Through their work on an organization’s front lines, individual contributors have one of the best points of view for spotting missing or flawed processes. From clunky manual reports to repetitive steps and lengthy turnaround times, they often have no trouble seeing the potential value of deploying process automation across HR, finance, sales, customer service, and other day-to-day workflows.
The challenge for these workers is convincing leadership to allocate time and budget to the changes that enable impactful process automation. If you’re not used to bringing big ideas up the company ladder, advocating for this change can be intimidating. But it’s not impossible — especially when you put in the work to prepare for these conversations.
If you believe automation can change your team or company for the better, it’s worth speaking up. Here are our recommendations on how to plan, pitch, and advocate for the process automations your organization needs.
Plan: Building your case for the value of process automation software
Convincing fellow team members of the value of process automation is one thing. Persuading senior leadership to commit the necessary resources is another. But you’ll need to do both if you want to have the best shot at making process automation a reality.
Here’s how to get started:
Identify a problem that process automation can solve
Broken or flawed processes can take many forms, but they all share the common trait of inefficiency. Faulty processes make daily work too slow, too expensive, or non-compliant with industry standards, which creates material costs for the organization.
These process-related problems could include:
- IT taking too long to set up and equip new hires
- Unsustainable sales prospecting costs
- Slow customer service response times
- Inconsistencies in meeting compliance requirements
Once you identify a process that seems flawed and inefficient, take some time to document the tasks and steps required to complete each key workflow. Consult with co-workers as needed to brainstorm where process flaws exist and how automation could solve them.
Gather metrics to support your case
Leadership might be sympathetic to hear that a process is time-consuming, but they’ll be more likely to act if you can articulate how these inefficiencies are affecting your organization’s top goals or KPIs.
Gather any evidence of the problem you can in the form of metrics and statistics that will help you make the case about where processes are falling short — and how they can improve with automation. These will differ depending on the department you work in. For example:
- Your slow customer response times are dragging down your Net Promoter Score
- Your inefficient HR recruiting process is driving away skilled applicants
- Your margins on a redundant operational process are higher than the industry standard
Whether the metrics you gather relate to lost money, lost time, or poor service, all are valid business needs that will resonate with team members and leadership alike.
Secure internal buy-in
Approval comes from leadership, but your whole team will need to use the process automation software if it’s adopted. Secure the support of co-workers before you go to leadership so you can present a united front when making the pitch.
Gaining the buy-in of your colleagues and peers will also inspire confidence in leadership that new software won’t sit around gathering dust.
It’s helpful to identify a “software champion” who is willing to get in the weeds and support a successful software rollout later on. Modern AI-powered software is easy to use, but it still takes work to implement correctly. This might be you or someone else, but someone with passion and bandwidth should be ready to take on the work of documenting, automating, and building processes.
Pitch: Best practices for winning over senior leadership
Once you’ve done the prep work, it’s time to make your case to your immediate manager. If that conversation is successful, your manager should join the cause and escalate the request higher up the ladder.
Here are some tips to set up your pitch for success:
Show your metrics and estimate ROI
Numbers don’t lie. Start the conversation by outlining the metrics that support your central argument, such as statistics you gathered that reflect poor customer satisfaction, compliance inconsistencies, or inefficient spending patterns.
Tailor your pitch to address your company’s highest-priority KPIs and goals. This makes the pitch more likely to resonate with leadership.
Then, contrast the “cost” of process inefficiency losses to the cost of process automation software. If possible, estimate a return on investment timeline: How much does the software cost, and what is the estimated impact that process automation could have in the months ahead?
At Nintex, for example, our customers typically see a return on their process automation investment within the first year.
Illustrate the big-picture impact
The ideal process automation solution will be versatile enough to support not just one department and workflow, but use cases across the larger organization. For example, imagine you work in accounting and want to automate travel expenses. Automation will benefit both the accounting staff and all employees who submit expenses for reimbursement.
The same applies if you work in HR and want to automate vacation requests, or work in IT and need to streamline support tickets. End-to-end automation platforms have the power to impact all the different systems, processes, people, and customers that glue your organization together. The project you’re advocating for is likely just the tip of the strategic iceberg.
Get IT on your side
If you can convince IT that the new software will be self-serve, easy to use, and ultimately reduce the burden on IT via automation, you could find crucial support from your CIO and other IT personnel.
Process automation software is often a smart IT bet versus building a solution in-house, as it spares IT teams from time-consuming custom code development and ongoing maintenance of that solution. Instead, platforms like Nintex provide off-the-shelf software that can do exactly what you need and is supported by ongoing R&D to ensure you stay competitive.
In fact, our powerful platform allows you to create and integrate workflows with no coding required.
Manage expectations
Process automation has big potential, but it’s important to set realistic expectations when you start out. Digital transformation is an iterative journey that gets better over time, not a magic button. Be clear on the bite-size goals you want to accomplish to start with, and how AI will continue to improve the KPIs and objectives you identified earlier — whether that be speed, accuracy, customer experience, or savings.
Advocate: Lay out a vision for process automation success
The work doesn’t end once your company purchases process automation software. Once you have the right platform in place, your organization still has to do the hard work of creating value from this new technology.
To aid leadership in driving a strong return from their investment, recommend the following framework for implementation:
Audit your current processes
Before your processes can be automated, you have to truly understand them. Software like Nintex leverages AI to help you audit and document your current processes, setting the groundwork for fixing them.
Remember: a bad process is still a bad process when automated. Your organization must commit time and strategic thought to defining and optimizing processes before automation begins.
Identify a quick win
If you have multiple process automation projects in mind, encourage leadership to start with a workflow change that can serve as a quick win. Ideally, that process should be:
- Painful enough to get widespread attention
- Relatively easy to automate
- Measurable to demonstrate its quantifiable business impact
By choosing a quick win that gets results that prove the value of process automation, advocates of this change can build organizational confidence in the new software while shoring up support for future automation projects.
Test with a beta group
Encourage rolling out your team’s first process automation update with a beta group that can provide initial feedback and help you iron out the kinks.
Automation won’t be perfect from day one — and that’s okay. Starting with a small proof-of-concept test run will allow you to surface and resolve imperfections before process automation is introduced to a broader audience.
Automate your process
Once your company starts automating a process, it can begin to further enhance the experience around it.
For example, you wouldn’t want to get 500 email alerts per day as a result of automation, which would overwhelm your team members or customers. We recommend that time be dedicated to fully deploy, vet, and perfect the lived experience of each newly automated process.
Track your progress
Whether your organization decides to track cost savings, time savings, customer satisfaction, compliance metrics, or something else, measurement will help illustrate the impact of automation, quantify ROI, and provide insights that you can use to continue improving processes over time.
A quick-reference checklist to secure process automation support
Here’s a handy checklist to copy and tweak as you take on the challenge of championing process automation within your organization.
Phase 1: Plan
- Identify a problem that process automation can solve
- Gather metrics to support your case (money, time, CX, compliance, etc.)
- Secure internal buy-in from your fellow team members (Bonus point if you can identify a “software champion”)
Phase 2: Pitch
- Share your metrics with leadership and estimate ROI if possible
- Illustrate the big-picture impact and global benefits of process automation
- Get IT on your side by showing the ease/benefits versus a home-grown solution
- Manage expectations by clarifying that automation won’t solve problems overnight
Phase 3: Advocate
- Encourage a thorough audit of your team’s current processes
- Help identify a “quick win” where your team can apply automation easily and reap clear results
- Recommend testing with a beta group so your team can pilot-test automation while ironing out the kinks
- Automate your process, rolling it out to a broader audience and further vetting/iterating
- Track your progress against key success metrics
- Rinse and repeat as you expand your team’s process automation applications
Encourage process automation within your team
There’s no better voice to champion process change than the workers dealing with those processes every day. At Nintex, we partner with companies of all sizes to deploy transformative AI across all aspects of their day-to-day operations.
With best-in-class software and an end-to-end approach, our process automation platform will help you achieve new efficiencies that increase what’s possible within your organization.
See for yourself how Nintex can help achieve the automation your organization needs — request a demo today.
