In this volatile market, business leaders are tasked with ensuring business growth, fostering worker satisfaction, and implementing innovations that advance their position in the marketplace. But facilitating change is a delicate balancing act dependent on specific needs, specialized training, project planning and meeting workforce demands — all while reducing costs and maximizing profitability.
Conduent surveyed nearly 400 professionals across a range of industries to gauge their sentiment on intelligent automation, and the insights and findings are powerful. Participants who completed an automation project saw commanding results — most reported improved service levels, greater regulatory compliance, stronger data security and better data accuracy. Ultimately, more than 80% reported increased customer and client satisfaction following successful implementation.
And while automated processes remain the most effective solutions to costly and inefficient workflows, the prevailing barrier to success isn’t always access to new technology, but a lack of internal resources, project governance and clearly defined requirements. No matter the size of the company or industry, business leaders lack the internal resources, buy-in, knowledge and planning necessary to make a change. More than 80% of respondents recognize that automation can address workflow challenges but are overwhelmed by the complexity of implementation.
Delivering change requires a blueprint.
Define your challenges and goals
The road to correcting workflow inefficiencies can be daunting without proper preparation, planning and partnerships. To start, it’s necessary to define what your organization seeks to solve. Nearly half of the organizations surveyed reported being burdened by too many manual tasks, and 40% cited convoluted processes or workflows as key business challenges.
Some industries are especially impacted by manual tasks. Healthcare and health plan administration, legal services, mortgage and consumer lending, and finance, for example, are heavily document-driven, which generates high costs and customer servicing friction.
Defining your organization’s specific challenges will help inform the goals, which may include reducing errors and risk, enhancing regulatory compliance, and elevating experiences for customers, clients, and constituents.
Assemble a team
Successful automation projects are designed from the ground up and include thorough representation from all areas throughout the organization, including IT, budget, legal, and information security. Strong project sponsorship helps ensure that there are no deficiencies in the automation adoption process.
Early considerations for discussion include time requirements, system integration, information security considerations, and training.
Building on Conduent’s experience capturing, indexing and classifying 3.6 billion documents annually and the research findings, our experts identified seven steps for implementing business process automation, including onboarding teams and encouraging ongoing, sustainable success in automation. These include hosting a series of “roadshow” meetings to communicate plans, gather input, identify stakeholders, and align automation goals, concerns, challenges, and outcomes. Likewise, train-the-trainer initiatives for large organizations help penetrate teams and groups deep within the organization.
Business process focus
When vendors fail to deliver back-end support, organizations will experience increased workloads, more costs, and “double work” resulting from automation mistakes. Partners need a track record in delivering business process automation solutions that consistently deliver improvements in efficiencies, productivity, cost savings, and planning far beyond the sale. For automation to impact business results, companies need to look beyond technology as the solution and start with the business process. Finding a partner that has the experience in process transformation is critical to the success of the project. An effective automation partner will help you identify needs and desired outcomes and apply their expertise and experience to design a plan for ongoing support and training.Put it all together
The common challenges of improving broken and costly business processes can be overcome by planning, inclusion and implementation of the right people and guidelines. More than ever, successful projects are centered around good partnerships, a well-defined project scope, cross-functional support, and comprehensive training from your vendor. These elements, when combined, can help an organization of any size move its automation journey forward.
Bob Crittenden is a senior director and senior solutions leader for Automated Document Solutions at Conduent, Inc. driving product and solution strategies across multiple industries, including financial services, insurance, transportation, and healthcare.
