Automation is the key to success in any business. It's a simple fact: the less time you spend on manual tasks, the more time you have to focus on your business core. With automation, companies can achieve greater efficiency, improved productivity, and higher customer satisfaction.

But if you're not strategic, it can also waste time and money. So how do you ensure that your automation strategy is successful?

This post will cover three best practices for creating a successful automation strategy that will take your organization from good to great.

1. Determine Your Business Automation Goal.

Before starting a solution, it is essential to define the problem. The first step in creating a successful automation strategy is determining your organization's objectives for automation.

Determining your automation goal can help you achieve a successful business automation strategy that meets your needs and goals. It's important to consider what you want out of automating your business before diving in headfirst.

For example, you want to improve customer experience, increase revenue growth, or reduce risk. Once you've decided on your goal, you can determine which automation strategies will help get you there.

Operational efficiency

One of the most common automation goals is to streamline business processes to become more efficient and effective. It is imperative if you have many employees or customers to manage, and you can reduce costs by automating manual tasks, such as data entry or approvals.

Revenue growth

Another automation goal is to generate more revenue by increasing the number of customers or improving the customer retention rate. If your business has grown to the point where it takes more work for employees to manually enter every order into an online payment platform before processing payments, then an automated solution might help you cut down on paperwork while also increasing revenue from sales.

Customer experience

Automation can also help businesses provide a superior customer experience.  Automation can streamline customer service functions like live chat and ticket resolution if your company is trying to improve how customers interact with you.

Rate of innovation

Automation is the way to go if you want to stay on the cutting edge of innovation. Using automation to test new ideas and concepts, you can see which ones work well and which don't. It gives you a leg up on the competition because it allows you to move faster. Additionally, automation can help you implement these changes quicker and at a lower cost than if you did everything manually.

Risk reduction

Automation allows you to take many of the manual tasks prone to human error out of the equation, which means you will make fewer mistakes. It can lead to higher quality products, more consistent results, and happier customers. For example, if you're running an e-commerce site, automation can help ensure that the products and services you offer are always available. Without automation, it would be up to you or your employees to manually restock inventory when items sell out—and this could lead to customers having trouble finding what they want at any given time.

Again, automation is a powerful tool for businesses, and it can help achieve any number of goals. From operational efficiency to revenue growth to customer experience to rate of innovation, your goals for automation are up to you. However, achieving any of these goals requires a solid strategy.

2. Establish an Automation Center of Excellence Inside the Organization.

According to AI Multiple, an automation center of excellence (CoE) is a business unit that oversees and coordinates all automation initiatives within your organization. To establish an enterprise-wide approach to automation strategy, companies must look at the entire picture and gather a dedicated unit of experts, including automation strategy leaders, analysts, and developers.

We cannot overstate the importance of establishing an automation center of excellence: it's the foundation for successful projects across the company in terms of planning and execution.

The COE unit will be responsible for developing automation strategy, guidelines, and roadmaps, providing technical guidance for project implementation, monitoring project progress, and providing support to teams as needed.

3. Use Citizen Developers to Get ROI Fast.

If you want to get ROI as quickly as possible, citizen development is the answer. Citizen developers are an essential part of your automation strategy, and they can help you get ROI very rapidly and are easy to train.

When you create a training program for citizen developers, you are building a pipeline that will keep replenishing itself with new talent as people come and go from your organization.

Citizen development platforms like AgilePoint make it easy for anyone with basic computer skills to build apps in hours instead of months--and those apps solve real business problems immediately! The more you discover how an app developed on a citizen platform fills your needs, the more value it provides you.

Implement Successful Business Automation with AgilePoint

Business automation is not just about getting things done faster and more efficiently; it's also about ensuring that your organization benefits from it as much as possible. With AgilePoint, there are so many ways to do just that!

AgilePoint will help you to implement a successful automation strategy. The low-code development platform delivers powerful features that can bring citizen developers into the fold and accelerate the time to create digital solutions. AgilePoint's mission is to empower today's "citizen developers" by making it easy for them to create enterprise apps that solve business problems quickly, cost-effectively, and efficiently.

Request a personalized demo of AgilePoint Business Process Automation software today and experience how it can help your business accelerate and succeed in its journey toward scalable and cross-functional automation and digital transformation! After the demo, you'll be able to choose a plan that best suits your organization’s needs.