Optimization is important. It is a goal shared by all businesses, for it is the only way to grow. As a business grows, one of the major endeavors is to take existing business processes (core or not) and optimize them.
Most business leaders agree that optimization is a top priority. They fall short when it comes to implementing an optimization and automation strategy.
Businesses gear everything they do around optimization:
- Optimize revenues, minimize expenses.
- Keep high-value customers and shed low-value ones.
- Keep high-value products and shed low-value ones.
Often, one of the highest value adds in most analytics endeavors is taking long-running and inefficient processes and shortening them to get more timely access to information.
This article will explore optimization trends, strategies, and processes that ultimately shrink manual activities to get relevant and reliable information quickly.
Sections
- What is Robotic Process Automation?
- The Flow of Analytics
- How to Measure and Optimize Business Processes
- Challenges of Automation
- How to Use the Power Platform and the Technology Base to Optimize Internal Billing
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is for routine or repetitive tasks within a business or IT process. These could include those associated with finance (such as managing accounts payable or accounts receivable), reporting, compliance, and many others.
Since RPA can mimic these activities, organizations use it to handle mundane tasks and support business functions that require a combination of knowledge and judgment.
Expectations are for global RPA software revenue to reach nearly $2 billion in 2021, and Gartner predicts the RPA market will grow at double-digit rates through 2024 despite economic pressures from COVID-19.
As more businesses start their automation journey, they often wonder where to start.
The key to optimization is automation, and the primary enabler of automation is quality data that can easily flow between systems without manual intervention.
The Flow of Analytics
One trend in optimization is the need to get trustworthy information faster. People ideally want information quicker to support decision-making, and they want it to be reliable and trustable.
Through the lens of people, process, technology, and data, let’s break down how to achieve optimization. In the video below, I walk you through this breakdown.
As discussed in this video, the first step to any kind of optimization exercise is to evaluate your current processes.
A major first step is collecting information about the system(s) needing improvement. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure, so getting a fresh perspective on what is going on in the organization is vital to making good decisions.
A good place to start optimizing is with processes that require a consistent rhythm and cadence to ensure the data is correct.
In many cases, the last time anyone looked at the data was a month or quarter ago, and major changes have happened in the meantime.
It might be because of a new initiative, a new department, or a new product launch, but identifying what has changed is key to making the right decision. To optimize, you can automate tasks such as data refresh and data collection to make sure that the data doesn’t fall behind.
As an example, let’s say you are a retailer looking to understand how your website traffic correlates with your brick-and-mortar sales. Without reliable and up-to-date information about your e-commerce traffic, it is difficult to determine the correlation between online traffic and in-store traffic.
How to Measure and Optimize Business Processes
The graph above shows how we analyze a business process to better optimize it. Consider your core business activity and how you might apply each stage.
- Descriptive analytics: We first start by trying to get a handle on the historical data to answer what happened.
- Diagnostic analytics: Once we understand and can describe what has happened in the past, the next step is to start to understand why behind past events.
- Predictive analytics: Then the guiding star is to utilize the data foundation and your knowledge to try to determine what will happen next.
Most people expect to see the benefits of optimization in the “what will happen” stage, but most of the benefit is in the first two buckets. By evaluating all business process tasks, we can determine what can be optimized.
This video outlines a typical process flow for analytics.
When examining a process, consider these points:
- How can I reduce the number of steps?
- What can be automated?
- How can I optimize specific tasks?
Remember that you’re not optimizing an entire process, you’re optimizing a task, which will make the activity as a whole better.
Changes from above drive automation to the core business practices speeding the entire activity up.
Challenges of Automation
While automation can help free up time for development and management teams, certain challenges come with automation. These challenges include a lack of transparency and the need to have a clear goal.
An established goal and plan can prevent many common automation challenges. Here are some optimize and automate guiding principles to consider before you begin automating your processes:
- Process scares people: Implementing an automation project requires a lot of planning and buy-in. It is one of the most critical areas in a successful automation project. You must create a strong case for automation and educate everyone about the value this can bring to the business.
- Don’t think too big: Remember that you cannot optimize an entire process at once. Instead, focus on optimizing specific tasks to make them more efficient.
- Prevent overengineering and overspending: Work in small pieces to shrink long, manual processes. A good way to do this is to work in small pieces to incrementally build out one step at a time.
How to Use the Power Platform to Optimize Internal Billing
Let’s take a look at our time entry business process. This is an end-to-end breakdown of how we are approaching optimization and automation iteratively.
This first part is to push data collection and quality to the earliest entry point. For us, we use PowerApps for data entry and quality checks.
When thinking about how automation can help to optimize this process, we think about the specific tasks.
We use a Power Automate flow to:
- Assess appropriate time codes.
- Verify hours entered in a day, week, pay period, and month.
- Validate billable vs non-billable hours.
- Verify time was entered within 2 days of the work performed.
- Compare pay periods for reasonability.
Reporting in Power BI
Next, we can use reporting in Power BI as another point for data quality checks. We can provide a report to the employee that summarizes and flags if an employee missed or incorrectly entered data. For example, here are some of the weekly review tasks that can be answered through a report:
- Weekly time reporting
- Approve data to ensure that quality is maintained.
- Everything is coded properly.
- Comments make sense.
- Right time progress towards monthly forecasts
- Right time budget analysis
- Payroll reporting
- Employees can verify their pay stubs before payroll is submitted.
- Employees can ask: Are all my expenses in? Are all my bonus hours accounted for?
- Employee balances
- Are there vacation, PHSA, Wellness, and park pass, and office allowances?
- Invoices
- Invoicing can be done very quickly and accurately.
- The goal of inviting customers into view billings as they are approved
- Post reporting
- Headcounts over time
- Revenue by multiple dimensions
- Margins
Reports accelerate a review process directly to the employees. The optimized process removes the manual step of data review by the manager. An on-demand report improves timeliness and quality when answering business questions.
Power Virtual Agents bots are great tools to optimize frequently asked questions, for example, billing services on policies and balances. A Virtual Agent handles simple questions and directs people to the right places. Ultimately, this frees up HR management time, allowing staff to focus on value-added activities.
Conclusion
To close, this piece showed the flow of data during the internal billing process. Power Platform is a great option to optimize tasks within this process to reach the end goal of optimizing by automating.
We have always stressed the importance of automation to optimize business processes. Our own iterative billing procedure is a great example of striving towards the ultimate automated workflow.
An automated workflow can establish powerful enhancements and improved data quality and access. People can contribute more value-add benefits than resorting to button-pushing.
