DON’T AUTOMATE your business processes!

Sorry for the title, but this is not a gimmick. I meant it. Don’t automate your business processes until you really understand what you are about to do, because it can kill the organization.

Hi, I am Mehul Thakkar, founder of Awesome Analytics, a firm that focuses on automation, analytics and AI. I am a CA and a Certified Ethical Hacker [basically programmer] and we deliver 100+ projects every year through Awesome Analytics. So everything that I am sharing stems from my personal and professional experience.

So, why should you NOT automate business processes?

Before we get into the “why not” let us understand what is meant by business process automation. Business process automation is the practice of automating business processes to improve efficiency & accuracy, reduce cost and, most importantly, reduce manual efforts in repetitive tasks.?

However, there are some major pitfalls that are super important to understand before venturing on a journey that can be as tedious as converting Mars into a habitable planet!

A tale of two automations.

Imagine that you have someone from the accounting team, let’s call him Amit, sending 800 emails to your vendors every month for balance confirmations. Now, they know that this manual activity is not only time-consuming, but it is borderline disrespectful of their time. They realize the “value of the time” that can be saved by not having to do that task manually.?

On the other hand, imagine another person from the backend team, let’s call him Vijay, who’s work as a part of automation was transitioned wherein instead of an excel file he now fills a web - based form. The data that he fills is exactly the same, just that he now fills fewer fields compared to their earlier form. However, now there is detailed log and tracking of when he fills what and a new report that holds him accountable for the delays at his end has started making his life miserable.

You may have often heard of the benefits of automation, so let’s talk about those benefits and it's dark side, keeping Amit and Vijay in perspective.

Benefit 1: Increased Employee Satisfaction and Output:?

Automating your business processes can improve employee satisfaction and output. By automating tasks that are time-consuming or error-prone, you can free up staff to focus on more important activities. Though everyone tries to sell automation stating that it is time saving, That benefit is often contextual from an employee’s standpoint. After all, Einstein did say ”Time is relative”. Let us understand that from our above story.

Time is relative

Now, Amit’s and Vijay’s automations are both saving time in their own processes as well as for organization as a whole. This automation would also help other functions that are dependent on these processes. Amit is going to love his automation while Vijay does not show much love for the end result because even if time was saved, the additional clarity has made his life difficult. Amit, will respect the automation, the time saved and will do everything in his power to ensure the automation developer is supported by him during the requirement gathering and development. Will Vijay do the same? Not really, Vijay might ensure, that he creates roadblocks by consistently changing the scope of work, not doing the testing thoroughly and then later complaining that the automation does not work “as expected”

Vijay’s unrest if spread to others, may result in a departmental or worse, organization level failure of implementation of that automation while the management overall may be left with a negative opinion about automation, technology, vendor, etc. This problem could have been avoided, if the management sets the correct tone regarding the importance of each automation that is being picked up and its impact on each process/individual.

At the end of the day, automation does save time. It will undoubtedly result in increased productivity and reduced operational costs. It's also worth noting that automation can encourage employees to be more proactive – taking advantage of available technology to speed up processes.?

However, management has to ensure that they identify people like Amit and Vijay, and have a strategy in place to manage expectations for both. The goal of automation is not to single out individuals and point out their flaws. Its goal is to make an already existing system better and iron out any inefficiencies that may have been caused by an earlier manual operation.

Benefit 2: Transparency and Management:

At the heart of most business processes is information management. Automation can help to improve transparency and accountability by logging all the activities in a process at various stages. This makes it easier for the process owner to identify problems and resolve them quickly. Additionally, automation can help you to keep track of your costs and performance – making it easier to make informed decisions about the future course of action.

However, as we learnt from the earlier story, not everyone likes transparency. Some employees may not like that things are more transparent especially when their inefficiencies are being pointed out.

Mindset is everything

This could eventually turnout to be a people problem but to start with we could say it is a mindset problem. Lack of transparency was a result of lax processes and frameworks of an inefficient process set by the same management. Change is hard for people. They would often feel that their honesty, ethics or work is being questioned when all you are doing is asking questions to identify the root causes of delays so that you can enable them to fix it. This is exactly where change management is critical.

Make it everybody's business

Initiatives like, performance based incentives, incentives linked to milestone automation project’s success, workshops on problem-solving, workshops on technology, etc. can really help people like Vijay to switch to a better mindset. After having been given such facilities and reasonable opportunities, if there is still resistance without reasonable cause then management has to be ready to deal with consequences. Management should not shy away from making a statement about how serious they are about this automation. The heart wants what the heart wants. That’s how clear the mandate should be. It is the duty of the management to address all the queries and concerns of the employees affected by the automation but still ensure that they keep making modifications and moving forward. If at any point anyone tries to sabotage the end objective then it should be dealt with even if it takes firing someone over it as a last resort.

If you scale with broken processes and a workforce with unclear mindset then these problems will just be magnified when you scale. Implementing change in processes when you are growing is critical. Even though it could be a task as difficult as collecting all the infinity stones spread across the galaxy, people will still remember you as the villain, Thanos.

And then there is more...

There are two more benefits that people talk about, benefits in automating compliance reports and reduction in human error. We do 100+ automation projects every year, from minor automations with huge impact to scalable automations that are marvels which make the developers and customers equally proud and happy. In those projects, we have seen the compliance risk increasing instead of decreasing and I don’t even want to talk about the myth of human error component right now given that this article is already lengthy. I will address the dark side of these two aspects in the next article with another example. Though eventually it was all sorted out, it’s important to understand what can go wrong and how it can be prevented.