Session Information:

The Process Automation Revolution is here – but how should you get started?

We're in the midst of a revolution in Business Process Automation (BPA). It’s becoming simpler and more cost effective than ever to model and automate business processes. RPA went from hype, to fad, to “Hyperautomation” in a few years; and BPM, once neglected, is being seen as important for end-to-end process automation.

In this environment, simple system workflows are quickly taking a back seat in the automation game – but how do you navigate the different types of Business Process Automation? This session will discuss the importance of robust process management and governance as an important automation strategy for sustainable success and achievable results.

Session Transcript:

Hi welcome to BTOES's 2020 the session title the process automation revolution is here but how do you get started during which I will try to guide you a little bit on the things to consider the things to think about as you go down the process automation journey as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid and hopefully that will help you plan your strategies moving forward.

My name is Shyamal Addanki, I have a background in process management and process automation in the aerospace and aviation industries and more recently for the last five years I've been helping companies implement their own process automation strategies as well my email address is up there on the slide feel free to reach out to me.

If you have any questions this is a topic I'm quite passionate about and happy to talk about I do also have colleagues standing by so if you do have any urgent questions you can type them into the question box and someone should be able to reply to you right away, we also do have a virtual booth at BTOES 2020 and you can find our Firestart booth where you can ask questions.

We're all hanging out ready to to respond and you can also schedule meetings and calls with either myself or any of my colleagues who are there so getting right into it when we talk about process automation i always like to start with a slightly broader topic which is what is business process management and i feel that that is the key topic to go down the process automation journey so bpm business process management there's a lot of different ways to look at it there's a lot of depth into what you can get into but we're just gonna take a very very high level view here of what is bpm there are three main elements to think about the philosophy.

That your company embodies what's your management style like your corporate culture the methodologies that you utilize your lean six sigma tools value stream maps and so on and so on that are now used across different industries and finally the systems that you have in place your erp your crm workflow tools.

All this technology that you've brought in so you can simply you can think about these three things as your people your processes and technology that you use to enable your company to function uh the way it functions today bpm business process management simply put is all about aligning all three making sure that they're working together towards a common goal what we are going to talk about today here is specifically the technology element because it's the technology that underlies how your bpm operates it's what enables your people to use your processes efficiently but technology also has its own pitfalls everyone focuses so much in all the technology.

That's available today and let's face it there's so many tools it's just so many solutions out there for every single problem that you can think of so is it true that every technology is a every company is a technology company well perhaps but there's a pitfall there that every company maybe focuses too much on technology technology for technology's sake if you will and that can cause its own problems right are you using technology efficiently is it bringing value to your organization is it bringing value to your operations or is it creating its own series of problems and issues that you need to troubleshoot all the time and is it aligned with your business processes is it enabling.

The automation of your business processes which is ultimately what we're talking about today and the reason i bring up that topic is you know we tend to forget about the value of processes when we talk about process automation this is urged to quickly automate systems any way we can without thinking about underlying processes so again let's step back and look at perhaps how your company operates and this I've noticed is true for perhaps 85 to 90 of the companies.

That I've spoken with most companies have process managers process managers well design and build processes many of you here today at an event like BTOES might be process managers within your own organization and you've got your documentation that's then stored in you know some sort of document repository or content management system and the idea is that users the business users are supposed to go into the system and consume these documents download this flowchart read it understand what their processes are but then they go into their other systems to actually perform the tasks so they're in account management.

They're going into their crm and they're performing what they need to do if they're in engineering or or manufacturing they might go into the ERP and perform the task whatever it is and now you've got this slight disconnect between the two so the business users might realize that hey I can't really perform my task the way the process documents telling me to for whatever reason and feed that back and there's a there's a whole iteration of processes processes are living things they're all constantly evolving constantly improving as they should be and usually at this point one of the business users gets a pretty clever idea and says you know what I'm going to go and talk to it because I think we can start automating some of these things.

That I do there's RPA tools app dev there's workflow tools there's so many things out there there's connectors from one system to another and it starts looking into it and starts going down this automation initiative and starts either building homegrown tools to automate these processes or buying off the shelf tools and integrating them or whatever it is the disconnect here and if you've already gone down this path you might have noticed it and if you haven't gone down this path.

Then take this as a warning the disconnect here is that your process managers are defining how a process is supposed to be performed while it is creating the executions of this process through automation and the two are usually disconnected every time a process manager updates a process whether it's because there's an improvement that's happened or because they found a way to to reduce waste in the process who's making sure that it's updating all this automation to be in sync with the process because if they're not at best you've got an inefficient process at work.

You're you've got a compliance issue right especially if you're in a regulatory driven industry and this goes in line as well with those back end systems your ERPs and crms and so on your processes have to be aligned with your systems your systems have to be aligned with your internal automation tools and that rarely happens so what's the fundamental issue here well the reason we have this problem is that over the last few decades.

We've evolved as organizations as it departments to operate on the system first approach to processes and what i mean by that is with the with the rise of enterprise software we looked very much into these silos of functionalities for example you need a good crm because you're growing so big and sending excel sheets around isn't working obviously so you invest heavily into a powerful crm and the more you invest into the crm the more you're using internal functions within the crm the more you're pushing your people to use the crm this isn't just a database.

It's got all these great features we're paying for let's use it the more you try and use these features the more the features within the crm are driving your process they're defining how you do what you do because the system allows you to do it so your system is actually driving your processes when what we should be doing and yes we want to use all those features but we should first understand the user journey what is it that the business user is trying to do if the business user is trying to communicate with a customer and then get a purchase order from the ERP system and write it into an email or save it back into the crm.

That's the user's journey and the user needs to interact with three different systems to do that and that's what we need to understand less about what the system can do but what is it the user needs to do and that's where we think about changing the way we work the way we think about processes in it the process shouldn't follow it it should support the process and the way it needs to function.

The way that looks to put into a visual having a process centric middle layer that connects up all your systems and all your departments allows you to have much better visibility of what your company's operations are actually doing this also means that by by re shaping the way you you have your landscape around processes you get just this this fantastic visibility.

When the when the opex team needs to figure out what's going on with the process they should have access to the process the process executions whatever data they need to mine uh to be able to figure this out same with management team same with it everybody should be on the same page and understanding of a process the process is a central core of the company and the people in the technology make sure that it happens the way it should that's where when we talk about bpm and and automation process automation.

We really are now able to say okay huh we've thought about the process now we're ready to go down the automation journey because if you haven't thought about the process first that's where you get around to a lot of issues so any comprehensive bpm platform should be able to provide you with three different core elements a platform to do your process modeling this is where you can draw flowcharts using things like standard bpmn notation do things like have built-in governance and version control of your processes definitely collaborative development is a given and then use this documented process as a layer on top of which you build the automation.

So don't separate your automation and your process but rather make sure they're well aligned make sure that your automation is essentially taking your documented process integrating it with other systems integrating tasks and forms for user driven inputs and then able to actually deploy and the cool thing with that is you get a ton of real metrics because now that you've built this automation layer on top of your actual process execution.

You can get real data for example to say look every time we onboard an employee it's taking us three weeks from from the time we select the candidate to the time the contract is sent why and you're able to go and look at the exact metrics of how long this process execution has taken at every single stage where it's gotten stuck and for how long it's been stuck there and then you can do a broader analysis and say look our lead time for example on new customer onboarding is you know taking anywhere from three to six weeks and here's the trend over the last six months.

Here's how it's changed when we implement this new technology all this sort of metrics that previously you would have had to go and interview people and really dig around to get the answers now you're getting real live data which you can obviously use to improve your processes make them better make them leaner redeploy them and when I say improve your processes.

You're improving your processes and your automation because they're one and the same thing that's the key point now when we talk about this automation layer so up till now I've talked about processes because remember what i said processes are the key make sure you've got robust process governance behind it so we want to build the automation layer on top of it okay but how where do you start.

There's just so many different types of automation there's so many different automation vendors out there and let's face it most of them and i should say most of us use the same terminology so it becomes very confusing and how do you separate one from the other because you can look at it and you can see they're not exactly the same thing but their marketing materials very similar so do they serve the same purpose it's it's a very very confusing area so to try and simplify it let's look at four main things that are available today in the market.

Let's start with RPA robotic process automation is you know exploding it has been for the last few years it almost doesn't seem to be ready to to stop anytime soon robotic process automation is brilliant because it is very very easy to deploy.

It's very quick to scale and it's essentially replacing repeatable human tasks you have to do something like look up five entries in this table and move them to the other table and then do a google search and find all the vendors and put them into this other field build an rpa bot to do that it's repeatable you can program it you can train it it uses your live screen so it's using screen capture technology uh to enter data you can do things like open an amazon web page and do a search for the first 25 products if you want and get that data it can do a lot of this sort of human tasks that's what makes it very very powerful the on the other hand the risk with robotic process automation is that it's not process automation it's a big confusion in the industry and it makes it much easier when you think about is robotic task automation.

It's a great way to automate repeatable human tasks it's not a good way to automate your business process as an end-to-end item so then we get into workflows workflows are a way to automate subsets of a process that can be automated and typically they work within a system uh what i mean by that is let's say every time i create a new entry in salesforce i want to have a workflow that automatically perhaps sends an email out to an account manager based on the first letter or or geographic region of the customer and asks them to input certain information and then sends an email out with some of my documentation attached that's a workflow it's a nice little you know it's a it's a couple of steps something that's part of the customer onboarding journey um and i can automate it's mostly within a single thing and I've got one or two users uh that that interact with that two important things to remember about workflows.

They're typically a subset of processes because there's only a few steps that happen they typically exist within a system or sometimes within one system and integrating with one or two other things and they're not linked to your documented processes so again you've got your processes let's say documented in vision or or wherever it is and these workflows are things you're programming into systems so they may not reflect your as documented processes as they should then we get into business process automation or it's also called digital process automation and the idea behind dpa and rpa bpa is to really take the workflow to the next level extend it connect it up.

So that you've really got an end to end process so an example of a of a bpa end to end would be let's look at our customer onboarding journey from the first contact where they filled out a form at a website for example to the time we signed the customer contract what are all the main touch points who needs to do what where are the reminders.

Where do we store information and actually map out that entire journey and then start automating steps so we can create entries in salesforce we can look up information we can put this in here we can send tasks to people send emails out everything that we need to do we're automating we're managing through tasks and now we've got an end-to-end business process for customer onboarding the one thing about business process automation though is it's a nice idea from an automation standpoint but again by definition it's not linked to your process documentation.

It should mirror it it should be parallel but you're still maintaining two different things over here and so that brings us to business process management the idea of business process management is doing the documentation and the automation in one element in one platform in one group so you're building this end-to-end business process automation but you're doing it using things like bpm and 2.0 notation using proper process metadata into your process diagrams so that you're also you also have something that somebody can read if i'm not necessarily interested in automating executing this process but i want to understand how you do it or let's say i'm the faa and i'm auditing uh an aerospace supplier and i want to know what their component qualification process is i don't really want to look at workflows and code and things like that bpm gives me something.

That's human readable it's a flowchart i understand what's happening but it's also an automation because it's also linked to these other systems that's the key point you also maintain organizations and roles you maintain things like governance and approvals and version control of the processes just as a side note one of the reasons that's very very important about two years ago i want to say Ernst young to the study and there was a 40 60 percent of rpa projects never met the the goals.

There they were hoping to meet because of a lack of governance behind them process governance and that's a key point and that's something we tend to forget a lot when we talk about process automation you still need governance and version control and proper management behind it and that's what business process management gives you so you've aligned your processes figured out you know that you need to get that done and how you want to do automation.

Here's one way to think about your entire organization and all the different elements and how they all fit because when we talked about rpa bpm workflows it's not that one solution is better than the other they all work in harmony so let's consider an airport for a second when a plane is coming in for a landing there's a certain set procedure the aircraft arrives on the radar scope at a certain location as it's expected to uh the controls give it certain vectors and guide it in the way.

It's supposed to make its approach to um to the to the runway there's a there's a sequence of events that happens that makes that plane land successfully from from the airport perspective now that can be considered as a workflow it's not necessarily repeatable every plane has some slight differences based on its size and separation requirements and speeds and so on and so on but there is an idea behind of you know behind it.

What need what needs to happen and that air traffic controller has a certain quote-unquote workflow that he's using to bring that plane in for a landing and in that context that's a subset of that entire airport operations yes you've brought the plane in for a landing that's fine that was a single system now we've got to think about how that crosses across multiple things from the approach controller to ground controller to all the equipment that needs to service the aircraft the passengers off passengers on and all these different things now.

We're talking about the the business process management of the airport operations to get that plane functioning and and take off again so in this context if you want to find a way to include bpm you can think of for example automated check-in kiosks that's an example of sorry that that's an example of rpa because there's a human that's checking people in but that's relatively repeatable.

You know what what information you need to get from a passport or from an id and put it in the system and check off a few boxes let's have a kiosk to it that's that's the rpa for the airport if you really want you can think about rpa as the autopilot for a plane but that starts opening up a whole another slew of discussions but the key point to remember is rpa is replacing a human workflows and business process automation are making the overall process more efficient and helping the people actually go through the process.

So hopefully this is all made made it clear on the importance of aligning your processes and deciding you know how you build that automation layer on top of it but now where do you start because it's not like you've got one process you've obviously got a library of processes in your organization these are a few points to consider there's net there's never any right or wrong answer but it depends on your organization and again something that we can dig into far more deeply anytime.

You want to have a conversation but think about for example the process documentation and when you pick a process that would be a prime example and ask how well understood is this process if i ask 10 people in the organization will i get 15 different variations of an answer regarding how the process actually works think about the complexity of the process is this something that has risks of causing bottlenecks uh lots of impacts on other upstream or downstream activities as well think about the life cycle of the process is this something simple like an employee onboarding that lasts a couple of weeks or is it something like a major acquisitions process.

That can last six months to a year uh and how is that going to be impacted by automating this process obviously how critical is this to your core activities and and just to touch on that a little more it's it's important to note that it doesn't mean you should pick a process that is critical and it doesn't mean you should pick a process that isn't critical it really depends on you picking a process that's a support process for your organization might you know give you a lot of benefits but may not ultimately improve the bottom line in the organization picking a core critical business process activity might make a huge impact on your roi but is it something you want to risk right away.

Just something to think about and definitely integrations integrations with other systems potentially with other companies does this affect your suppliers or your customers if you change your process uh and where else you know this is uh integrating with in terms of systems and so on and then one advice that I would give on that note as well is to carefully think about your starting point traditionally bpm kind of had a bit of a negative negative impact because the idea was hey let's go in and connect up all your systems and digitize all your processes and it was these massive projects where you get like teams of consultants on site right and the problem with that is is obviously it's very expensive which ends up impacting your roi but also it creates.

Its own problems with agility and rapid deployment so processes they're living things always improving and when somebody wants to improve a process and they can't just make a change now they have to go and request a ticket to their bpm consulting team who then has to put it into queue and and do a business case behind it and maybe it'll eventually get implemented.

You know four months down the road that's just not efficient at all so now we start really looking into the world of lean bpm where you're able to have this sort of rapid deployment business user friendly bpm tools that enables your business users to own their processes knowing their automation so if i'm in hr i own hr processes i can manage my hr processes i can manage my hr automation with it support but i ultimately own the process and and so on.

So you're really allowing people to manage you know what they're doing that's going to make you very lean very quick and help you deploy efficiently across the organization so a couple of best practices to sum up everything we've talked about definitely you want to look at understanding what are your clear business goals if you're looking at saying look we're struggling with process x we want to put some automation on it and we should be able to to rocket ship out the window it it doesn't work like that make sure you really understand.

What you're expecting to get out of this process automation and how that's going to work and while you're doing that the thing about avoiding silo traps is really make sure you're speaking to everybody in your organization if you pick a process that you feel needs to be automated it's causing a lot of problems don't forget to talk to all the other departments that might be affected by that process very often i've seen companies say look we need to overhaul this process we're talking to this team we've got a solution we're going to deploy it and then all the other teams come back and they don't realize that the impacts that they had on the other teams and that also goes in line with understanding your end-to-end processes right because this is just one part of your overall business process landscape and how that's impacted by everything that you do and you want to make sure that you're understanding that part too make sure that you have a basic understanding of business process management fundamentals.

It doesn't have to be a deep deep training course or anything but enough that you know how to use bpmn 2.0 there's a reason there's a lot of value in making these processes very easy to understand very easy to read and you'll go far by making sure you understand how all of these work and be agile i've seen too many companies sit and get stuck on okay we need to improve this process before we deploy it so let's think about how it's going to work.

Let's get a bunch of user feedback now let's reiterate it let's do this no just come up with the concept come up with an idea deploy it get people testing try storming doesn't work change it redeploy that's what you need to do that's the best way to get get out of the gate you'll be surprised by how much faster you can do this by failing feeling quickly rebuilding and going again so that being said couple of thoughts that i'd like to leave you with to think about going back to kind of what i mentioned about silotraps make sure that every process.

You're improving every process you're automating has a very very clear result and goal in mind make sure that you understand the destination of your business goals and make sure your processes are aligned with them and finally when you talk about automating processes i've seen again too many companies say this process that we have here it's a real mess it doesn't work we've got a lot of problems let's slap some automation on it automating.

A mess yields an automated mess that is the one mantra you should always take with you when you're going down the process automation journey as much as i would love everybody to quickly automate everything take the time to understand your process understand that there's no quick automation solution that's going to solve every problem.

If you don't have an underlying good process behind it and that's everything from my side thank you very much for uh listening to this session thank you very much for being part of BTOES's 2020 as I've mentioned in the beginning you can always feel free to reach out to me by email feel free to type your questions in the box if it's too late for us to answer at this session feel free to stop by our virtual booth at Firestart and I'd love to hear from you and talk about process automation much more thanks very much and have a wonderful rest of the day in BTOES's 2020.

Thank you.