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?