Leveraging Automation to Improve Business Performance
Chosen theme: Leveraging Automation to Improve Business Performance. Welcome to a practical, uplifting guide to turning repetitive work into momentum. Explore real stories, actionable ideas, and metrics that matter—and join our community by sharing your wins, questions, and experiments.
Spotting High-Impact Automation Opportunities
Begin with a customer or employee journey map to see handoffs, delays, and rework. Layer in simple time-and-motion observations or light process mining to validate where the real friction hides. When the map reveals waiting and double entry, you have a compelling target that aligns with outcomes people actually feel.
Spotting High-Impact Automation Opportunities
Score candidates by expected value and implementation effort. Value comes from faster cycles, fewer errors, and happier customers; effort reflects data availability, rule clarity, and change impact. Co-create scores with operations, IT, and compliance. The top-right quadrant is exciting, but quick wins in the low-effort corner build momentum early.
Architecture and Tools That Scale
Robotic process automation excels at repetitive user-interface tasks, while workflow orchestration manages end-to-end processes. Integration platforms connect systems cleanly, and low-code lets business experts prototype fast. Start simple, then standardize. The best stack is the one your teams can operate, secure, and extend without heroics.
Change Management That Sticks
Co-create With the People Doing the Work
Shadow frontline experts and ask what a great day looks like. Invite them to sketch screens and rules on paper. When they see their fingerprints in the final flow, pride replaces skepticism. One warehouse picker named two bots after her twins; her team now suggests improvements weekly without prompting.
Upskill and Redesign Roles
Pair citizen developers with experienced engineers to learn testing, security, and maintainability. Shift roles away from keystrokes toward analysis and exception handling. Career paths matter: show how automation skills open doors to product operations and continuous improvement. Retention climbs when people see a future they helped build.
Communicate the Wins and the Why
Publish short before-and-after stories with measurable outcomes and human benefits. Use demos, brown-bag lunches, and a monthly note from leadership that names contributors. Invite comments and questions. Subscribe to our newsletter for ready-to-use templates you can adapt to your company’s change playbook.
Metrics That Prove Performance
Track cycle time, error rate, on-time delivery, and customer satisfaction tied to the automated process. Connect each metric to a business objective like revenue protection, cost-to-serve, or compliance. When outcomes improve and stay improved, you earn credibility—and budget—for the next wave of automation.
Metrics That Prove Performance
Capture a clean baseline before go-live. Where practical, run a control group to isolate the automation’s effect from seasonality or process changes. Celebrate wins, but also record trade-offs. This discipline turns debates into learning and keeps your roadmap grounded in reality rather than wishful thinking.
Start Small, Learn Fast
Pick a contained process with clear rules, cooperative stakeholders, and accessible data. Time-box delivery, publish what you learned, and retire what did not work. One clinic automated appointment reminders in three weeks and cut no-shows dramatically; that playbook unlocked a wave of patient-access improvements afterward.
Standardize Patterns and Reuse
Create a library of reusable components: connectors, error handlers, logging wrappers, and security policies. Document patterns for approvals, exceptions, and retries. Reuse slashes delivery times and improves reliability because teams assemble proven blocks rather than reinventing under pressure.
Build a Community of Practice
Host monthly showcases where teams demo live automations, share pitfalls, and swap templates. Recognize contributors and publish a shared roadmap. Join our mailing list for facilitation guides and agenda templates, and leave a comment with a topic you want covered in the next session.
