Starting with Business Process Automation

HappyWired’s expert view on….

Quick wins: Starting with Business Process Automation

It’s time to discuss low-hanging fruit, and how to start your automation journey with projects that add value simply and fast through Business Process Automation (BPA).

It’s worth thinking first about which processes yield the most benefit quickest.

These tasks usually have some shared features:

  • High-volume – they require a lot of human effort and time
  • Time-sensitive – they must be done within a specific timeframe
  • Repetitive – the work doesn’t require much human judgement
  • Error-prone – the manual process produces rather a lot of errors
Automation-Roacket

BPA reduces human effort, delivers very fast and works using rules. That means its benefits shine when introduced to these types of processes.

However, the amount of error that can be tolerated needs to be taken into consideration. Quality-control tests must be run before introducing BPA to a process that needs to run faultlessly. This will take time and may not always give you that ‘quick win’ we’ve promised.

There is a balance here. Is the possibility of error using BPA higher than the usual level of error generated by wholly manual processes? Some manual processes produce frequent errors: in that case, it’s still worthwhile to invest and get going fast.

Processes that often give quick wins and rapid returns using BPA without much development include:

Approvals

Approving documents and decisions through various sign-offs can be very time consuming and full of friction. Automatically routing drafts to those in charge of approval will drive value immediately. This automation can also be easily built upon to drive more value – for example, while routing drafts, a bot could strip all relevant files from a document or email and store them automatically.

Email and document distribution

HappyWired was asked to provide an automation solution for a client recently that involved sending personalised emails and letters with one of four different messages to more than 4,000 employees each month. The letters were produced automatically using the client’s HR system, but they needed to be sent by email to the appropriate employees with tailored messages for each.

Done manually, this would have taken many many hours. We eliminated the manual need to produce and distribute thousands of individual emails with an automated process that took each letter created by HR, found the relevant email address in another system and sent each document with a personalised email based on crucial content included in each message. There was no chance of machine error in the process and no fundamental change to the existing workflow. Our solution sat in the middle of the process, replacing the tedious and error-prone manual email generation. There was no need for new infrastructure or software. The solution simply realised the potential that was already there. We turned this process around in days, yet it immediately saved countless hours of manual work each month. There’s a near-instant return on investment, as opposed to a large-scale project which might have a value that’s hard to pin down.

Onboarding of staff and suppliers

Recently HappyWired worked with a company in the construction sector to improve their contractor onboarding process. The existing approach took days. It involved a great deal of manual information gathering and for personalised Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) to be produced and posted to suppliers, before being signed and returned.

We streamlined this with an automated online process where NDAs are produced automatically and distributed electronically. Contractors receive their documentation almost instantly and can quickly use a digital signature to complete the sign-up process.

This process was further improved with simple automation allowing automatic authorisation of contractors where appropriate, and automatic generation of identity credentials allowing contractors to access the site.

That’s ultimately the goal for these quick-wins – providing value fast while leaving the door open for future improvements. By unlocking the capabilities of Microsoft 365, you too could rapidly improve processes.

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