What is automation?

Simply put, automation is the ability to use technology to perform tasks with minimal human effort. More specifically, automation describes the tools, techniques, and strategies designed to minimize labor, freeing up human workers to focus on other responsibilities.

The most-often cited benefits of automation include the following:

• Fewer human errors
• Higher quality work product
• Increased speed
• Improved productivity
• Increased employee availability
• Reduced labor costs

Of course, there are also challenges associated with automation. The most prominent of these is the risk of losing the human element when interacting with customers and associates. Other concerns include employee inability to adapt to using automated systems.

That said, the push towards automation is a major focus for business and technology decision makers, with 32% identifying accelerating digital business transformation as their top driver for process improvement initiatives.

To provide patients with the care they require, providers need to be able to coordinate effectively, respond to service tickets quickly, and focus their energies on improving patient circumstances. Automation helps make it possible.

Omnicare is an industry leading, long-term care pharmacy services provider. As Omnicare made the switch to outsourcing the day-to-day management of IT services, freeing up in-house IT professionals to focus high-value strategic initiatives, it encountered a problem: Omnicare would need to maintain its highly rated customer-service levels, despite outsourcing to other service providers. By integrating ServiceNow solutions, Omnicare was able to achieve full visibility into service-provider environments. This led to a 90% first-contact resolution rate, and used custom applications to help ensure optimal internal operations and customer satisfaction.

See how Omnicare and ServiceNow are applying automation to facilitate top-quality customer service at scale

Novant Health is an integrated network of physicians, hospitals, and outpatient centers. This not-for-profit healthcare system is dedicated to improving and simplifying the healthcare experience of their patients, delivering world-class care, clinicians, and technologies. However, their existing processes were taking clinicians’ valuable time, and negatively affecting the patient experience. ServiceNow solutions made possible improved transparency, more-effective collaboration, and better service, resulting in 62,000 more clinician hours for patient care per year.

Read about how Novant Health implemented ServiceNow technologies to streamline IT workflows and better address patient needs.

Financial institutions are making the switch to full automation, freeing up their human employees to better engage with customers and clients. Automation is eliminating the repetitive, mundane tasks that stand in the way of providing exceptional customer experiences.

Operating across 37 countries, Experian is a multinational consumer credit reporting company. But while this extended reach was allowing Experian to serve more than 100,000 clients and maintain demographic data for millions of consumers, it also meant incompatible processes, disconnected systems, and high operational costs. Working with ServiceNow, Experian was able to transform how it delivers IT services, adopting a single, unified platform throughout its entire business infrastructure. The end result was faster request approvals, seamless service delivery, and a 50% reduction in time spent resolving incidents.

See how ServiceNow helped Experian modernize and streamline their employee experience.

As one of the world’s first all-virtual financial institutions, Discover Financial Services is dedicated to providing efficient, effective service delivery. Tom Eavenson, Vice President of Infrastructure Structure Services, has pledged that Discover Financial Services will be working exclusively with the ServiceNow platform to fully implement automated workflows as a replacement for written standard operating procedures within the next five years.

Watch the Discover Financial Services Keynote Interview

HR departments are experiencing unprecedented digital transformation. Legacy HR systems demand custom programming, and are simply not capable of keeping up with modern demands. HR automation is stepping up to replace aging systems, automating essential processes and handling crucial administrative tasks.

General Mills was already a well-established entity within the branded consumer-foods industry when it undertook a company-wide global transformation towards increased visibility into employee HR inquiries. General Mills chose to work with ServiceNow, gaining a holistic approach, and creating an effective solution to the employee-service experience.

Watch how the HR team at General Mills turned to ServiceNow.

American Express Global Business Travel (AMEX GBT) relies on expert staff to provide high-quality service to travelers in need. To do that, AMEX GBT counselors need easy access to relevant, reliable information at the click of a button. AMEX GBT and ServiceNow built upon their existing collaborations for onboarding and IT-service management, and created a unified HR portal. By bringing multiple functions and resources together on a single platform, AMEX GBT saw approximately 18,000 hours saved in productivity gains.

Read more about how AMEX GBT and ServiceNow are making essential resources more accessible than ever, with a powerful, unified employee portal.

Business automation is becoming essential for all industries. As such, it’s likewise important to identify who in an organization should be involved in the automation process.

In most organizations, developers will bear the greatest responsibility for creating and implementing automations. Developers will likely have the requisite experience and technical knowhow, as well as in-depth understanding of the company and customers to create automatic, data-driven processes that effectively address those areas where automation is needed most. That said, developers should be expected to work closely with other departments to ensure that the benefits of automation can be enjoyed company wide.

Developers may be the most obvious architects of business automation, but they are not the only ones capable of creating effective applications. In fact, any interested individual can become a citizen developer, with help from the ServiceNow Developer Program.

Providing citizen developers with automated tutorials, libraries, and the opportunity to connect with fellow citizen developers, the Developer Program offers a clear path to building automated apps to solve a range of problems.

Automation can have a significant positive impact for businesses across essentially every industry. However, before investing in automation, decision makers need to be able to accurately gauge not only the need for automation, but also the anticipated ROI.

In creating a business case for automation, consider the following steps:

Not all processes are likely to benefit from automation. Review the areas where your business is experiencing bottlenecks, reduced productivity, and above-average numbers of human errors. These processes are more likely to benefit from automation.

Automation is designed to replace or assist human involvement when it comes to task completion. In some cases, employee involvement may be entirely eliminated from certain processes. In other cases, the work of the employee is reduced to only the key essentials. This means that employees should be able to focus on tasks, projects and ideation that machines or automated processes can’t handle. The idea is that with automation, employees spend their time more effectively, which saves on labor costs. In addition, costs from time wasted from human errors, miscommunications, or non-human events—such as paper jams from printers—may also be considered for the total cost.

The value from automation may be attributed to time or money saved by automating a manual task, and including any benefit you can attribute to the automation is appropriate. The basic formula to assign a monetary value to the freed-up time of a knowledge worker looks like this:

Time spent on single manual task x Frequency of performing task per month x Cost per hour x 12 months = Yearly savings.

An example of indirect value from automation is savings from downtime reduction. To quantify the value, you calculate the yearly costs of a service or system outage – before any automaton. You then apply the reduced rate of outage after automation to arrive at the savings.

Finally, to determine whether automating a specific process or processes will result in a positive gain for your business, you will need to calculate the expected return on investment. Use the ServiceNow Value Calculator, and see for yourself how lucrative business automation can be.

Just as automation can be applied to a wide range of processes, how you approach your automation solutions can be equally varied. Here, we address your options in implementing business automation.

If you prefer to have complete control over the code and behavior of your automation solution, you may choose to build it from scratch. Building apps takes a great deal of time, resources, planning, expertise, and effort, and that’s with an established development team. Beyond development, you are also responsible for maintaining the code and supporting users year after year.

Beyond building your own automation solutions, there are a number of third-party automation platforms you might want to consider. The right automation platform will provide your business with all of the necessary tools and resources to automate vital processes at scale, and can offer additional support when needed.

If you decide to invest in an automation platform, be aware that you have a wide range of choices, and not all provide the same level of service. As such, reading reviews, researching case studies, and—when possible—trying out demos and free-trial options can help you get a feel for what each is capable of.

With that in mind, here are the four main factors to consider when choosing an automation platform:

As your business grows, you don’t want to have to find a new automation platform to support increased demand. A scalable automation platform will be able to grow with your business.

Your chosen automation platform should be able to fit the unique needs of your business. Finding a platform that is flexible enough to do exactly what you need it to do is absolutely essential.

You have a lot riding on your automation solution, so your platform should be dependable. Frequent outages, unreliable support options, bugs, and other issues will tell you that you need to keep looking.

Not everyone in your business who uses the automation platform is, or should be, a developer. The platform you choose needs to be intuitive and user-friendly enough that everyone can build effective automations. Find a platform tailored towards citizen developers and well as professional developers.