Digital business automation is helping companies across industries improve operational efficiency, drive innovation and better serve customers. Automating work helps businesses offer a better experience at speed and scale. To begin, businesses must evaluate their big picture. What are the complex processes with multiple steps that when done manually are slow, costly and frustrating for your business and customers?

Resolving operational pain points with digital business automation

Most businesses could benefit from automation. For example, do any of the below operational pain points sound familiar?

• Your customers are complaining because their applications take too long to process, or their emails take days to get answered.
• You can’t say exactly why your processes aren’t working because you can’t “see” what’s causing the inefficiencies.
• Your knowledge workers are restless because they have little time for high value work. Instead, their days are filled with filling out forms, redirecting questions or performing work they weren’t hired to do, but spend most of their time completing.
• Your business can’t keep up with compliance and regulatory requirements, the maintenance of which is stealing focus from key innovation initiatives.

These common problems can be mitigated by applying digital business automation software, such as data capture, workflow automation, process modeling, decision management and embedded AI. With the right automation technologies, companies can improve operations. Here are some examples.

• Interactions between people, such as approval steps or determining when to send reminders for tasks.
• Interactions with IT systems or applications, such as verifying client benefit eligibility information, obtaining product information, or updating a client record.
• Making decisions, such as whether to accept a loan request, determining whether a claim or transaction is fraudulent, or setting the price for a shipment.
• Processing and storage of documents containing relevant data, such as extracting and digitizing data for a bill of materials, a purchase order, an account opening form, a permit application, proof of residency, or a medical claim.

To see transformative improvements, however, usually requires some combination of automation software, possibly from multiple vendors, or solutions to be built in house. This can be challenging given stretched IT resources and a business imperative to act quickly. This is why cloud-based automation platforms with comprehensive, pre-integrated tool sets can become a competitive advantage, allowing businesses to grow and scale into the future.

Finding the right starting point to scale digital business automation

Even with the right software tool set or platform, figuring out which initiatives to focus on first is no small task. It’s tempting to dive in and focus on the squeakiest wheel without looking at the wider picture. Without a user-centric, pragmatic strategy, well-intentioned projects can quickly go off the rails, no matter how best-of-breed the technology. So, how do you start? Better yet, how do you start in such a way that you can scale? Design thinking can help.

Join the on-demand webinar to hear one of our clients and a couple of our automation experts talk about how the practice of design thinking, plus the right cloud-based tools, can get your business to a quick, scalable win. Learn more and register here.

Need to get started right away? Learn more about where your company can apply digital business automation for better business outcomes by downloading the quick and practical guide to digital business automation.