{"id":3586,"date":"2018-07-13T16:46:57","date_gmt":"2018-07-13T16:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peeriosity.com\/shared-services\/articles\/?p=3586"},"modified":"2022-09-05T19:20:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-05T19:20:46","slug":"setting-project-priorities-for-intelligent-automation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peeriosity.com\/shared-services\/articles\/2018\/07\/setting-project-priorities-for-intelligent-automation\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting Project Priorities for Intelligent Automation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In the new world of Intelligent Automation, with innovative solutions to automate routine tasks that require accessing multiple systems and applications, having a clear process for identifying priorities has never been more important.\u00a0 Because your list of available opportunities will likely number in the hundreds or more, determining what to focus on first and why, with decision rules that can be clearly communicated and understood by diverse customer bases, is critical to successfully leveraging these latest breakthrough technologies.\u00a0 While an \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter, let\u2019s just get started\u201d approach might work for a pilot, long-term success requires good fundamentals for opportunity sizing and project management.<\/span><\/p>\n

Company Experience<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A recent PeercastTM<\/sup> discussion in our Intelligent Automation research area<\/a> featured a large global manufacturing company with over $50B in annual revenue and more than 100,000 employees worldwide, discussing their approach to identifying and prioritizing opportunities for automation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first approach attempted was to have each organization brainstorm to identify opportunities.\u00a0 The idea was to identify the parts of an employee\u2019s day-to-day activities that were the most painful, with suggestions for what should be done differently.\u00a0 While an interesting exercise, this approach yielded a huge number of ideas that were too low-level, where you would need a significant number of different ideas and projects to reach annual goals for improvements in efficiency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The final approach selected was to use three techniques in combination.\u00a0 These included 1) an innovation survey to understand employee perceptions of where opportunities are, and 2) a formal \u201cheat map\u201d to measure, in a structured and objective way, individual work processes in order to identify each group\u2019s biggest pain points, and finally, 3) a headcount survey to understand the resources required for each major process step identified on the heat map.\u00a0\u00a0 The combination of these three elements was used to identify the highest impact opportunities<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

iPollingTM<\/sup> Results Review<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Peeriosity\u2019s iPollingTM<\/sup> was used to provide supporting data with Peeriosity members providing insights to the major process areas in Shared Services that were first selected to test RPA\/AI technology<\/a>, with an assessment for the primary reasons that process area was selected.\u00a0 The results indicated that for their Intelligent Automation Proof of Concept, 39% selected Order-to-Cash first, with 22% selecting Purchase-to-Pay, 17% selecting Record-to-Report, and 11% selecting multiple processes simultaneously.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"iPolling:<\/p>\n

When considering the primary reasons they chose a particular process, 72% indicated that the potential impact of being automated (38%), and the level of complexity of the process selected (34%) were the most important reasons.\u00a0 For Intelligent Automation, these two reasons often go hand in hand, since a process with low complexity that also takes a lot of effort to complete is typically the \u201csweet spot\u201d for automation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"iPolling:<\/p>\n

Here are some of the added comments from members:<\/span><\/p>\n