When starting your automation journey, there are some common mishaps that usually delays or stalls your organization from yielding real benefits from your automation efforts. In this blog post, I we want to highlight a few notions that are worth remembering when starting an automation project. These are concepts that may be hard to solve in practice, but that we believe are doable for any organization that puts in the effort. These concepts are drawn from our experiences in working with a wide variety of firms over the course of several years and in thousands of different automation configurations.

The themes we want to highlight in this blog post are the following

1. Priority (within your company)
2. Resources (Time, Knowledge & Personnel)
3. Tooling (Software)

1. Priority

Why are you implementing automation? Have you clearly defined what task or tasks you want automated? Have you clearly defined what a successful outcome looks like? Are there people with the right experience in your organization? Do you have a clear timeline or path towards automation? Do you have regular follow-ups?

These questions are often hard to answer precisely, and that is the point of this exercise. As it is with all projects, it is hard to successfully start and finish a project without a plan containing all these topics. In order to succeed, you will need to have a detailed plan with your expectations and goals, as well as having proper experience in your automation team.

2. Resources

How many people have been allocated to this project? How many hours per week will they work on it? Is this a task added on top of their other work tasks (more work → no productivity increase) or are they fully working on this project now?

Resourcing is a common bottleneck for companies, both with time and personnel. We have seen that the best results are yielded when the team has been allocated proper time resources for this task. If you have added the automation-project on top of their other tasks, without making time for it, it will never succeed to the degree we would want it to. Make sure your employees have the time to start this journey, otherwise we might never see the finished product.

3. Tooling

Do you have the correct software for your automation journey? Have you compared softwares before purchasing one? Did you ask the company if they have done something like this before? Do they have a history of satisfied customers? Is it designed for the right cause?

Tooling is the third and most common stepping stone when having a successful journey towards efficiency in automation. All automation software providers offer good properties, but they might not have the right tooling for your needs. Proper due diligence with honest communication is important for your organization to find the correct software partner for your needs.

We here at Accode have seen multiple organizations try to automate their operations, and the ones’ with the best results all have solved these problems before even starting their journey towards a more efficient work environment.

Accode is a platform that enables organizations to systematically identify and reduce manual work across the entire accounting process.