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Streamlining enterprise automation opportunity assessment and prioritization
Choose the right lane forward
Putting a structured automation assessment and prioritization process in place can enhance the success of your early automation deployments—a critical component to building a strong and successful automation program. Are you ready to choose the right lane forward?
Explore content
- Assessing opportunity and impact
- Putting the machine in motion
- Case study
- The bottom line
- The opportunity of enterprise automation series
Assessing opportunity and impact
Picture this: Your organization has decided that automation can deliver big benefits—and you’re the right person to make it happen. Your list of automation candidates is long, ideas coming from multiple parts of your organization, and each department is sure that their processes are the best place to start. But you will need to determine whether the proposed processes are a good “fit” for automation. Then you need to evaluate and prioritize the processes based on the value of the benefits and their ROI, providing evidence to support management and/or executive decisions. Where do you start?
Because your organization’s time is limited, you should focus automation efforts and investments on the opportunities with the highest potential for success and impact. Putting the right processes in place to identify, measure, and prioritize automation candidates is critical. And because the scale is important, you want to do it in a programmatic way.
What’s needed is a standardized approach and methodology that can help your organization evaluate and prioritize automation opportunities. With this approach in place, you’ll be able to quickly establish and utilize a defined set of criteria to determine which processes are good candidates for automation. You can evaluate those candidates to measure their potential benefits. And then you can prioritize—and justify—which processes to tackle first.
Here are three steps to help you choose the right direction:
Find the fit
Not all processes are created equal, and good candidates share some common characteristics. When identifying opportunities for automation, look for processes that:
Measuring suitability of processes for automation up front can enable you to filter out processes that aren’t a good fit and focus your efforts on the processes that may return the best value.
Qualify the opportunities
Once you have identified the processes that are good candidates for automation, it’s time to qualify and evaluate individual opportunities. You can do that by assessing the relative value to be achieved from automating the process against the complexity of building the automated process.
On the complexity scale, be sure to get your arms around the scope, size, and variability of each process, developing a view of how the process is performed and the logic required for all decision points. Depending on the situation, you may also need to take into account more qualitative considerations related to the “fit” of the process for automation, such as whether the automation can be deployed in the current operating model and the functional owner’s readiness to deploy and own the automated process.
On the value scale, begin with a heavy focus on measuring time savings—determining how much time is spent performing the process today and how much of that time could be captured through automation. It is important, however, for the analysis to take into account several other factors, both quantitative and qualitative. These factors may include the potential for future cost avoidance, reduction of error rates and risk, and overall process efficiency gains (particularly in processes with multiple handoffs).
Once the analysis is complete, you can compare automation opportunities based on their relative value and complexity. Then you can zero in on the highest-priority candidate processes—the ones that can provide the greatest potential return on your investment and shortest payback period.
Dig into the details
By now, you’ll have selected good automation candidates and established a foundational view of their complexity versus value. But your list of high-priority candidates is still too large, and your department heads are pushing hard to make their processes first in line. Now is the time to move from soft qualification criteria to detailed prioritization parameters—quantifying complexity versus value at a more granular level and providing the data needed to justify your prioritization.
Keep in mind that determining value is not just about quantifiable cost savings. During this phase, you may want to consider a scoring system that takes into account several qualitative measures of success as well, including:
Having a detailed measurement of priority can result in deeper commitment to the success and scale of the process to be automated, collective agreement on priorities and proposed outcomes, and ultimately higher returns on your automation investments. And—because decisions can be justified and quantified—it can also help you build organizational harmony.
Putting the machine in motion
To scale automation, you must build a “machine”—a standardized and repeatable approach to assessing, analyzing, and prioritizing automation opportunities across the enterprise. If you don’t have this approach nailed down (or if you’re creating or re-creating it on the fly), you’re fighting an uphill battle. Not only will it be difficult to determine which processes are a good fit for automation and estimate what the return will be, it can also take a significant amount of time and erode your return on automation spending.
Case Study
Snapshot of success: Fortune 500 company
A large Fortune 500 organization was looking to gain an advantage in a very competitive industry and decided to explore automation to improve margins and focus more of their workforce on strategic initiatives. The organization’s team began by executing on a set of strategic pilots and quickly identified a large number of automation candidates, across numerous business units. Although there was pressure to “get started,” the newly appointed chief technology officer (CTO) resisted this urge based on past experience with piloting automation technologies. The CTO had experienced internal friction around where to start, as well as disappointment as the processes chosen for a pilot, did not result in significant return on investment (ROI), which put the entire automation program in question.
Not wanting to repeat that experience, the team decided that it shouldn’t simply move forward with whatever automation candidates were on the table. Instead, the team took the time and effort to develop a programmatic approach to identify, measure, and prioritize candidates based on the organization’s long-term business strategy. Working with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory, the team first developed guidelines around what qualifies as a good candidate for automation as well as a methodology for measuring complexity vs. value. Then, the team then engaged a cross-section of people from business, IT, risk, and strategy to align on these methodologies and to bring in the qualitative measures of success unique to the organization.
| The result |
| By aligning the company around methodologies for measuring and prioritizing automation candidates, the team was able to avoid internal friction around the pilot choices. And, by applying those methods to the candidates on the table, the team was able to pilot automation that resulted in true value to the organization. In the end, the team not only delivered a winning set of pilots, |
The bottom line
Putting a structured automation assessment and prioritization process in place can enhance the success of your early automation deployments—a critical component to building a strong and successful automation program. It can also provide a
By focusing on the organizational, operational, and governance readiness aspects of automation—up front—executives can significantly increase the speed and scale of their automation projects.
As the competitive advantages of automation continue to expand, and the use of automation technologies becomes more common, the need for organizations to accelerate their automation programs and quickly move to scale becomes more urgent. It’s time to move into the fast lane:
- Choosing the right lane forward: Streamlining automation opportunity assessment and prioritization
- At the intersection of control, speed, and agility: How to optimize enterprise automation at scale with a center of excellence
- Building for performance: Leveraging design thinking in automation strategy
- Going the distance: Measuring the ROI of automation
- Leaning into the curves: Automation lessons learned from the driver’s seat
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