Doing More With Less – Identifying Opportunities For Operational Innovation

The last 12 months have been a rollercoaster for many. While there have been new opportunities, there have also been considerable challenges. We know that agencies are looking for new ways to stay competitive and profitable, and while innovation in data collection and analysis is on the increase, the operations function often gets left behind. Operations, whilst not the most glamorous side of research is indispensable, and operational innovation frees up researchers and resources to spend time on the things that matter most.

Finding ways to digitise and automate workflows and processes helps teams and companies be more efficient, more productive, and more profitable. This is particularly relevant in an environment where we are working remotely and still need to collaborate and interact without the ability to do it face-to-face.

The current situation has probably forced you to digitise a few processes already, but how can you identify new opportunities to improve your workflows?

 

Understand that not everything can be automated

As this recent article from Deloitte Insights demonstrates, not everything can be automated. There are some things humans are just better and more efficient at dealing with. Tasks which require nuance and involve ambiguity and decision making are often best left to real people. It’s the more rote and mechanical tasks that lend themselves to digitisation and automation. However, more often than not, it’s these rote tasks that may be operationally vital but time consuming and take employees away from the work that really adds value.

 

Audit your processes

The first thing to do is take a step back and perform an audit of your current processes and identify which are ripe for automating. This can require cross-organisational input as often there is room for operational innovation in every team of your business – from research to finance, to human resources. Key elements to look out for when auditing processes are:

• Employee involvement and time spent – if employees are spending a lot of time on manual tasks these should be considered for automation or digitalisation.
• Processes that are routine and well defined – processes that change frequently can be a challenge to automate.
• Rules-based tasks – processes where employees follow a specific set if predefined rules or pre-conditions rather than their own judgment can be good candidates for automation.
• Volume – a single manual task may not take much time, but the cumulative effect of it over a month may be considerable.
• Mistakes and quality – Eliminating human error in such processes will raise the quality of work and decrease the time spent on correcting these errors.

 

Prioritise

Once you have a good idea of what can potentially be automated it’s tempting to bring in solutions for these as quickly as possible. But that’s not always a good idea. A whole raft of new solutions can be overwhelming for your team. The first thing to do is prioritise which processes will have the most impact, once you’ve identified the solutions for these, introduce them carefully to get broad team buy-in and not overwhelm them. The solution then stands a better chance of being accepted and taking root. You will also want to look at expected returns – time-saving, reduction of errors, profitability – along with ease of implementation.

There’s nothing more disheartening than introducing a new system or solution that is supposed to increase efficiency and free up time for your team, only for it to gather digital dust. The key for successful workflow automation and digitalisation is to take the time to do the work upfront.