Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are changing the face of industry, with the intelligent automation of repetitive routine business processes being a key part of the paradigm shift to the Automated Enterprise.

From agile start-ups to the large enterprise, businesses need to think big when it comes to automation. Importantly, they need to think about their 2025 goal and what steps they need to take to start working towards this long-term goal.

Something that’s often easier said than done, as we all get caught up in the day-to-day and in hitting our short-term quarterly or annual targets. Also, when it comes to automation, it’s sometimes quite clear which businesses processes need automating, in the long term. Yet it’s often difficult to know where to start.

With all of this in mind, there are five simple yet incredibly effective steps to automation that all businesses need to be aware of.

Think big. Start small. Act now.

There has never been a better time than ‘now’ to kickstart your efforts to automate in your own organization. So follow these five small but vitally important steps to ensure that your business is on the best road to automation.

1.       Learn the basic reasons why you should become an Automated Enterprise – in terms of both the immediate and the longer-term business benefits.

2.       Understand the need to iIdentify specific business problems and specific the data sets that you need to get together and build trust around within your organisation. Data is the key to the automation process.

3.       Explain to all the key shareholders and educate employees throughout the organisation that automation is predominantly about making the core and simple business processes more efficient – which helps to identify which processes you need to automate.

4.       Stress that automation is not about people’s jobs being under threat, but that it is about giving people the insight they need to make better strategic decisions. Many people still do not get the best information they need to drive their organisations.

So a key starting point is to educate staff that this is what automation is about, and that it is NOT about replacing humans with machines.

Automation creates a different world for SAP users. There are already machine learning applications available for tasks like AP and AR.

This is a different world, with huge opportunities for business users to start to use the experience, and skills and knowledge that they have more and spend less time on boring and repetitive tasks. It is about freeing up intellectual capacity to deal with exceptions.

Becoming an Automated Enterprise

In conclusion, automation and innovation is ultimately about changing your business for everyone’s benefit. Data is the key to the Automated Enterprise, and becoming ‘data first’ is the ultimate challenge.

Essentially, you need to reimagine your business model before someone else does, as we are moving into a world where your business data drives automated decision making.

In addition to following our five ‘baby steps’ to automation outlined above, all you need to remember is this. Let your users guide you. Your data is crucial. And think big, smart small, act NOW!

Arun Rangaraju works at Bluefin Solutions.