Accelerate digital transformation with an automation-first company culture

3 key takeaways

   –> In order for your initiatives to succeed, you need senior leadership to buy in.
   –> Choose a few quick wins and implement those first.
   –> Get your entire team involved with your digital transformation initiatives.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, ambitious digital transformation initiatives have become top priorities for most IT leaders. And for good reason, automation has the power to improve operations, save money, shift employee focus from manual tasks to strategic work, and deliver top-tier service to your customers.

To truly revolutionize your business, it’s important to go beyond just integrating your tech stack and automating processes. For a real transformation, you need to establish an automation-first culture from top to bottom.

How do you get your employees to buy into your digital transformation initiatives? We’ll walk you through the steps to get started.

1. Get senior leadership involved

No matter the size of your organization, the automation-first shift requires the support of company leaders. Whether you outline your plans in an open forum or prepare a thorough presentation, your first step is to convince your fellow leaders that automation is essential to the success of your business.

The key to getting these leaders on board is thinking through their concerns and taking the necessary steps to address them. Here are a few questions you should consider preparing for:

• How will costs and profits be affected?
• How long will it take to implement them?
• How will day-to-day work be affected during the transition?
• What’s the process for shopping for an integration platform?
• Who will need to be involved?

2. Break down the benefits

There are plenty of benefits to automation including saving time, higher profit margins, reduced errors, better customer experience, and full customer visibility. To take these benefits a step further, consider the use cases for your business and the results you might see. For example, one of Celigo’s customers OZNaturals was able to save hours of manual order management that would typically require a team of at least 10 people to complete.

Make sure to communicate the benefits that specifically apply to your teams and the challenges your organization faces. It’s important to keep in mind that automation can sound daunting to some leaders, especially if leaders feel jobs are on the line. Focus on how automation will allow employees to focus on strategic initiatives rather than tedious manual tasks.

3. Choose which processes to automate first

While the prospect of jumping in and automating all your business processes at once may sound exciting, don’t just automate to automate. This can lead to going too big too fast. Instead, look into what your company can accomplish by automating processes and begin tackling those processes first.

Here are a few questions to consider when determining where to start:

• What is most important to your company?
• What processes are currently bogged down with tedious manual tasks?
• Which teams are the most willing to change how they work?
• Choose a few initial goals that are quick wins and implement automation to achieve them. When you can show the actual benefits of automation, it will become easier to shift the mindset across the organization.

4. Empower your team

Remember, automation doesn’t have to be limited to your team. By leveraging an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), like Celigo, built with business users in mind, you can rely on low-code tools that non-technical users can easily understand. You can tackle the complex integrations requiring custom coding and robust developer tools, and your business teams can create, manage, and monitor simple integrations. This will also help you eliminate your integration backlog and give your business teams the ability to automate processes on their own. 

Automation will seem much more appealing to your teams when they understand how they can benefit from both an efficiency and business standpoint.

How Celigo can help

In addition to providing a scalable and user-friendly iPaaS, Celigo offers prebuilt solutions with embedded business logic to automate business processes with built-in best practices.

Celigo’s team of integration experts can help you assess, automate, and optimize the business processes within your organization. Contact us today to get started.