What are the Triggers for Automation?

Automation can deliver many benefits but what are the light bulb moments / triggers that start an interest in Automation?

There are many activities taking place day to day in a business so when does that “Aah Ha” moment occur, that spark of curiosity which commences the discovery of Automation.

This article lists several triggers and events that could cause Automation to be considered.

Some of the triggers may occur together in some scenarios.

People Triggers

This group of triggers are scenarios related to employee situations.

Staff are not available

Staff within a business can be processing the workday to day but then something happens. One or more of the staff could become unavailable due to maternity leave, parental leave, long term sickness or extended jury service.

Whatever the reason, the number of staff available to perform the work is going to be reduced for many months.

The challenge is how to get the work.

One option is to recruit a temporary member of staff, who will need training on the tasks required

Automation of some the tasks could be an alternative with the remaining team able to work as normal.

When the person returns from the absence, the automation could be stopped, or the temporary member of staff discontinued.

Staff resignation

There can be many reasons why staff resign but their departure will leave the same amount of work to be performed but less people to complete it.

In an ideal scenario a replacement would be recruited and start immediately after the departure of the person who resigned.

In many situations there will be period where the team is short staffed, but the work will still need to be completed.

One option is to get the remaining staff to work additional hours to complete the work, another could be to bring temporary staff if they are available in the timescale. As some automations can be implemented quickly, the use of automation to perform some tasks to reduce the burden placed on the existing staff can be an option.

Staff recruitment is difficult

When there is a workload mismatch and staff recruitment is difficult, automation might get considered to ease the burden on the existing staff.

The job description for the vacancy would include the tasks that need to be completed. Performing business processes, by definition is a level of repetition.

When automation is deployed it can reduce the amount of repetitive work required in a job and therefore make the description of the vacancy more attractive to people who are not motivated to undertake “Boring” work.

A Recruit with Automation Experience

Imagine if you have worked in a business where automation is widely used, and you then started working in an organisation that took a manual approach to the use of IT systems.

As a new recruit, you are going to be conveying the potential of automation to your colleagues, your team and your managers. You know there is a better way of working, you have experienced it in action. Hopefully that will trigger your new colleagues to listen and investigate automation.

Retain employees by making the job more interesting

Retaining staff is often seen as important for a business. Team spirit and corporate culture will only go so far, as the work still needs to get done.

Automation is good for the business and is welcomed by staff. There can be some initial nervous reactions but when it enables staff development and a recognition that “Staff are worth it”.

Removing the repetitive boring tasks from an individual’s activities is desirable and once implemented, staff never want the automation switched off to resume manual processing.

Staff Pay rises

Most businesses operate some form of annual or regular review of staff pay.

As the cost of staff performing business processes increases, the potential value of the benefits from automating tasks increases.

Unless the value of the output being delivered from the staff activity can increase, pay rises lead to the cost pressure on tasks covered in another trigger.

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Business Triggers

These triggers related to business events and scenarios.

Winning a big new contract

When a significant amount of extra business has been won, it usually means that there will be more work across the business. The more volume it generates in business processes the more effort that will be required to complete the work. The number of office staff to process the existing work is unlikely to have spare capacity to process the increase in volume.

One solution would be to employ more staff which of course means desks, computers, etc. as well.

An alternative is to see if some of the work can be automated. By automating some tasks, the existing staff levels may be able to complete the increased volume of work.

New tasks for the business

For commercial reasons a business may need to perform additional tasks. This situation can occur for many reasons such as competitive pressures, compliance, etc.

An example of this scenario is when Brexit created the need for large amounts of customs paperwork to be completed when previously there had been none.

The existing staff are unlikely to have spare capacity for the new tasks.

Like the “New Contract” option, the ways to deal with the extra work are recruit more staff or automate some of the tasks.

Time for work changes

As businesses evolve the time scale when work needs to be completed can change.

The rise in expectation of “Next Day” deliveries has generate pressure across supply chains to reduce the lead time from order to shipment. Of course, similar time pressure changes can exist in other businesses.

When staff work a typical office day of 9:00am until 5:00pm Monday through Friday, the question of what queue of work exists at the start of the day, what is left outstanding at the end of the day and what happens to work that arrives overnight or over the weekend.

Although factory production lines and logistics may operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, not many office functions fully operate for the same hours.

It is usually more difficult to employ staff for office work during evenings, overnight and at weekends.

If office work is automated, it can operate as required 24 x7. It could mean that the automation could deal with work as it arrives rather than wait until capacity in daytime office hours. Such a change might have a significant benefit to the overall operation of the business it could just highlight another constraint.

Errors in Work

The generally accepted rate of errors for people performing repetitive tasks, such as following a business process, is 4%. Of course, IT systems are designed to prevent unreasonable errors, but they cannot prevent “typos” or valid but in-correct data.

There is a cost associated with the correct of the errors. It can be simple additional administration work, but can also impact stock, costs or the business reputation. Clients often expect the admin part of any transaction to be 100% right, first time.

By implementing automation for a business task, the task will be completed correctly 100% of the time. Yes, IT systems can fail, but people can be alerted to the failure and data will not have been processed in-completely or in-correctly.

For business processes that have strong compliance requirements, the threat of compliance fines can be a strong trigger to implement automation.

Peaks in Work

Black Friday is often viewed as a industry self-constructed peak in activity. Many other businesses have workloads that vary significantly each month, others have specific predictable dates that see a spike in workload. Examples being found in Event businesses.

Ensuring staff levels are sufficient to match workload changes can be a major logistic challenge that incurs significant costs from planning, ramping upon and winding down.

Automating tasks that are time critical to the handling of the peak workload can provide an option that is more robust, more flexible and potentially cheaper than a manual solution.

Implementing automation takes time, but once operational, the deployment of more IT processing power and software robots to perform the automation can offer a scalable solution which can respond to increases and drops in levels of activity very quickly.

The Competition Trigger

Every business is aware of their competitors, and some have formal monitoring techniques for others it is much more ad-hoc.

If you discovered that one of your competitors was investing automation, would that be a trigger for you to investigate automation and its potential for your business?

Although businesses might be competitors they may not operate in the same way, so business processes might be different and therefore it is possible that the potential for automation might vary.

If as a business you are investing automation and starting to gain the various benefits the technology offers, you might be keen to keep the activity quiet and not let your competitors discover the investment.

Ether Solutions as a leading automation specialist has been engaged by some businesses who have been delighted with the benefits arising from the automation but requested no publicity for the work.

AI Wave

The AI Wave has been so big in terms of media coverage that it has reached many business executives who would normally not be engaged with IT.

As many have discovered the capabilities of AI and started to consider how it can be effectively deployed within the operations of the business, there is recognition that the key benefit in many scenarios is from automation rather than pattern handling capabilities of AI.

The ad-hoc use of AI tools can be interesting and exciting but engineering the repeated use of AI functionality into business processes is effectively dependent upon automation.

Cost pressure on Tasks

“Do more with less” is an instruction often issued by CFOs to other business leaders at the start of a budgeting cycle.

Although the instruction is clear finding ways to achieve it can be difficult.

Implementing automation of business process tasks is one way to achieve the same level of activity or even more activity and save on operational costs. It is often a solution CFO’s like as the risk factors are low and the ROI from automation is usually very attractive.

Review of Processes

Many organisations recognise the benefits from a regular review of their business processes. The use of techniques such as Lean and Six Sigma can structure the activities.

A part of such reviews can be the identification of processes which are suitable for automation.

The trigger for such automation can often be alongside other changes to existing processes. The work can recognise where staff will need to interact with automations and how any errors can be dealt with from a process perspective.

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For more information on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and the journey to implement automation please see our website .