orchestration is key.
Use a digital business platform like Bizagi as an agile layer to wrap around and unite your existing systems. From there, you can integrate data and processes across the organization and design your operations to deliver market-leading customer experience.
You can bring further efficiency to your processes by introducing Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence into your workflows. Everyone is talking about RPA and AI this year – more than 40% of enterprises will create state-of-the-art digital workers by combining AI with RPA this year, according to Forbes.
Integrating them into your businesses processes aids end-to-end automation and helps employees to be even more hands-off as cognitive technology takes control of certain tasks. Using RPA and BPM together can bring about great process automation value than using just one of the technologies. While RPA takes care of the manual, repetitive, rules-based tasks, BPM helps to engineer your workflows and enable end-to-end process automation.
Take a look at our blog on how Bizagi and RPA work together to complement each other.
Alternatively, AI can bring an element of machine learning to your processes and help to make recommendations on how to improve efficiency by learning from data. AI combined with contextualization can dramatically improve your customer experience.
Now that you know the essential steps that you should consider, download our ebook, How To Create a Timeline for Digital Transformation,and start planning your actions for 2019.
