Workflow Automation Can Help Meet the Innovation Challenge in 2021

In today’s competitive business environment, not automating is no longer an option. Even if you are unaware of it, the chances are that your organization is using workflow automation in some way or the other. It could be a simple email scheduler for personal productivity. Or it could be a single department that relies on automated workflows. 

A unified automation strategy will help you consolidate these disparate point implementations and unlock major efficiencies. 

The Criticality of Workflow Automation in 2021

2020 was a watershed year for workflow automation, as organizations tried to reduce their dependence on legacy, manual technologies. It also helped to cope with dips and spikes in customer demand. For example, a content center could afford to scale down its workforce, confident that there is an automated service delivery capability in place in case of the occasional traffic spike. 

According to researchOpens a new window , nine in 10 IT decision-makers view automation as “essential” to an organization’s digital journey. Of this, 84% plan to increase their automation investments in 2021. 

Further, an employee-centric surveyOpens a new window revealed how automation was helping workers perform their duties during the pandemic. Nearly 62% have used an automated voice assistant for work, more than half have used voice to text transcription, and 48.33% said that automation saved them from tasks that are “repetitive and boring.” 

77.13% of employees would even be more likely to apply for a job at a company that invests in automation. 

Workflow automation isn’t just good for your business – it is integral to digital transformation and keeping pace with competitors. It is also now part of the typical employee’s expectations and demands from a productive work environment. 

Learn More: 4 Industries That Are Ripe for Automation in 2021  

5 Functions That Can Benefit from Workflow Automation 

This is among the first stumbling blocks you will face on the road to automation. 

In a complex organizational setup, it can be difficult to pinpoint the most optimal starting point for automation implementations. Should you focus on high-value, high-return tasks to quickly obtain ROI from your investments? Or should you aim for low-hanging fruits, targeting tasks that are easy to automate using ready tools? 

Ideally, the following process areas are recommended as the best candidates for workflow automation. 

1. Supply chain management (SCM) – Creating bids for procurement, assessing and selecting suppliers, sending follow-up emails, approving invoices, and processing payouts are tasks that can be easily automated using purpose-built supply chain solutions. 
2. Human Resources (HR) –  HR tasks involving data entry and rule-based decision making (with minimal exceptions) are excellent candidates for automation. For example, you could automatically extract candidate information from their resume and populate onboarding systems using optical character recognition (OCR) and route for approval, which also happens automatically based on preset business rules. 
3. Contact Center processes – Without automation, contact center processes will become extremely laborious and inefficient. So, core activities like call routing and dialing should be fully automated. You could also automate agent incentives based on the targets that they achieve. 
4. Marketing workflows – Marketing teams could benefit massively from automation, improving data insights, eliminating repetitive steps when running campaigns, and streamlining collaboration. Modern marketing technology lets you build a single source of data, which you can feed into an automated decision-making engine for activities like sending emails, analyzing customer sentiment, etc. 
5. IT services (including cybersecurity) – IT helpdesk automation could dramatically reduce workloads for IT teams as employees face increasing IT issues when working from home, even as you fast-track digital transformation. Automation tools can carry our routine jobs like backing up event logs, monitoring network traffic, provisioning device updates, etc. 

All of these tasks have a few things in common. 

First, they are significantly high volume. Automating high-volume tasks means that you aren’t investing in eliminating an occasional or one-off activity. Second, they are time-bound in nature – automating the workflow should give you a time advantage and save efforts. 

Finally, they do not involve too many exceptions. 

There are some workflows, like product development or design thinking, that are unique every time they take place. There is no unified business rule to govern such workflows, and there are frequent exceptions to previously tried and tested rules. 

Workflow automation is best suited for tasks that follow a relatively structured pathway. 

Learn More: Intelligent Automation Can Help Banks Overcome Semi-Digitization Challenges 

Making the Move to Automation: Choose the Right Tech 

Depending on your business needs and the workflow you are targeting, you can choose from a variety of automation approaches. The most basic of these is probably script-based automation, ideal for technology workflows such as rolling out security updates or flagging unauthorized access. Integrating your enterprise systems lets you implement script-based automations for routine IT jobs. 

Robotic process automation (RPA) is another popular tactic, where software bots perform workflows based on predefined business rules. A sophisticated RPA bot can perform actions like logging into an app, copy-pasting data, writing to databases, scraping data from the internet, and making calculations. It isn’t very good for decision-making but works perfectly well for high volume and repetitive tasks. 

An improvement on RPA is no-code/low-code automation. In terms of functionality, it is similar to RPA (but cannot make high exception decisions and isn’t very good with unstructured data). However, it introduces greater customizability as you don’t need any technical know-how for setting up the automation.

You can integrate systems, design workflows, and reuse processes without writing (or maintaining) a single line of code. 

A more advanced alternative highlighted by GartnerOpens a new window as one of the top ten technology trends for 2020 is hyperautomation.  Hyperautomation adds artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to make workflow automation smarter – in effect, the AI can discover processes, automate them, monitor the results, and realign automations with minimal human intervention. 

Hyperautomation is yet to fully mature but holds incredible promise. 

It is likely that your workflow automation strategy for 2021 will include some or all of these technologies, applying them to specific business problems to build a bespoke automation landscape for your organization. 

Learn More: This California Startup Has Its Sights Set on Intelligent Network Automation 

Getting Started: Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them

As you embark on your automation journey, it is important to be aware of pitfalls and challenges. After all, 88%Opens a new window of IT decision-makers face at least one challenge during their latest automation project. Some of the issues to watch out for include: 

• Shadow IT: You might have systems, devices, and processes in the organization without any formal mapping by IT. Conduct an assessment before automating so that these processes aren’t left behind. 
• Cultural resistance – Importantly, more than 1 in 5 employees would prefer to not work with any automation technology. Invest in change management as a necessary part of workflow automation to understand and overcome cultural resistance. 
• Complexity – If business growth outpaces digital maturity, workflows could become too complex for effective automation. There are two ways to tackle this: first, regularly assess your automation landscape to update it in tandem with your workflows. Second, look for adaptive solutions that you can quickly realign with new processes without a lot of technical effort. 

Emerging technologies like AI and GUI-based codeless interfaces open up a whole new world of opportunities in workflow automation. Not only is 2021 a crucial period for introducing the efficiencies of automation, but it is also an excellent time for you to benefit from these latest technologies and sophisticated advancements. 

Which workflows would you recommend as the best candidates for automation in 2021? Tell us why on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to learn from your strategy!