Companies across the world are employing lean enterprise practices to eliminate “wasteful” activities, i.e. activities that are not adding value. However, one is often left with a number of indispensable, rote tasks that consume staff resources but do not easily lend themselves to further optimizations. Should we as managers be satisfied with this? No — with any kind of repetitive task we should be looking for a way to automate it.
Consider how much time employees waste every day keeping systems in sync because no proper APIs or integration points exist between these systems. Take for instance the US Army Corps of Engineers that was facing the challenge of coordinating payments to contractors and employees across 13 districts, each with its own project management system. Using the Kapow Katalyst platform for process automation, they set up automated synchronization between the local systems and the central systems, resulting in savings of $2 million.
Similarly, the Spanish call center provider Atento had an army of people employed to type in data from printed forms, as this had to be done each time a new customer account was set up. Again, with the Kapow Katalyst platform for process automation, the account processing could be done automatically — leading to both the re-allocation of staff to more productive tasks as well as an improvement in the data quality due to the elimination of human errors in the data entry.
This ties in nicely with iSixSigma’s top four metrics of success of a lean project:
- Revenues
- Costs
- Risk
- Customer Satisfaction
As illustrated by the cases above, process automation can contribute to all of these key areas. It enables the organization to scale; growing the top line without incurring proportional costs in staffing to meet back-office demands. Employees can be freed to spend the bulk of their time on activities that yield core business value, leading to a more focused and agile enterprise. This is lean in its purest form.
By: Anne-Sofie Nielsen 
