To remain competitive, you have to digitally transform your business. It's a non-negotiable. A Total Economic Impact survey carried out by Forrester for Nintex reported the business benefits of using cloud-based workflows as improved productivity, cost savings made on building workflows, improved competitive advantage and improved compliancy.
It seems difficult to believe that some businesses still haven't started their digital transformation journey, and by this stage they're probably so far behind the curve that the prospect is a daunting one. In fact, 77% of respondents to a Forrester report: 'Digital process automation is the fuel for digital transformation' admitted to still using paper-based processes in their business to some extent.
However, businesses that are slow to adopt digital transformation are doing themselves, their employees, their suppliers and their customers a disservice, says Stephan Gous, Territory Manager for Middle East and Africa at Nintex. And digital transformation is about far more than digitising paper-based documents, it's about automating processes so they can be optimised and managed.
Three main reasons companies resist automating their workflows are as follows:
* They end up with siloed tools that don't integrate;
* They lack access to the coding skills required to get the functionality they need; and
* Only some workflows are identified for automation owing to time and monetary constraints, and smaller ones generally aren't automated, so there's no integration across the business.
These challenges notwithstanding, digital transformation and process automation are two sides of the same coin, one cannot happen without the other.
Gous says the digitalisation of documents and processes can be broken down into five steps, making it a much more manageable prospect than that of automating the entire businesses workflow in one fell swoop. It's like eating an elephant, you do it one bite at a time.
The first step is to map your processes. Know what you have, who uses them and which technology they use. Then you need to look at how information is captured in the business and look at how that can be done digitally. The third step is to automate the processes identified in the first stage, simplifying them and removing duplication where possible. Connecting and managing your data comes next so that it's accessible where and when required. Finally you need to set up reporting and optimisation, so that all of that data is put to good use.
There are two main things to remember, according to Gous. "Process automation is a journey, not a destination; and you need your staff to buy into and actually use the new processes in order for your business to reap the rewards of an automated workflow."
Why are businesses so set on automating their processes? According to the Forrester report on digital process automation, two years ago, businesses were concerned about reducing cost. Today, they're all about improving the customer experience, while in two years' time, businesses will focus on accelerating digital business transformation.
As technology evolves, so too will users' expectations evolve to demand that technology. For instance, over the next two years, shifting to agile was identified as the way forward by most respondents, while 67% identified the adoption of low code software as a priority.
In conclusion, Gous looks ahead to the next evolution in digital transformation, which sees the use of robotic process automation (RPA) to break manual tasks into smaller steps that can be automated. Those steps are then linked together into a workflow. Find out more about RPA by clicking on this link.
You can download a copy of The Paper to Digital Guidebook here.
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Nintex has been named by Forrester as having the leading strategy for wide deployments of DPA. Read more here.
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