Business Process Automation Mapping (BPA) provides organizations with a visual representation of tasks, roles, decisions and information. This helps them understand their current processes, identify any gaps, and streamline teamwork. By having a clear understanding of current processes, you'll understand how best to implement automation to gain value.
A business process automation mapping can help provide a decision framework to evaluate automation opportunities. This includes looking at costs, repetition, complexity, company priorities, requirements, and risks. This will help you prevent wasting money on unnecessary automation.
Key factors to consider when deciding on automation.
Consider these key factors before deciding on which processes to automate.
Repetition: Processes which involve repetitive tasks are often suitable to automate. Invoice processing, data entry, scheduling appointments, and report generation can take up a lot of time. So identifying repetitive tasks will help identify areas to reduce workload.
Costs: You should look at how much time and resources are required to complete current processes. Although automation can save you costs by reducing manual tasks, you should also consider implementation, maintenance, and training costs.
Complexity: Not all processes will be suitable to automate. If the process involves more than one department, complex approvals or lots of exceptions, you should streamline it first. A business process mapping will help identify any unnecessary steps, bottlenecks, and areas to create consistency.
Data availability and compatibility: Automation relies on accurate data, so you should look at what software, databases and digital tools you have available. If your data is structured and easy to access this will make implementing automation easier. If your systems aren't integrated then extra work may be required.
Value: Automation should help you achieve company goals. You should consider if it will improve customer experience, productivity, accuracy, or help you grow your business. If a task is easy to automate but won't bring much value, it may not be the best option.
Business Process Automation Mapping Framework
A process automation framework helps organizations design, implement, manage, and monitor automated processes. It sets standards, guidelines, and processes.
A useful framework for evaluating a business process automation mapping can be broken into 6 steps.
Identifying and evaluating processes
Firstly, you'll want to understand what processes would benefit from improving. Look at how processes currently work within your organization. Are there any bottlenecks? How many tasks are completed? How long does it take? And what issues are currently being faced?
Mapping process
This will give you a visual of your current process. You should list out individual tasks, decisions, departments and approvals. This will help identify any delays, repetitive tasks, excessive manual tasks, and lack of communication.
Evaluating automation opportunities
Once mapped you can look at the different automation opportunities available. Focus on high volume, repetitive and rule based tasks to help bring value.
Deciding on what technology to use
Next, decide what technology will support your process. Depending on your process you may want to use Robotic Process Automation (RPA), workflow management tools, artificial intelligence, or integrations. Choose a tool which is compatible, scalable, cost effective and will support your processes.
Testing
Before implementing, test your process. This will help identify any issues, integration problems, or unexpected exceptions. Getting feedback from employees will help ensure it works as intended.
Monitoring
Regularly track automation using KPI's such as how long it takes to process, error rate, costs, and productivity. This will help identify any issues.
Things to consider before automation
To ensure you make the most of your automation, you should consider how processes can be assessed, implemented, and governed.
You should ensure you're not just automating because you can, but that it will bring value and is suitable for your processes.
Things to consider:
- ROI - Will the savings and productivity improvements cover the cost of automation?
- Risk - What security, compliance, and risk issues could arise?
- Skills - Do your employees have the right skills and training?
- Scalability - Will the solution scale with increased workloads?
- Human Involvement - What tasks need humans involved?
- Maintenance - How much resources will be needed to update, monitor, and maintain?
This will help ensure you make a balanced decision and reduce the risk of investing in automation which doesn't help.
Examples of Business Process Automation Mapping
Having an understanding of business process automation mapping can help organizations understand where they can implement automation.
Inventory: By mapping inventory processes, organizations can understand how stock is monitored, orders are placed, and deliveries are recorded. Using automation can help provide alerts for low stock, update stock, and request stock to be reordered. This shows how a business process automation mapping can help organizations understand different processes.
Governance: Having a clear governance structure will help manage your automation. Having a business process framework will help you keep processes consistent with documentation, measuring performance, accountability, and improvement. Having a good governance structure will ensure all your automation processes have clear roles, approvals, and expectations. This will also help you ensure automation is being used in line with your policies.
Using a structured approach to business process automation mapping can help companies like Heloix identify improvements to their processes and help link them to their processes. By assessing processes before automation you'll focus on practical solutions.
Conclusion
A business process automation mapping can provide organizations with a structured way to understand their processes, identify areas to improve, and make informed decisions. By considering repetition, costs, complexity, compatibility, and value you can identify processes which would benefit from automation.
A clear decision framework will ensure automation is implemented, tested, governed, and monitored. Focus on processes which will bring improvements and align to your goals. This will help create efficient, reliable and flexible business processes.
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