If you find the vastly different opinions about automation in the workplace confusing, you’re not alone. This post wades through various perspectives by using real-world examples.
Let’s explore why you’re reading this post.
Maybe you want to develop a compelling business case for an automation platform.
Maybe you don’t know why you should care about automation.
Maybe some of your current point solutions include a few automations and you want confirmation that you’re all set.
Maybe you’re doing research but you think this topic is totally uninteresting.
Perfect. this variety of reactions exists with our customer stakeholders, so we’re sharing what we’ve experienced with the following perspectives :
- automation is good
- automation is necessary
- automation is bad
- I don’t care about automation
- Automation doesn’t affect me
If you haven’t had a chance, check out our definition of an automation platform. The spoiler to that post: it’s using software for any business process in your organization.
Let’s start with the automation is good perspective.
- We work with a lot of marketing and sales teams. A popular automation is in our CRM solution, and starts when a new lead contacts one of our customers, Origami.ms sends the contact a “hello, we’ve received your request let’s connect on this date” via text message. Our customers are really happy with this automation because their prospects love the speedy response. The benefit of this automation is significant for organizations of all sizes and industries as it saves many people from performing administrative tasks such as comparing a web lead with existing contacts, identifying the lead as new, sending the correct text message, recording that the text was sent and scheduling a meeting when the lead confirms. If a company performs these steps manually, they’re incurring resource costs and using precious time executing repeatable steps. This example is one of hundreds of automations that we deliver to customers every day.
- We regularly hear from CMOs, CROs, Heads of sales, COOs, CIOs and CEOs that they want to deliver the best experiences and products, and consider automation part of what will help make their companies successful across all their business processes.
- Where’s the automation platform benefit? Many companies use different tools for lead management texting and meeting scheduling. There’s a hidden cost in people, software and time to manually track and update separate point solutions as repeatable steps occur in this workflow. Our customers calculate the time it takes to complete each of these steps for their leads for 1 year, and add inefficiency, data cleanup, reporting and opportunity cost multipliers. The business case is compelling, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what Origami.ms can help you automate.
Next, we’ll review the automation is necessary perspective
- There are many tasks and processes that your team members perform, which are repetitive, time consuming and which they’d prefer not to have to perform. Retain great staff by giving them interesting work and automating repeatable. tasks they perform such as filing, saving, chasing, emailing, aggregating and more
- According to IBM’s 2021 Global AI Adoption Index, 80% of companies are already using automation software or plan to use this technology in the next 12 months, with key benefits being improved employee productivity and resiliency.
- If you haven’t invested in automation, it will become increasingly hard to catch up to automation-enabled competitor efficiencies, margins, and interesting work environment advantages.
- Where’s the automation platform in all this? When our customers talk to their teams and find out how many people not only perform fatiguing repeatable activities, they discover the people and software duplication that exists in their businesses from so many people updating the same data in different systems. After internal discussions, executives usually call us up urgently to help them “fix our unnecessary people and software costs across our organization”. No executive that we work with has ever said to us that their status quo will grow their organizations. None.
There is also an automation is bad perspective
- As with the industrial revolution, it’s pointed out that automation is a threat to some people’s jobs. We don’t dispute this. The questions are: how many manual, repetitive, and duplicative costs can an organization afford as they try to scale or fulfill their mandates? Will the organization still be relevant, competitive or attract the desired caliber of people with the status quo? These are the most important questions our customers ask themselves when they discuss the impact on jobs.
- For a refreshing perspective, we’ll share how one of our customers decided they couldn’t fulfill their mandate unless they implemented platform automation. This customer gets 1000s of records per day from a government database. Each record is associated with one of their hundreds of patient care locations, scheduled to experts to review and update with new healthcare information and sent back to the government database throughout the day. There are simultaneous activities to pre-screen, welcome, and follow up with patients. This customer decided that they MUST help the government keep healthcare costs under control by delivering high quality patient care, minimizing administrative overhead, and optimizing time spent by healthcare experts. When they worked out the costs of manually completing all their necessary steps, they realized that platform automation would save the healthcare system over 87 people every year, before they factored in their own growth!
Some stakeholders claim not to care about or think that automation doesn’t affect them
- The root cause of these perspectives is often the same. Many people have team mandates and don’t even think twice about absorbing inefficiencies. If a process is frequently repeated, requires unideal manual or software steps, requires chasing, data re-entry, data matching, data cleanup or is ‘just how the team does things’, the time and costs of these inefficiencies are often distributed across team members and aren’t quantified.
- There are some team leaders and department executives who consider team level inefficiencies the cost of doing business.
- Organizations with people that look across all processes, often the COO, CIO and CEO roles determine their direct and indirect inefficiency costs by asking insightful questions about each team’s structure, technologies and processes. They also examine processes, data, software and reports that extend across cross teams.
- People that think that automation isn’t relevant, or doesn’t affect their teams may not be taking an organization-wide perspective, and may not be quantifying inefficiencies or experience impacts in their scaling forecasts.
- Where’s the automation platform in all this? It’s right with the people who plan the future of the organization, by quantifying team and cross-team inefficiencies. Lack of automation impacts companies now, and as they grow. Implementing an automation platform is a scaling, growth, and mandate enabler.
It’s never too early or too late to engage with internal stakeholders to quantify the impact of some current processes, and to investigate how your organization operates across teams.
At Origami, we’ve worked through these important discussion with our customers and their stakeholders.
What we love, is to bring our experience to your teams and open up opportunities that often weren’t even imagined to be possible.
Contact us to discuss how we can help your organization take steps now, to enable your future.
