In the first two months of 2023, some of the biggest names in tech and business laid off more than 120,000 workers to reduce costs and streamline their organizations.
With continuing global financial uncertainty, businesses need to be efficient and effective, to use their resources economically and with minimal waste. On the other hand, there is a competing need to gain competitive advantage by driving innovation and continuous improvement, which requires investments in time and energy.
By embracing process automation and forward-looking talent management practices, organizations can accelerate continuous improvement despite shrinking budgets and resources.
Process automation can remove hurdles to efficiency
One of the key enhancements that companies have embraced in recent years is process automation. Alongside excellence in process management, process automation practices can automate forms, eliminate workflow down-time, remove user errors and accelerate handovers between tasks and workgroups.
Robotic process automation (RPA) can accelerate or remove laborious computer tasks and improve customer outcomes, creating efficiencies across the business. The development of robust process automation can quantifiably reduce costs and process execution timeframes, while increasing accuracy and effectiveness.
Those tools, however, do not come in a plug-and-play package. To implement effective process automation, most organizations will need to invest in IT infrastructure, developing the tools or integrating third-party solutions into existing business systems.
With the toolsets in place, they then need tech-capable teams to build the workflows and train the bots from the ground up, often custom-coding complex routines or interfaces to take full advantage of these systems. That requires a significant amount of development time and talent, and those demands will often compete with existing IT projects and pressures.
Draw on the expertise of your people
Unfortunately, not every business can afford a team of dedicated developers waiting in the wings to swoop in and customize solutions to every process problem. In fact, most organizations are reducing their technical teams, maintaining their systems and integrating the best-fit tools without leaving any capacity for building complex workflows or bots to work within them.
That can result in high-tech process automations sitting on the shelf, wasting their potential and failing to provide a return on investment.
The answer lies in bringing that potential to the people who can use it — your subject matter experts who use and know your processes at the execution level. Process automation does not have to be the exclusive domain of the IT department. In fact, if asked, most IT teams would welcome the idea of managing systems and integration, leaving the implementation of solutions to those who are most familiar with business needs.
Bringing automation to the process experts can be achieved with low- and no-code process automation tools. By removing the barrier of complex coding for bots and workflows, process automation becomes viable for everyday teams, who can bring their process expertise to bear with the new tool set.
Suddenly, IT teams have the time they need for their core business, and the organization still has the benefit of continuous improvement being driven by enhanced automation, leaving processes running more efficiently and with less breakdowns or errors.
Build your teams wisely
The key to this transition is finding the right people. Among your process experts, look for those with a technical inclination and interest in developing those skills.
Offer opportunities for teams to grow their abilities with process automation tools such as forms automation, workflow automation, RPA and document generation. Once you have identified the best candidates within those groups for heading up automation projects, pair them with your existing IT working groups to ensure they are adequately supported and can work cooperatively with those maintaining the systems.
Then set them loose with user-friendly process automation tools that will enable them to maximize their impact on the business.
Accelerate automation and cost reduction with low- and no-code tools
Reducing overheads and prioritizing continuous improvement do not have to be competing needs within a business. The right tools in the right hands can create better customer outcomes without over-investing in IT resources or leaving your tech teams stretched too thin.
Maximize the expertise you have in your business groups and empower your people with low- and no-code tools that will enable teams to embrace new digital tools and mindsets, without added costs.