CPA = more productivity from same staff!

How much business activity is “Routine / Regular”?

Standard business means the execution of well-defined business processes.

A quick analysis of process execution usually identifies the 80 :20 Rule – Standard Business compared to “Exceptions / Unusual / Special” Business.

If it is standard business that can be executed by trained staff – why would a business not automate it?

Consider the processing of orders as an example.

New Customers will require “One off” execution of specific processes.

Once a customer is defined, is the processing of the orders from a customer standard?

Do trained staff look at a manual to perform standard business processes?

What would prevent automation?

1. A question of Scale?

At the level of small tasks, it is easy to see why repetitive activity should be automated. It is hard to argue against such automation.

At the larger “Business Process” level, it might contain many smaller processes each of which consists of multiple tasks. The same logic can be applied.

2. Is it about Complexity?

Multiple staff might be involved in the execution of the complete process.

The Orchestration of the activities is important from a Governance, Audit and Security perspective but those considerations should not prevent the automation of the overall process.

Discrete automations, orchestrated together, might achieve the right balance.

3. What is the correct Name?

Marketing people and scholars can argue about which term should be applied:

• Process Automation
• Agentic Automation
• Business Process Automation
• Robotic Process Automation
• AI Automation

The key opportunity is to replace the manual activity performed by staff to work performed by computer code so that the activity is automated.

4. After Automation Are Staff still required?

When a process is automated it should be designed to enable Human In The Loop (HILT) activity.

People can be used to investigate and resolve any issues that occur during the automated processing.

It is often thought that people are essential for decisions.

• Do decisions required in a process rely on Data or Judgement?

Data driven provides the potential for rules that can be automated.

Judgements must be made by people. But Judgement is not usually made in a vacuum.

• What factors impact the Judgement?
• What levels of authority are required to make the Judgement?
• Are there policies that set boundaries for the Judgement?
• Are Judgements reviewed for consistency?
• Do Judgements adopt a “What Did We Do Last Time” approach?

Could automation be used to reduce the effort required to make a Judgement?

Consider an Order processing scenario, does the potential order exceed the customer’s credit limit?

The decision to accept or reject the order could be data driven or resolved by judgement.

Using people to handle exception conditions and exercise Judgement in the business process is where more value can be delivered for a business than using people to execute standard business.

5. Do Process Exceptions Matter?

Once automation of the “Standard / Routine” activities is achieved, it can bring into focus the costs of Exceptions?

Process improvement effort can be focus on preventing the exceptions and / or making sure that the business value from the Exception processing is achieved.

To achieve the value, it might mean higher prices for exceptions which reflect the higher processing costs.

6. Marginal Gains – Deliver Value!

Continual Process Improvement (CPI), can be effectively achieved through incremental automation.

Automating one task at a time can seem like a small change, but when implemented consistently the impact across a business process can be significant.

Each execution of an automation delivers incremental value. Volume is a key factor for effective automation.

7. Leverage Automation infrastructure

Deploying the first automation requires infrastructure to be established in terms of people skills, processes and technology.

Each additional automation leverages that infrastructure. It provides better usage of the capacity and effectively shares the “Overhead” cost. This can provide the spiral for an Automation programme of activity.

8. Factors that work against Automation

These factors work against Automation:

• Regulations that demand human oversight / decisions
• Processing volume is too low for automation to be cost effective
• Interface to systems is subject to frequent changes
• Data availability for input to automation is subject to frequent changes
• High number of variations outweigh the volume of “Standard” processing
• The cost to build and operate an automation are greater than human costs

Would addressing any of these factors improve a business and make it ready for automation?