Where do you begin when beginning the automation journey? How do you select an area for automation that will yield the best results?
These are questions that are often raised in daily conversations with our partners, who entrust us with solving complex automation challenges. After all, the use of automation, particularly intelligent automation, has grown drastically in previous years. At Zetta Ampersand, we begin almost any new relationship by planning the automation journey for our partners.
There are many crucial considerations when beginning to think about automation. In this post, we detail how Zetta Ampersand evaluates potential automation opportunities and will help guide how your team can begin the automation journey.
Where to Begin
At the beginning of any project with our partners, the team at Zetta Ampersand attempts to find areas in a workflow containing handovers, formatting, or managerial bottlenecks. Practical examples include manual data entry or a customer passing from sales to the team delivering value. By allowing bots to address repeated tasks, leaders empower the humans inside the company to handle more value-added opportunities.
Handover Management
The first area where automation can be a crucial resource is managing handovers. In every company, there are numerous areas where one team or person passes along current projects to another. In these handoffs, there are often inconsistencies that lead to different qualities of execution. Naturally, human contributors will have difficulty replicating a process perfectly across hundreds or thousands of these handoffs. Conversely, automations greatest strength is its ability to remain perfectly consistent across all tasks. Thanks to automation, our partners can ensure that every pass-over of projects or information happens constantly and consistently through automation.
Bottleneck Identification
Identifying production bottlenecks is also an essential part of the Zetta Ampersand analysis process. Critically, we at Zetta Ampersand dive deep with our partners to identify areas where the entire workflow passes through a single point. Whether this is a person tasked with oversight or the input into a single system, production bottlenecks are where automation excels. Our partners often begin their automation journey by working out the kinks in their current workflows rather than replacing them. By addressing areas where a simple solution creates the greatest impact, company leaders see tremendous results with little effect on business continuity.
Automated Data Integration
After identifying any handovers or production bottlenecks, the team at Zetta Ampersand works with our partners to identify areas where data is being manually formatted or altered. An excellent example of this type of task is any workflow that requires data entry. In many of our current partners' organizations, there are numerous areas where some form of incoming information lives inside multiple sources. It is often up to a team member inside the company to compile all the data before moving on to more valuable analysis. For example, a finance team may need to gather their month-end figures from multiple reports. Or a sales team would be tasked with enriching new customer data inside their CRM. These tasks, while seeming simple, can consume a drastic amount of time and hold back companies from reaching their growth targets. Due to the ongoing administrative tasks, the teams engaged in the workflow can never focus entirely on long-term goals. Automation allows these companies to unlock massive amounts of potential in their employees and, ultimately, drive growth.
A Continual Journey
The automation journey is a process of continuous improvement with a constant arc of potential applications. However, for many of our partners at Zetta Ampersand, the first step in the automation journey is applying automation to handovers, production bottlenecks, and formatting tasks. In all of the above cases, our partners can use simple solutions that allow for the use of systems that are already in place. Ultimately, any automation journey aims to empower each company to deliver more value with the current resources.