“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
Heard that one before?
In the midmarket, less than half (43%) of organizations run formal automation programs that include automation planning—but our research reveals that the companies that are effective in process modeling and planning consistently succeed in automation.
In short: you can jump into automation with both feet … but you might be setting yourself up for future difficulties if you don’t plan for what you want your automation program to look like first.
But how do you build a strong automation program?
Let’s start with the fundamentals.
How do automation programs benefit your organization?
If your company’s still running mostly on manual processes, you know the feeling: It’s tough to manage initiatives across the org with limited human and financial resources.
Setting up an effective automation program gives you the opportunity to manage labor costs and increase productivity, giving you an edge over the competition. Even better? It makes your customers’ and employees’ lives easier, too.
Four big benefits of automation programs include:
Scaling the efforts of individual teams
This might sound like a no-brainer, but let’s take an example: your midmarket sales team may be juggling a couple hundred accounts at the same time. With all the manual work they have to do to stay on top of these accounts, their ability to scale (let alone deliver on their quota) becomes hampered.
You don’t have to start your automation program across the entire sales org—after all, the enterprise team may not be in as dire need of automation as your midmarket team. Instead, you can start with where the biggest need lies and grow from there (more on that below).
Efficiency and productivity
The IDC State of Process Automation in the Midmarket in 2024 found that midmarket businesses mostly sought to increase efficiency (50%) and boost productivity (46%) through their automation projects in 2023. Automation streamlines workflows, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall process efficiency. With automated systems running continuously in the background, productivity increases overall. These benefits lead to lower operating costs and better revenue growth potential.
Customer satisfaction
Process automation programs improve customer satisfaction by providing faster
response times and more support through chatbots and automated service systems. By leveraging customer data, they can deliver personalized experiences and recommendations. They also reduce errors, ensuring a more consistent service quality and a more reliable and satisfying customer experience.
Employee satisfaction
Mundane repetitive activities, like entering data or creating forms, often lead to mental fatigue. With automation, employees can focus on valuable tasks that are more engaging and interesting to them. This can lead to a better employee experience and lower turnover rates.
As your organization starts to realize the benefits of automation, you start to build a case to justify the adoption of more formal automation programs. These, in turn, increase project capacity and success rates.
“When teams gain experience and encounter increasing complexity, they may focus
improvement planning on an organization’s broader and more strategic area or a
critical value stream. This type of approach incrementally drives value and spreads
costs as improvements are made over the initiative’s life cycle.”
– The IDC State of Process Automation in the Midmarket in 2024 White Paper
What all successful automation programs have in common
Automation programs have diverse use cases, from managing purchase requests and invoices to streamlining employee onboarding. But no matter the use case, successful automation programs have three traits in common.
Great automation programs have…
…a clear request process
To keep your automation program organized, you need a straightforward system in place. “A great automation excellence program is essentially case management,” says Jonathan Butler, Group Product Manager at Nintex.
Make sure you have a standardized request process where people can submit ideas for automation opportunities and explain how they might impact the business. You’ll also want a way to rank requests by importance and a method for tracking how long cases have been in the queue.
If your IT team is in charge of automation at your organization, they’ll often have a good process around this already. Otherwise, talk to your IT counterparts to figure it out together.
…a prioritization process linked to revenue
Great automation programs are tied to revenue or financial impacts. If you have 30
requests to automate tasks, it’s time to triage. Have a system for ranking requests in place before the queue gets out of hand.
For example, of those 30 requests for automating new tasks or processes, many may be “nice-to-haves.” But you’ll also have a few in there that could save your sales reps an hour each day. Those are the ones you want to prioritize—the ones with direct financial impact.
…an oversight process
You need big-picture oversight to gain visibility and ensure your automations run smoothly. This oversight becomes part of your greater automation management process.
Butler advises you to ask yourself questions like, “How do people request things? Where do they have to go to have those conversations? When a new request comes in, who needs to be involved to handle it?” Having clearly delineated steps and responsibilities ensures you maximize your efficiency and ROI.
The path to automation excellence
If you’re just getting started with automation, the path from paper processes and manual systems to automation excellence can initially feel daunting. Here are four steps that can create a flywheel of growth for your company’s approach to automation:
1. Plan first
The first step is to ask yourself what process you want to automate or improve. When you choose one, take a close look at its current state. As Butler says, “Automating an unknown is not going to produce the results you want.”
Pay close attention to any points in that process that cause confusion or bottlenecks. How could you improve them, and what are the desired business outcomes? Having a tangible goal gives you something to measure progress against.
Having a measurable goal connected to business outcomes also helps you get buy-in from leadership. Remember to always loop in IT as well. Even if they don’t have to build the solution, having them on board will help if you need technical support down the road.
2. Start small
When starting out with automation, it’s tempting to jump into exciting stuff like wide-scale changes and major overhauls. But remember: you don’t have to automate something like your end-to-end cash process right away.
Instead, start by automating small, valuable processes with clear, measurable outcomes. For example, say you begin by automating the visitor sign-in process at the front desk. Visitors will come in and enter their information on an iPad, which gets logged automatically into a database. You calculate this will save your receptionist 5 hours per week, or 260 hours per year. That’s your first win.
Later, you can add to this process. But in the beginning, it’s just important to learn how to implement automations while avoiding overwhelm. Your first wins will build your confidence to tackle larger projects down the road.
Pro tip: Depending on your business goals and industry, what it looks like to “start small” may vary. For example, you could:
- Capture and track data from digital formsals
- Review and approve documents
- Automate a customer onboarding meeting process
- Collect e-signatures
3. Prove success
Once you’ve been capturing data for a predetermined period—whether that’s a month
or a year—it’s time to analyze your success. When you know what your desired business outcomes are, it’s fairly easy to say: “These are the metrics we needed to capture. Are we showing success with this or not?”
If yes: Great! Continue to optimize. If no: That’s okay, now you know where you stand. Look at where you missed the mark the first go-round and adjust moving forward.
4. Scale internally
Once you successfully introduce a process or two, your automation program is well on its way. With a few wins under your belt, it’s easier to get buy-in and scale internally.
For example, let’s revisit our sign-in automation from before. You’ve saved your receptionist time dozens of hours by introducing a digital sign-in process, and visitor data now automatically gets transferred to a spreadsheet.
Now, you might build on that first automation. For example, the action of logging in for a tour could trigger an email, so the tour leader knows to come to the front desk. Or, you could add a “How was your tour?” QR code on the sign-out page to automatically capture customer satisfaction data.
In this way, you gradually gain evidence to show the success of automation initiatives—and success leads to more budget and more buy-in to continue to scale.
Set a solid automation foundation with the right tooling
Kickstarting your drive for automation excellence can be easy … if you have a firm grasp of the benefits of automation to keep you motivated and an understanding of the principles that great automation programs have in common. Following the path to automation excellence—plan first, start small, prove success, and scale internally—gets you the rest of the way there.
The only way to make things even easier is with the right tooling, so you’re confident that your platform can facilitate the use cases you’re looking for.
Ready to implement a winning automation strategy in your organization? Get actionable insights from IDC: Download The State of Process Automation in the Midmarket in 2024.
