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Writer's pictureJorge Soares

What is the role of automation in ensuring success of digital transformation projects?

Across industries, organisations are accelerating digital business transformation for long-term growth and profitability. The pandemic has further accelerated transformation initiatives as businesses realise that performing digitally is going to be critical for them to survive and thrive. From Gartner’s perspective, “the transformation journey is taking large enterprises especially at least twice as long and costing twice as much as they originally anticipated.”The main reasons behind suboptimal success of transformation initiatives is the fact that organisations are trying to automate businesses processes “as is”, missing onto the foundational first step of identifying what they would like to improve in their existing processes before they digitise them.


What is the best way to scope, scale and lead digital business transformation and deliver financial results?

As we said above – the first foundational step is to be clear about your objectives – would you like to improve an existing process or completely transform it? This process analysis helps in creating the roadmap for digital transformation. This is where the inputs of a process automation expert like ABP becomes important. We see several reasons why process mapping, analysis, and redesign work are essential to an effective transformation implementation. If the existing overly complex, with unnecessary steps that could be eliminated before automation is applied.


Process automation examples: Improve efficiency of processes or complete transformation


  1. Making processes more efficient:

With a study from McKinsey estimating that up to 45% of work activities could be automated using automation technology, the potential for businesses to become more efficient and productive is clear. For example, in a global logistics company experienced delays in payment realisation as they did not have information of goods received on time. This information was being sent by delivery teams to the sales order teams who were then manually updating this information onto the finance system. In order to transform the process digitally, the company automated the receipt of good received confirmation straight into the finance system.

  • This simplified the process and eliminated the need for manual data entry.

  • The finance team is now able to see the status of payments online.

This is one of the thousands examples of how automation can support digital transformation of a business process.




2. Transforming Processes Completely:


If your transformation objective is to completely change the way you carry out a process, automation can support. For example, if an insurance company is losing customers because of slow processing of customer claims, process automation can completely transform the process and allow:

  • Customers to file claims online

  • Automate capture of claims information

  • Automate the workflow of claims processing by sharing information with various teams

  • Also, automate decision making on claims

As a result, businesses can -

  • Transform customer experiences with slick, responsive processes in place to either onboard customers, handle their complaints or service requests.

  • Maintain competitive advantage by keeping costs down and improving customer experience

Process automation enabled transformation can bring a much higher level of performance and value for businesses. RPA initiatives in which the “P” stands for process improvement or innovation is more likely to succeed in achieving transformation objectives.


Embarking on your transformation journey? Reach out to the process automation experts.

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