Are you trying to make the most out of your business’ capital? Are you always looking for the best way to reduce costs and become more efficient? Productivity boosting and cost savings go hand-in-hand with automation.

Simply put, in business, automation is the use of software to carry out repetitive tasks with the aim of reducing – or even eliminating – human interaction. Automating processes frees up time to focus on business development – and your bottom line.

But why is it important? Let’s consider five key reasons.

1. Accuracy and Consistency

If you want a job done the same way every time – day in and day out – choose a robot. They do exactly what they’re programmed to do. A bot that automates what you do ensures every piece of work is consistent. This can be great in finding further optimization. Remember – consistency is the key to success in your business.

2. Time Savings

The headline of any automation pitch is the time-saving aspect – and rightly so. Automation takes the time out of basic processes and gives it back to your people. Time saved can be turned into money earned. Just think about what you can do with all that time(!).

3. Risk Reduction

People are unfortunately prone to error. That imperfection is part of what makes us, us. But in a business, errors can often cause far bigger problems. Perhaps it means you aren’t compliant and receive a fine or make a mistake that leads to a customer complaint. Automation takes people away from repetitive work where they are likely to make mistakes.

4. Better Collaboration

Workflow automation can be used to automate the process of bringing team members into a piece of work. If you want to involve ops or accounts at a certain point in every process – automate it.

5. Reduced Employee Turnover

If there is one thing that drives people crazy at work, it’s feeling like they are wasting their time. Automation gives you the chance to take away the boring work from your team and let them spend their time adding value to your business. It really works. They’ll be much happier and that means they’ll stay with your company in the long run.

What are the best ways to automate processes?

Start with low-hanging fruit. What is a reasonably simple process that you or your team find themselves doing daily? It could be updating a CRM or closing down old tickets on your support system. Whatever it is, first understand the process, then work with an expert – and tick it off your list.

What processes or services do companies most often want to automate?

Deep breath in and… sales processes, tasks assigning, employee onboarding, employee offboarding, expenses, payroll, accounts, data entry, call logging, call attending, surveys, feedback monitoring – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ultimately, with all the automation software available on the market, you can automate pretty much anything. And if you can automate something, then why shouldn’t you? Too often business owners spend their time getting dragged into the day-to-day grind – when they should be focusing on the bigger picture. The solution is business automation.

Automation can be great for your business. Interested? Contact PAteam today!

Is your company struggling with the heap of tasks it has to carry out, day in, and day out? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. But help is at hand – in the form of workplace automation.

What is workflow automation?

Workflow automation is defined as the design, creation, deployment, and automation of business processes based upon preset rules where tasks are automatically triggered and routed between people, technology, and data.

In business today, we use all sorts of different applications and services to get our jobs done – everything from ticket management, task tracking, social media, email, calendars, spreadsheets, invoices, forms, etc. And with the right strategy and software, every single one of these processes can be automated.

What can workflow automation be used for?

Some great examples of workflow automation are email marketing and employee onboarding.

By using a bot to automatically follow up on emails, you free up the person who normally monitors and carries out the process to engage in more meaningful work.

When it comes to employee onboarding, all the relevant screening processes and form filling can be automated to pull through the info held on the new candidate. This can then be sent out for references and then reviewed, on completion, by a person – letting them add their value.

What’s the biggest challenge automation faces in a business?

The greatest resistance you will find to workflow automation, and making people’s lives easier, is surprisingly from those very people. Naturally cautious of technology that might steal away their job, – or make an error out of sight – your staff and senior management may be hesitant to dedicate resources to developing or maintaining something they can’t have a conversation with. Business automation starts with people, so get your answers to their questions ready.

FAQs

Questions like “how will this help us grow?” or “will it really save us money?” are common And handled correctly, automation can add more value than many realize.

When it comes to growing your business, you need your talented teams to focus on making your product or services better. You don’t want your top-tier marketer replying to feedback emails, you want them organizing the next great campaign to push your product, right?

And when it comes to saving you money, think of it like this: a bot can outwork any person if you build it properly. Sorry, we’ll rephrase that: a bot can outwork all of your people. Computers are built to deal with operations at an unbelievable speed and scale unmatched by human input.   As a result, they can churn through your tasks quicker than a room full of people. While the performance benefits are clear, the cost impact is too – even with programing and maintenance costs factored in, automation is much cheaper.

What are the pros and cons of using an integrated workflow automation system?

An integrated workflow automation system bridges the gaps between your business’s different programs and automates process flows that run across multiple platforms. Naturally, this makes things a lot quicker and allows teams working over different areas to communicate with each other more effectively.

Workflow automation needs to be seamless, so if you don’t do a good job of building it in full or haven’t finished it – your staff have to fill the gaps. People are great at workarounds and patches, but if you subject them to that for too long they’ll become frustrated.

As long as you reach out to an expert and get the guidance needed to do it right, workflow automation has the power to transform your business for the better.

Caught up in workflow automation? Get in touch with PAteam today!

Why are people so bad at getting automation into their business? It’s pretty simple: they lack the knowledge to do it right. Combine that with a need to chase trends rather than results and it’s no wonder that so much automation falls flat on its face. We’re here today to hold up a mirror to the attitudes that plague so many businesses.

For Good Reason?

Let’s talk about what the logic behind most pursuits of automation is made up of.

Say Business A becomes aware of automation, either through leadership or expertise within an IT department. If identified through leadership, it’s almost always to keep up with the competition. If it’s introduced through the expertise of an IT team member, then unfortunately their vision will likely be warped when it is debuted to leadership.

It might seem like we’re being a bit down on the C-suite, but really it isn’t their fault. The idea of adoption curves is not a new thing. However, because of them, the enthusiasm that surrounds new ideas is often far ahead of the understanding that should underpin them. This is most often why automation fails in a business – because of a lack of knowledge and strong implementation.

Roadblocks

Every activity you pursue in a business should have a clear purpose. Without that, any success you have is built on luck. To find the things you can improve, you need to map out your business and the processes within it. Find a process that isn’t working as well as it could be. Improve it. Then, if it warrants it – i.e. you want it to scale and not involve people – bring in automation.

The hard work doesn’t stop there though. Once automation is in place you need to track it; using specific KPIs built to assess how well it’s doing. If anything isn’t crystal clear, then you need an expert to tailor your automation to your business needs.

Once it’s built, tried, and tested, well, then it’s got to be maintained. This is without question the most overlooked step in RPA. Cowboy suppliers in the industry conveniently forget to tell new clients this – something that we certainly always cover during onboarding.

Despite all of these steps, most companies give up on making RPA a success long before they should. Whether it’s down to poor planning, a lack of expertise, or a commitment to trends rather than effective tools – most don’t make it.

Buck The Trend

RPA is built to take humans most of the way out of the processes that take up too much of their time. They’re still going to deal with outliers and exceptions but to give the space for all this to happen you need a good culture that focuses on improvement and learning above everything else.

At PAteam we set the right expectations from the start. We’ll give you insight into how businesses just like yours have succeeded and help you take the next step in your own journey. This all comes together in building automation that is tailored to your business needs.

We draw from our customers’ goals to think in terms of giving them solutions. Any innovation that we develop is because they have some great problems to solve. The best part is, every time we work with someone new, we get better for every client.

Need help with automation? Contact PAteam today!

Libraries by their very nature are brilliant resources with so much knowledge and a never-ending subject list that tapping into it all is more than a life’s work.

But, with all that information it’s easy to get lost and even easier to find something that isn’t actually useful to you. Just like the brick-and-mortar outfits, software libraries are much the same. They’re cool and have value at a basic level but beyond that, they begin to struggle.

Here’s where we’re at with them.

Hot Take

As always, this is just our opinion and there are others in the industry who really back software libraries. But it’s our belief that these repositories for automation don’t really, truly, serve people to the fullest. Like many things today people want a quick fix, a shortcut, 10 tips to…, but in reality, there aren’t shortcuts or a one-size-fits-all approach that is going to work with RPA.

Window to Another World

One advantage we will concede is that it often opens the door to what is possible with technology. If you’re in a tech-phobic business or have stakeholders who just don’t want to know, the low-hanging fruit of pre-built automation to demonstrate potential is a great starting point – especially for simple tasks.

Easing Pickings

Software libraries within a business actually make a lot of sense, particularly in very large organizations – such as SAP, TCS, and Cognizant. If your developers can quickly grab something pre-built to your standards and then tweak it to fit the scenario then that’s a win. Providing things are documented and controlled properly this approach speeds up development and implementation. In fact, it epitomizes the purpose of a library – to build on shared knowledge.

Generally Too General

So we’ve covered the good now for the less good and actually it’s just one thing – software libraries lack specificity. Don’t get us wrong, there are libraries teeming with highly niche automations but none of them will work for your business without significant tweaks.

That’s the drawback and it stems from the very nature of good automation is its granularity. Your process should be close to perfect and should fit your needs precisely, in turn, the automation needs to be built in the same way. For automation, one-size-fits-all actually fits no one.

Unlike an Open Book

Abbyy is a popular library for all sorts of automation including intelligent document processing. Using a piece of their software as an example they saw that their US invoice processor couldn’t read EU invoices because the formatting is different. Let’s take it a step further and imagine Spanish invoices, perhaps, differ from the rest of Europe. This is a really high-level example and already we’re seeing deviations. Automation needs to be built for a single process at a time.

The bottom line is that you can’t build automation with a few clicks. Using a simple fix devalues the complexity of the problem you’re solving. To get the value from automation that is most definitely there, you need to add specificity. And while a library can be great if you need to find a basic template, there’s a good chance that to understand how to make them work for your business, you need an expert.

Keen to discover the power of automation for your business? Contact PAteam today!

There is real duality in the businesses that we work in today. We rely massively on trusting other people. This trust can relate to anything from completing tasks, offering advice, or maintaining quality. And yet, despite this massive reliance on others, we still put safeguards in place – just in case they don’t follow through.

Today we’re talking about what makes ‘good’ RPA (TL;DR? It boils down to how much you trust it to work).

Deemed Unnecessary

While no bot that we put in place is ever left completely unattended – because checks and balances are crucial in managing any process – we always want the people we work with to gain the trust of a bot’s ability and use this trust to truly free up their time.

If this didn’t happen then the bot would be redundant. Why? Because they wouldn’t actually be taking the menial work away from someone! Instead, they would just be overseeing the task rather than completing it.

Double Standard

One habit we see in every implementation is that a person who has had their tasks taken from them distrusts the bot innately. When they log in each day, 9 times out of 10 the first thing they’ll do is check on the bot. If it’s working correctly, great, that’s what it’s designed to do. But the moment it deviates, alarm bells start ringing! Imagine for a second if we treated people like that.

The real truth is, despite the exposure to technology that we all share, we still believe that people can do things better than robots. That might sound counterintuitive because we’re told to think of robots as machines that speed everything up, but in actual fact people still prefer people. People trust people and they assume a robot will fail because it isn’t intelligent in the same way that our fellow humans are.

But What Does It Do?

In case you didn’t know, automation is a brilliant way to boost the efficiency and reliability of a process by freeing up a person’s time. Not only do you get more value from the person by being able to give them more complex tasks, but you also catalyze the process allowing it to work far better at scale.

When it comes to defining ‘good’ we need to understand primarily what is the purpose of automation – what problem does it solve? There are always multiple ways to achieve the end goal, whether that is using people or robots or a combination of the two. RPA is only as good as the result it provides.

Process, Processes, Processes

But you can only determine if a result is good or bad by benchmarking everything that you are already doing. That starts with understanding your processes and documenting their effects.

Good RPA is a bot working well in an existing environment without you worrying about it. Process development and improvements are important in getting the most out of a bot. But if that bot does the boring, repetitive work quicker and more accurately than a person within the same environment, then it has succeeded. Then and only then, can we finally call it ‘good’ – it’s actually really simple.

How good is your RPA? Oh, you don’t have any?(!) Look no further than PAteam. Drop us a note – xxxx.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. That’s a phrase used by everyone and their uncle. But unfortunately, it isn’t often stuck to.

We’ve made a business off the back of broken processes, so in some ways, we’re grateful for them – but you definitely shouldn’t be.

If you already know there is something you or your teams do that just doesn’t work properly – whether there are communications challenges, technology errors, security incidents, issues with workplace safety, or quality control – you need to get on it ASAP. But is automation *exactly* what you need?

Perhaps. But it’s not where you should start.

Don’t Patch It. Rebuilt It.

Our phone rings pretty regularly with calls from businesses desperate to drop automation into the middle of their operations. But 9 times out of 10 their business isn’t ready for it. The processes they want to build on aren’t sustainable and adding automation is just going to add cost for minimal gains – not good. Even worse though is when they suggest that they can tweak it to make it fit. If it’s broken don’t ever just patch it – rebuild it better than before.

Because of automation’s recent addition to the pool of tech buzzwords, people think it’s a one size, fix all, easy win. While it does have a good amount to offer, it isn’t going to fix what is already there. If your process is inefficient, automation will just execute that inefficiency at a higher rate.

The Real Battle

Change though is its own mountain to conquer. Whether you’re battling to fix something while it is in motion which often can’t be done or you’re trying to tap into your IT team who are already pushed to get everything else finished. This is where bringing in an expert really helps.

Automation experts, like us, have seen it all before and can provide guidance on how to rebuild processes with as little impact as possible to your operation and your people. Because we see your business from a fresh perspective (and have been doing this for longer than we’d care to admit!) anything that doesn’t work jumps out at us.

Case in Point

Let’s take an example, something simple that businesses, maybe even yours, have to do – adding record IDs to a report. It might start to sound familiar. This manual Excel report is stored in a folder that is only ever dusted off to update the report. No one has read the report or used it at all since it was introduced. Now is there any point in automating this process? Of course not.

As experts, it’s also our responsibility to let you know when something isn’t just broken, but also redundant. If you’ve been carrying out a process poorly for 50 years, why would we want you to invest in doing it for another 50? That wouldn’t help us build a strong relationship with you and that’s what we always want. We’ll help you find a way to make the process more efficient and less error-prone – and then supercharge it with automation to give you the maximum kickback on investment.

Process improvement is present everywhere you look. An efficient process creates more value and automation makes it scalable. We won’t take “because we’ve always done it that way” as an excuse. Let us help you fix your processes and then we’ll look at automation.

We’ve got the complete toolkit and the right experience to fix your processes – contact PAteam today.

While we do love spending a little bit of time talking about ourselves, that’s what this is all about right? We also love to shout out the brilliant tech and players in the industry. While we work with a lot of vendors, to be honest, one of our go-to vendors is NICE. Because of that, not that they need the press, we wanted to take some time to talk about why they’re often our vendor of choice.

NICE With a Capital N

We’ll do our best not to throw shade on any other of the big names in the industry because that’s not really our thing, this is all about why NICE is so…well…nice. Nice to collaborate with, and even nicer to recommend them as a great bunch and we can’t say enough good things about NICE – but we’ll give it a good go anyway.

School of Hard Knocks

If we can use a schoolyard analogy for a moment, NICE is like the slightly geeky kid overshadowed by the jock. Quiet, considered, and an all-around good guy, NICE is the one that blossoms a little later than the rest – and turns out to be quite the stud as he approaches middle age (!). Because they have such an approachable manner, it’s hard not to want to work with NICE. They echo and mimic the values many of us want to embody.

Be Yourself

Much of what makes them great is their culture. NICE is interested in developing relationships and although they typically work with big customers, they’re more than happy to work with anyone given the right opportunity. They know exactly what they can do but that at the same time they know they aren’t the best at everything.

A Done Deal

Agnosticism is a lie in tech. Under the hood, 90% of the work that is carried out is tailored to a particular platform. When we start a conversation with a client we focus on understanding what needs and problems they have before we ever look at solutions. The funny thing is it usually just ends up with us using NICE. They’re actually just that good.

Best of Both Worlds

We believe one of the reasons they have been so successful with big clients is that they have the certainty which comes with a business of their size but the soul of a smaller outfit. This is a rare thing and even rarer in the tech world. Some of the other big guys in the industry have huge sales departments. That stands at odds with our own approach and NICE reflects this in the way they work and that makes dealing with them and our own customers that much easier.

NICE wants to do their best but they don’t want to be anyone else. They offer a variety of technologies so they know if they provide the approach to support and create a relationship they will be able to be successful in the future. It’s the long game and one we’re more than happy to play with them. We offer open and honest conversations and that is what we love about NICE.

If you want a great expert to pair with a great vendor like NICE, look no further than PAteam.

We live in a world where so many businesses, and ultimately people’s lives, sometimes depend on nothing more than a single line of code.

With the recent Log4Shell vulnerability sending large corporations everywhere into a spiral we thought today we would talk about the importance of business continuity and how having systems that are adaptive is your best bet.

Hold The Line

As we saw huge corporations dedicate their massive IT teams to defend against L4S, it was clear that even with great business continuity plans, without agility and teams made up of people ready to fight the good fight with great tools, those same companies won’t be ready next time. In IT things are taken for granted, so without question, there will be another part of some code that is susceptible to attack – to think differently is naive.

We Got This

When the Log4Shell vulnerability was first discovered, we had to quickly jump into action. From our customers’ perspective, the scariest thing for them was having software from vendors which might compromise not only their automation but also other aspects of their business. Thankfully,  because we work with a wide range of clients we were able to quickly liaise with the big vendors to ensure that everything was covered.

Not a Simple Switch

However,  fear surrounding stopping automation has developed – because it is now so ingrained in so many companies that it can’t simply be ‘shut down’. Many companies use automation to record and monitor security and compliance; so turning the bot off means potentially breaching internal policy or worse – wider industry regulations.

Paper Over the Cracks

Not so long ago. The idea of filling out an IT security verification form before working with a new customer was nothing more than a paperwork exercise. But now, security breaches can be so quickly and effectively leveraged that having the backup of good IT security in place is quite literally critical.

The Right Approach

We all need agility and mobility within our businesses. We need creative and smart people to help build and maintain our business. RPA is excellent for this as it can be turned around quickly and a working solution can be built and deployed rapidly. We need tools that can deal with things we cannot plan for and anything which can turn on a dime to counter threats is going to help.

There is real value in strong contingency plans and being prepared for the worst but if the pandemic we’ve been gripped by, or zero-day exploits are anything to go by, we can’t be prepared for everything. Better than great planning, is having teams and tools in place that can adapt and overcome new challenges and become all the better for it.

We’re ready for all things RPA, so if you want to find out more, contact PAteam today.

It’s about time we finally address the double standard seen in modern workplaces. And while it’s not usually in our wheelhouse to wade into workers’ rights, we’ve had enough!

Ok, we’re being a little facetious… but honestly, people treat bots badly. Robots are your digital employees. There’s no two ways about it. They carry out work that you would otherwise have people doing. It’s about time we give them the credit they deserve and truly recognise their strengths and weaknesses.

Clear Favourite

Imagine for a moment that you have an employee who does, well, average work. And while they don’t set your world alight, they’re OK at what they do. Then, let’s say, you have an employee who processes at incredible speed, 24/7. But from time to time, they get it really wrong. Like completely wrong.

It’s a bit obvious, but we’re comparing an average employee with a bot. It is a double standard that, for the most part, you’ll get a lot more frustrated with a bot than a person? We think so. And that just isn’t right.

Many Hands

Truly understanding the limitations of both a person and a bot is the only way to work when evaluating what you’re going to get by choosing a digital employee over a human one. A human being is going to be capable of making decisions and dealing with things they haven’t seen before – but, a bot isn’t. However, a bot can work round the clock, at a speed 100x a team of people could only dream of.

Golden Ratio

The thing is, any time a bot makes a mistake it’s because a human didn’t build it properly. That’s right – we’re all to blame when we curse a failed program.

This is why aiming for a 100% success rate with a bot just isn’t realistic – so get that out of your head. We aim for 80/20 success to failure. Now, that might sound low – but think how much that bot can do, 80% of a large volume of work is still far more than a team of people could churn through. Edge cases are unavoidable and that’s ok: you’ve got people to deal with those.

Gravy Train

At some point, you’ve got to consider scale. Let’s take the example of a public transport company dealing with strikes that cause massive delays. A lot of frustration for commuters.

With such widespread issues, a huge volume of refund requests flood in. You. You have two choices: hire a bunch of people to process them, or build a bot that can deal with the traffic.

There’s only one right answer here – and that is ‘the one that can deal with all of these requests as quickly and efficiently as possible; in the most cost effective way.’

It’s moments like these that digital employees will truly shine. But, unless companies spend time onboarding bots – as they would with any other new starter – they won’t be able to deliver when it matters most.

Ultimately, bots improve over time, just like people. But – for the most part – their capabilities are designed to tackle tasks in a way that people can’t. Remember though, just like you, they’re not perfect and they need experience to perfect their tasks.

We believe in looking after bots, do you? If you want to talk RPA then contact PAteam today.

It’s that time again where we set ourselves goals to live by for the new year. The joy of New Year’s resolutions is that they come round regularly. This means we don’t have to beat ourselves up too much when we’ve dropped them by mid-January.

But one resolution we wish everyone would stick to is to be more preventative rather than reactive. Clearly, as it’s us, this has an RPA spin, so let’s see where we would love 2022 to take you.

Sometimes You Can’t Help It

Sometimes as humans we too often we get caught up in the day-to-day tasks – the fire fighting that every business deals with. Crisis management becomes an everyday occurrence very easily if you let it. Most of us are or have been guilty of this but what if it didn’t have to be like that? Well… it doesn’t. With more free time we all have the opportunity to make better decisions.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

But where is that time going to come from? “I’m so busy!”, we hear you shout. Well, for one if you took away all the menial, labor-intensive tasks you’re probably holding onto, that would be a good start. We’ve spoken about it many times before, but what if you invested your time in understanding how what you do is done at a process level? And then developed that understanding into a machine that could do it for you? It really works.

Planning Is Everything

Human beings aren’t inherently very good at planning, that’s why we create tools and programs to help us. The streaking lines of a good Gantt chart or the color coding of a coordinated Kanban board all help us see what our brains struggle to keep track of. Having automation in a business aids planning – because it forces you to understand how something actually works. If it’s inefficient then you’ll know pretty quickly when you stop doing it for more than a second and really think it through.

Room To Grow

Investing in automation is more than just a time saver now. It’s highly scalable so as your business grows or the need for a particular task increases within your company, bots can be on hand to grow at the push of a button – it saves you time now, and in the future.

So we’ve cracked it and you now know to step away from the busy day-to-day whenever you can and look ahead. Now that you know what you need to do this year, what’s that free time going to help you solve? Because getting the extra time is one thing, but spending it wisely, well that’s just up to you.

RPA saves time and makes things run smoother when done right. Contact PAteam today to find out more.