Ursula Cullen, senior digital marketing executive at FlowForma, explores how to best position process optimisation and automation within an organisation using insights from the Forrester Research Q3 2022 Digital Process Automation Survey results
Industry experts Forrester Research Inc. have recently released their Q3 2022 Digital Process Automation Survey Results, in a report that highlights how organisations are prioritizing automation and process optimisation to achieve their business goals in 2023.
Process automation supports strategic business objectives
Since Covid-19, the more automated organisations adapted, the quicker and more effective they became.
Organisations across all industries are now prioritising process optimisation and automation to drive business objectives, and an adaptable strategy will be vital for success.
Digitalisation challenges faced by organisations
While business process automation isn’t a new concept, the immediate challenge differs from previous automation efforts.
Challenge 1: Pervasive automation is far more complex than siloed automation
Forrester’s survey results indicate that 83% of organisations plan to reinvent and automate their business processes as part of a wider digital business strategy. To address this challenge, organizations must:
- Address cross-organisational boundary challenges;
- Recognize organisational technology silos;
- Create an automation fabric strategy.
Challenge 2: Processes are unorganised
Another key issue when implementing a widescale process automation strategy is that businesses are already struggling with an automation backlog.
Processes are unorganised and run in myriad places, such as packaged applications, homegrown applications, DPA systems, robotic process automation (RPA), and low-code/no-code platforms. The challenges here are:
- Most of these technology silos are deeply embedded in business operations and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
- As organisations embrace end-to-end automation, complex processes will cross these technology silos.
Challenge 3: Spreadsheets and paper remain everywhere within businesses
Processes running across numerous legacy systems create challenges to a collective and functional automation strategy.
In particular, processes running in spreadsheets, email, and with paper dependencies are increasingly problematic.
These processes don’t run on managed platforms that can integrate into end-to-end automated processes. Forrester’s 2022 DPA survey indicates that almost a third (31%) of organisations still have many or most of their processes running with dependencies on paper.
Process optimisation is critical to automation
We associate process optimisation with process automation, however they’re actually two separate exercises but have similar end goals.
Process optimisation efforts focus on the analysis and potential re-engineering of organizational processes.
Some examples of the tools that support process optimisation are: process mining, task mining, process modeling, and documentation.
Process optimisation efforts increasingly lead to process automation — but not always. Jumping straight to automation without the due diligence of an optimisation effort can lead to substandard results.
With a massive process automation imperative now facing most organisations, one key challenge is leveraging and extending process optimisation skills.
Forrester’s latest survey data shows that 32% of respondents said they already have a small team in place that is supported by all departments of the overall business.
This demonstrates an increased autonomy for the business to drive process optimisation, which is critical to scaling business process automation and optimisation efforts.
Encouragingly, 80% of organisations surveyed expect businesspeople to participate in their business department process optimization and automation efforts.
Request a personalised demo of the FlowForma Process Automation tool to learn more about digitising your business processes.
