According to Nathan Chappell, senior vice president at DonorSearch,

Automating the workflow is imperative to allowing products and services to scale, but doing so in a sustainable fashion requires thoughtful planning. Spending time up front to define success is essential and will pay long-term dividends. When planning, avoid the temptation of diverging into isolating barriers or solving specific challenges; instead, stay hyper-focused on outlining the elements of success. (forbes.com)

Planning is what makes it possible to see the overall result of the implementation and keep the actions focused on that result. When the process can be developed with these conditions, the result is not only automation, but the total transformation of the business and its complete alignment with information technology. It is this alignment that provides new value, because it transforms the business into a more effective organization with creative potential.

For this to happen, it is necessary to have the support and involvement of all workers who are part of the overall operation of the business, because they are the ones who, by being influenced by the effectiveness of technology, learn to move in a different way in their activities and to establish faster and more practical forms of communication:

As with any improvement strategy, the first step will begin with defining milestones, tasks and success metrics, followed by modeling and execution and ending with monitoring and optimization. Above all, take careful consideration of your workforce’s feedback in designing processes and maintain open lines of communication across the entire life cycle. (forbes.com)

Thus, an automation that generates new value is one that also transforms the organizational culture and the mentality of all employees, because it is in this type of changes that the different points of view that enrich the business and put it in the first places of competitiveness arise.

So, to be sure of how to automate a business successfully, it is essential to have a process modeling tool that can make a design of what will be the ideal operation. With this model, it is possible to know if the approach meets the goals or if adjustments need to be made. To achieve this, all participants in the process should give their opinions and indicate, based on their experience with the specific activities, whether the design is going in the right direction.

After having the design completely elaborated, a simulation of the process can be done to finish making adjustments and to determine if there are failures or possible communication weaknesses in the nexus of the activities. Thus, the workflow will have a guarantee even before it starts to move and will bring satisfaction to employees and managers, as well as to customers. We have proven this countless times with our Dexon Business Process Management tool, which allows process modeling and enough flexibility to modify at any time what is seen as a weak point in the automation. This ensures a truly successful relationship between technology and business.