Monthly Archives: May 2025

In many organizations, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is introduced with high expectations—reduced costs, increased efficiency, and faster turnaround times. Yet, a common oversight often limits the value of these initiatives: skipping the process improvement stage. Before automating, improving your existing processes can significantly enhance the results, ensuring you get the most return on your automation investments.

Automating a poorly designed process only replicates its inefficiencies at scale. The key is to streamline and optimize these workflows before handing them off to automations. Here’s how a thoughtful process improvement approach can help maximize automation ROI:

1. Identify and Eliminate Redundancies

Before automation, examine your workflows for repetitive steps or unnecessary approvals. Consolidating these tasks reduces the complexity bots need to handle, leading to faster implementations and more reliable performance.

2. Standardize Procedures

Processes that vary by team or location create automation challenges. Standardization brings uniformity, making it easier to develop and maintain automation scripts. This also reduces error rates and simplifies monitoring.

3. Improve Data Quality

Many automations rely on structured, clean data. If your inputs are inconsistent or contain errors, the automations will simply reproduce these issues. Investing in data cleansing and validation steps can ensure that automations produce accurate and meaningful results.

4. Analyze Process Timing

Some tasks are more suitable for automation than others, especially those that cause bottlenecks. Process improvement techniques such as time-motion studies or value stream mapping help pinpoint high-impact areas that should be automated first.

5. Engage Frontline Staff

Involving the employees who interact with processes daily brings valuable insight. They can identify pain points and suggest practical improvements before automation begins. This inclusion also supports change management by reducing resistance.

6. Align Automation Goals with Business Objectives

Refining processes helps clarify their purpose and relevance to broader goals. Automating tasks that directly contribute to performance targets—such as reducing response times or increasing throughput—makes the ROI of automation much clearer.

7. Prioritize High-Impact Processes

Through improvement efforts, organizations can rank processes based on automation readiness and potential ROI. Prioritizing these processes ensures that early automation wins deliver value quickly and build momentum for broader adoption.

Conclusion

Process improvement isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s an essential step in maximizing the return on automation investments. By cleaning up your workflows, ensuring consistency, and aligning efforts with business goals, you’re setting up your RPA initiatives for long-term success.

Moving Forward

Next time, we’ll look at the involvment of automation in Change Management. How automation projects impact organizational culture and how consultants can guide clients through the transition effectively?

When organizations invest in automation, they often focus on the immediate efficiency gains. But what happens when processes change, systems update, or business requirements shift?

Without resilient design, these automations can become fragile and require frequent maintenance—diminishing the value they were meant to provide.

Resilience in process design means building automation workflows that can withstand change and remain effective over time. It’s a way of future-proofing your digital workforce.

Why Resilient Process Design Matters

Many automation failures don’t occur because the technology doesn’t work—they happen because the underlying processes were too rigid or assumed that nothing would ever change. A resilient process design considers real-world variability, making automations more adaptable and sustainable.

Here’s how to approach it:

1. Design for the rule but consider exceptions and corner cases

Automations often struggle with unexpected inputs. Build in clear handling paths for exceptions. For instance, if a document is missing data or arrives in an unusual format, the automation should be able to escalate it to a human or apply a backup rule.

2. Modularize Automations

Break processes into smaller, reusable components. If one step changes, you only need to adjust that part rather than reconfiguring the entire workflow. This also makes maintenance faster and less error-prone.

3. Use Clear Logging and Alerts

Set up detailed logs and error notifications so issues are easy to identify and resolve. Silent failures can lead to bigger problems if they go unnoticed for days or weeks.

4. Avoid Hard-Coding Values

Processes that rely on fixed values—like a specific file name or location—are more likely to fail when small changes occur. Use configurations or environment variables that are easy to update without touching the core logic.

5. Choose Tools That Support Flexibility

Some automation platforms offer better support for changes than others. Look for features like version control, object libraries, and low-code development environments that support easy iteration and testing.

6. Keep Documentation Up to Date

Resilient automation also depends on human understanding. Clear, updated documentation helps teams understand how a process works, what to do when things go wrong, and how to improve it over time.

7. Collaborate With Process Owners

Process design shouldn’t be done in isolation. Involve the people who understand the tasks best. They can help identify common exceptions, business rules, and possible future changes that the automation should accommodate.

Long-Term Gains From Resilience

While building resilient automations might take a bit more effort upfront, it pays off significantly over time. Organizations that design for change experience fewer breakdowns, lower maintenance costs, and better scalability as they expand their automation programs.

Conclusion

The goal of automation isn’t just to get faster—it’s to get smarter. A resilient process design ensures that automation continues to deliver value even as business conditions change. When systems are built to bend, not break, they’re far more effective in the long run.

Moving Forward

In our next article, we’ll explore how process improvement can be used to maximize automation ROI—focusing on how refining workflows before automating leads to better outcomes and greater returns on investment.