Business process automation has emerged as an essential performance lever in a constantly evolving economic landscape. From this tremendous technological evolution, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes benefit greatly. Automation offers unprecedented opportunities to streamline financial tasks, accelerate analytics, increase forecasting accuracy, and strengthen cross-departmental collaboration. This transformation allows Finance teams to improve their efficiency and responsiveness, and free up time to focus on high-value-added activities in order to fully assume their role as a strategic partner.
This blog covers some of the most common process automation terms and provides practical tips for making your process automation goals a reality.
What Is Business Process Automation?
A business process is a sequence of activities implemented within an organization to achieve a specific objective. The development of a business process is a structured and transversal approach, which consists of defining and organizing the tasks, their relationship and their sequence, the different actors involved, as well as the tools and working methods used.
In the financial field, business processes are put in place to manage the economic flows of a company. They often involve specific workflows to ensure effective financial management. For example, financial planning, a crucial process for performance management includes several well-defined stages such as the collection and analysis of economic data, budget development, or cash flow forecasting.
Features of Business Process Automation
All or part of these processes can be automated. Business process automation (BPA) is the use of specialized software and technologies (artificial intelligence algorithms, robotics, data analytics, etc.) to perform repeatable tasks without direct human intervention or with minimal intervention. It is used for multiple reasons:
Save Time And Efficiency: Automation helps speed up processes by eliminating repetitive manual tasks, thereby reducing turnaround times. As a result, it contributes to an overall increase in company productivity.
Increased Value Per Job: Process automation will free your employees from focusing on unnecessary or low-value tasks. That is, they can focus on work that creates more value (and makes more money) for your business.
Increased Employee Satisfaction: Anyone who has worked as an intern knows that chores and robotic tasks are extremely detrimental to motivation and enjoyment of work. No matter how you look at it, no one will enjoy working hard all day. If such things can be automated, you and your employees will be happier doing more meaningful work.
Minimize Human Errors: No matter how much attention your employees pay to details, they are still human. There is always a small chance that someone will forget something or that a mistake will be made. The consequences can be minor or catastrophic. The right software will remind you regularly of your tasks.
Process Automation In Seven Steps: A Procedural Model
Therefore, the best way to describe the procedure model for process automation is to follow the 7 steps below:
Identify Automation Potential
Evaluate the automation potential of your process portfolio, for example, based on process types or defined process characteristics such as complexity, execution frequency, degree of standardization, etc. In this case, many companies benefit from existing, easy-to-interpret process documentation. The more detailed this documentation, the better other parameters can be considered in process selection, such as the systems involved, risks, and dependencies or impacts on upstream and downstream processes.
Analyse And Optimize Your Processes
Before rushing into automation, take the time to analyze and optimize processes in depth, and eliminate the main weaknesses right away. If you automate an inefficient or flawed process, it will continue to be inefficient even after automation, and those flaws may even be amplified. With the optimized process, carry out an overall cost/benefit analysis between the automated target process and the current real process.
In this context, running a process simulation can be very useful to determine potential savings, compare them to the costs of the automation project, and thus evaluate the ROI of process automation.
Set The Executable Process
Transform the optimized process into a workflow graph that describes the execution logic. This chart is typically stripped of purely manual activities or decisions and enriched to include new tasks or events to execute. Next, you will want to add the technical information relating to the execution of the different steps, thus generating the final execution graph. Necessary enhancements may vary depending on the automation platform chosen and the necessary integration with surrounding systems. Simple tasks can usually be implemented directly without requiring programming skills.
Create The Necessary Forms/Input Masks
Along with creating the executable process, the design of the forms can begin. It's often even a good idea to start designing the forms from the beginning so that you can make improvements to both the workflow graphic and the forms, as part of rapid prototyping. Additionally, early creation of forms also allows for initial validation by end users, which significantly improves process quality and acceptance.
Prepare For Deployment
In preparation for the deployment phase, you should obtain technical approvals for the new process, inform and train your staff about it, and ensure that all technical tasks for effective management of the change have been completed.
Start Process Automation
It's done! The new process is now available to employees and executed using workflow support. The decision you still have to make is: do you want your automated process to be immediately available to everyone involved or do you still want to "test" it productively on a smaller scale at the beginning, to obtain initial practical information?
Check The Results
Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) as they relate to project objectives and cost-benefit considerations. In the early stages of automating a process, pay particular attention to how often ad hoc activities are added or alternative paths are taken. These observations can be used to verify the process design so that adjustments can be made if necessary. Essentially, all monitoring results can serve as a basis for future process improvements.
Conclusion
Process automation will certainly continue to grow steadily in the years to come. At Mindful Automation, we offer a ready-to-use process automation tool that seamlessly guides you through the essential steps of process automation. With this, you not only ensure things are done correctly but also that you are doing the right thing and, most importantly, not just a one-off project, but integrate your results into the company's continuous improvement process.
If you need any additional service, you can also talk to us about implementing the Invoice automation process in your business. Explore the cutting-edge technologies and don't hesitate to contact us to launch your initiatives today!
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