Digital automation is all the rage these and rightly so. It cannot only help you boost your productivity, help you achieve greater operational efficiency while minimizing the cost and errors. Moreover, it can also help you improve service delivery, ensure compliance and implement standardized processes in your organization.
Remember, you can only reap all these benefits only when you have a sound digital automation strategy. You should also be aware of your current digital automation strategy maturity level. Without these things, your digital automation efforts are destined to fail.
In this article, Anti-Dos will shed light on four effective ways you can use to increase the maturity of your digital automation strategy.
How To Assess The Maturity Level of Digital Automation Strategy?
The first thing you need to do if you already have a digital automation strategy is to assess the maturity level. The best way to do that is to look at which stage does your digital automation strategy fall in. There are three different stages involved in maturity models, which help you assess the maturity level of your digital automation strategy.
- Task Oriented Stage
The first phase of digital automation maturity level is task oriented. During this phase, simple manual processes are automated. Robotic process automation is used during this stage. It usually automates tasks at an individual level so if you are an employee who is supposed to complete a particular task, you can benefit from such an automation but it does not necessarily benefit your department or organization in the same way.
- Team Oriented Stage
In this stage, automation graduates from individual level and extends to team or departmental level. To better manage this stage, you can use a business automation platform or a function focused app. These solutions come preloaded with workflows that enable businesses to automatically assign tasks to different team members when a specialized event takes place. For instance, if a lead shows interests in your brand, the lead will be automatically assigned to sales reps who are responsible for closing the lead. This is just one example and there could be many more use cases for these applications. You must know how to automate the task assignment process to take full advantage of these solutions.
- End to End Stage
The last and final stage of maturity is reached when an organization can create end to end processes that can cover the entire organization. The best example of an end to end process would be a process which can accept orders from one system, check for inventory in another system and dispatch the other through the third system. Enterprise automation platform
How To Increase The Maturity of Your Automation Strategy?
Here are four ways you can use to take your digital automation strategy to the next level.
- Link Applications With Processes
If you are at the beginning of the digital automation strategy creation process, you can stick to the basics. Things start to fall apart when you continue to focus more heavily on automating simple tasks even when your strategy has matured. You should always set your sights on the next stage. If you are currently in a task oriented stage, your objective should be to reach a functional aur team stage.
Your ultimate goal should be to reach a point where systems, applications and workflows could communicate with one another. For that to happen, you first have to connect your applications with processes. The more connected your processes are with your applications the better chance you have to achieve that goal.
You should develop a platform that could keep complexity under control. With vendors belonging to different segments of enterprise IT joining hands to create robotic process automation tools that can integrate all the libraries and workflow capabilities into a single solution. If you are creating your digital automation strategy, all this can help you create a well thought out strategy, which can increase your chances of success.
- Leverage Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation has its advantages and no one can deny that. These bots are not only easy to use but they pack a surprising punch as well. Sadly, most businesses use them when they should not. That is why it is important to know when you should use robotic process automation and when you should refrain from it.
If you are using it to replicate how humans interact with user interfaces, it might backfire especially, when the user interface changes. Similarly, if you are putting many different bots to work which depend on one another, a single change to the user interface can bring the entire process to a grinding halt.
On the flip side, robotic process automation can come in handy when it comes to performing repetitive tasks, It can also remove errors. Additionally, it can do a brilliant job when it comes to automating different supply chain processes. It can also do a fantastic job in performing predictive maintenance and when it comes to automation high volume tasks.
- Harness The Power of Artificial Intelligence
Just like robotic process automation, artificial intelligence can also be your friend. Thanks to advancement in artificial intelligence technology, it can be used for reading documents and understanding its meanings thanks to natural language processing. Not only that, you can also use it to convert raw data into machine readable form.
Predictive modeling can empower your unsupervised automated process with decision making capabilities. The more you use AI to automate tasks, the more precious human resources you can free up. This not only reduces the burden off their soldiers but also helps them focus on value -centric activities.
- Create Interactive Relationships Between Computers and Machines
Last but certainly not the least is to create a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and computers. As process automation becomes more sophisticated, it will reduce human intervention. To keep machines on the right path, you still need humans as they can sometimes get out of hand. Your goal should be to design a system server in which humans and machines can communicate and collaborate with one another for seamless process automation.
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How do you take your digital automation strategy maturity to the next level? Share it with us in the comments section below.
