As a process improvement professional you might have a team of lean, six sigma black belts and you look at your company’s processes and identify opportunities to improve them. Or you are driven by or driving a large transformation effort. And you know what to be done to put your organization’s processes on a high speed track.

But when you look at what you can actually do today tactically or where the quick wins are, you often see that there are two bottlenecks.

• Your employees who are your change agents are stuck in tasks that are repetitive and mundane. It is very hard to engage and motivate them to make a change.
• You are working with a bunch of IT systems that are legacy and are not agile. Changing all that is an expensive option. You are not able to implement your improved processes or new workflows because these systems are not capable of supporting these changes.

How do you address these problems?

• Automation of manual, repetitive tasks to free up resources for better tasks. Or put the dollars coming out of the FTE reduction elsewhere. This means that the operations team is able to generate additional dollars to spend. This is the best case for Robotic Process Automation.
• Implement an agile Business Process Management suite that can wrap around your current IT systems and drive them through new workflows that are more efficient and effective. This approach gives you;
  • Better capability to track and monitor processes and people
  • Ability to respond to new requirements from business faster
  • Integrate disparate systems which is difficult or impossible through traditional means

Implementing Business Process Automation is often the most effective way to improve your processes from a tactical point of view. Products like Blue Prism (an RPA pioneer), Celaton and WorkFusion are tools you can look at to put your process excellence initiatives on a fast track.