Process Automation Does Not Mean Job Elimination

Since the onset of the pandemic, funding has been an increasing concern for many organizations. When funding resources decrease, it can lead to reducing costs and reprioritizations within your office. Organizations need to prepare themselves to accomplish more with less. By adding an automation solution to some of your offices usual tasks, it will give your staff the opportunity to focus on other things while still meeting the objectives required to keep departments all across the campus running smoothly.

According to McKinsey and Company, “By automating manual and repetitive tasks, successful operations centers are reducing costs by 30-60% while increasing delivery quality.” [1]

Before implementing an automation solution, it’s helpful to create a list of tasks your team expects to accomplish. From this exercise you can determine if automation may be the solution you need.

• Sort the list into task period and frequency
• Separate these tasks into two categories: Completed and Uncompleted
• Highlight those tasks which are regularly repeated and would be ideal for automation and then those tasks which require a high degree of human touchpoints

Automation can be a benefit for not only your team, but teams your department works with. When repeatable tasks are automated, workflow sequencing can be extended by adding next step alerts to all those participating in a project. Keep in mind, participating departments in the work queue cannot begin their work until the first team’s data is received. Automation allows you to set up priorities around what matters most for your customers.

The following graphic shows an example from HigherEd Metrics of the steps a team used to meet their accounts receivable goals.

Data, automation, and workflow are the perfect elements for creating work queues with teams working together. A work queue holds work items that can be processed by one of a number of users or by an automated process. Members of a work queue are generally able to see each other’s information which helps keep processes moving. When using work queues, teams can take pride in seeing their completed tasks which can increase work efficiency and create a team goal atmosphere.

With work queues, if a member is out of the office, another team member can step in to complete a task. When using an automation product, each team member will usually have individual logins with the role and permission level set accordingly by management. This can allow accounts to be viewable by all team members, but each person can only make agreed-upon operational changes. Using work queues can shift the paradigm from “me” to “team” and can implement clear objectives that are simple to identify, award, and celebrate when goals are met.

While automation can help teams work more efficiently, it can even create new opportunities within departments. In the accounts receivable example, shown above, it illustrates how identifying students with outstanding payments resulted in a greater number of inbound calls from students. When automation and workflow processes were enabled, payments increased 35-40%. Student questions created a staffing need in a different area which allowed staff members to be utilized in different ways. Those moved into new positions were precisely the resource needed to answer student questions and help them make their payments. Automation helped make this happen.

Balancing resources because of changes in business can be possible. By adding automation to your workflows, you can build positive team energy across departments while increasing efficiency. Automation can be the tool that leads to reorganization of priorities and success for your department.

To see if Nelnet can help you evaluate opportunities for automation at your institution visit campuscommerce.com

Want more information on automation? Visit HigherEd Metrics

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/operations-management-reshaped-by-robotic-automation