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4 Automation Challenges that Business Process Analysis (BPA) Solves

3 min read
Feb 15, 2022 9:30:00 AM

Organizations are still working on smoothing out the rough edges of their automation initiatives. In the effort to scale and increase returns on their automation programs, one solution that’s gaining momentum is centralizing all their business processes in a single repository for analysis—not just to solve their automation challenges but to drive several other critical business benefits.

These are the four automation challenges that business process analysis (BPA) solves to enable scale and significantly boost ROI in more ways than one.

Challenge #1 – Organization’s Don’t Have a Holistic View of Their Entire Automation Estate

One major challenge organizations are experiencing is that they don’t have a concrete grip on all the automated processes that they have in production.

Because so many automation initiatives are siloed – whether it’s different lines of business running parallel automation programs or multiple RPA tools in use – many companies don’t have a complete view of all their automations.

The most significant way this impacts their bottom line is that without knowing what you have, you can’t know which automated processes are delivering the business value that was expected and which are losing money—usually in the form of rising maintenance and support costs that outweigh any increases in efficiency they’re producing.

automation-rising-maintenance-and-support-costs

Centralizing all your business processes – including your automated processes – in one platform for analysis gives you the holistic visibility you need to see: which automated processes are working for you, which aren’t, which should be retired to save you money, and which could be directed to other outputs like simple re-design and retraining.

Here’s a scary reality we’ve come across in the field: roughly 25% of bots tend to be redundant when you get an end-to-end look at your automation estate. Centralizing your processes in one place would enable you to find and eliminate all those redundant processes.

Challenge #2 – You Can’t See and Act on Refactor Opportunities for Optimization

One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen our customers leverage when switching RPA tools with Blueprint, is the capability to refactor their automated processes.

The case to refactor and optimize existing business processes that are manually executed is easy to make, yet few organizations ever consider putting their automated processes under the microscope.

Refactoring provides you with the opportunity to improve the internal structure of the process without changing its external outcome or behaviour to make your automated processes more resilient, less prone to errors and outages, and naturally, more likely to deliver better returns.

Challenge #3 – Automations Take Too Long to Deliver Because You Always Start from Scratch

A significant pain point most automation programs are experiencing is the extended time to delivery for automated processes. The root cause of this can be attributed to the way processes for automation are defined. They usually rely on an interview with the process owner or a day-in-the-life approach because these processes exist in an employee’s head instead of in a centralized repository.

process-definition-day-in-the-life-interviewWithout a centralized approach, you also need highly-technical high-quality resources that know multiple RPA technologies inside-out because they need to verify that the process is a good candidate for automation and then do the actual development work.

Yet another big contributor to this challenge that doesn’t seem to get much attention is the absence of leveraging reuse opportunities. There is a lot of overlap and commonality among business processes. If you could see them in one big, centralized repository for analysis, you would be able to reuse elements of similar processes to build large chunks of the automation at the click of a button, enabling scale with a quicker time to delivery.

Challenge #4 – You Can’t Trace How Automations are Contributing to Bigger Business Objectives

Logic will tell you that the vast majority of your automations are increasing efficiency and reducing costs, but those aren’t the only goals automation was implemented to achieve. Equally as important is how they’re contributing to other business objectives like improving the employee and customer experience.

For example, if you’ve automated parts of your customer onboarding process, can you visualize and connect where those pieces fit into the larger and more important customer journey and how they’ve improved that process?

Centralizing all your processes, automated and otherwise, in one repository would give you a space to decompose processes from the highest business level, so you can see and measure how they’re impacting critical objectives.

From a vantage point even further back, process centralization using a BPA solution also reinforces better governance and a more effective process excellence management plan that only serves to further increase efficiency and ROI with the simplest of capabilities: seeing how your organization works in one, central place.