3. 1.What is a Process?
■ A series of steps and decisions in the way work is completed. A way of going from one
or multiple inputs to a desired outcome.
■ Simple ones:
– 1. How to heat up milk: Pour milk into pot, turn on cooking plate
– 2. How to make a sandwich:Cut bread, place desired ingredients
■ Not so simple ones:
– How to synthesize a human genome
– How to build a nuclear bomb
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4. 1.What is a Process?
„If you can't describe what you are doing as a
process, you don't know what you're doing.“
-W. Edwards Deming
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5. 2. How to visualize a process and why?
■ Optimization requires understanding and understanding is greatly supported by
visualization
■ Business Process Modeling as gold standard but high barrier to understanding with
too marginal benefits in growing everchanging organizations
■ Good enough:
Put Milk into Pot Turn on Stove Put Pot on Stove
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6. 2. How to visualize a process and why?
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7. 2. How to visualize a process and why?
■ Please visualize the process of sending an email
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8. 3. How to setup a Process
1. Wing it
a. Quickly gather inputs from involved stakeholders on ways to proceed
b. Process on informal plan resulting from inputs
c. Start execution as soon as possible
2. Learn Proactively
a. Constantly monitor process and gather feedback from all involved stakeholders
b. Collect all inputs as structured as possible (collection should always be more important than structure at
this point)
3. Review learnings
a. Look for aligning learnings and pain points from stakeholders
b. Look at issues that are arising or might arise in the future that might become systemic and maybe not
seen by any individual stakeholder (e.g. Data quality is often one of these issues)
4. Structure learnings and solve conflicting feedbacks
a. Sometimes the solution for one stakeholders issue creates an issue for another one. Here the process
owner (you) needs to make the call what is most sensible for a properly running process
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9. 3. How to setup a Process
5. Map out all required steps and information inputs
a. These need to be gone through with every stakeholder so nothing is lost
6. Assign responsibilities for every step
a. Minimize changing stakeholders whenever possible
7. Draw process map with all variations
a. Sometimes (especially with bigger projects) it makes sense to make one executive overview map and one map that is
comprised of all the individual sub-process maps for every bigger step
8. Brief and align all stakeholders with process map
9. Iterate andOptimize
a. No process is ever perfect and they need to evolve with the company. Keep that in mind!
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10. 4. How to iterate and optimize a process
„Itis not necessary to change. Survivial is not mandatory“
- W. Edwards Deming
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11. 4. How to iterate and optimize a process
(Examples)
1. Opportunities for improvements
Fuck-Ups and almost Fuck-Ups
Angry customers
Losses of Revenue
Additional costs
Friction Points between stakeholders
After Booking Finance takes too long to send out invoices
Issues in analysis of process flow or requirements
Scaling issues with additional stakeholders or multiplied transaction volume
Sending a handcrafted email to every customer for 50 customers vs 5000
Newly available or newly economical tools
Document generator for 1k EUR per month, uneconomical for 5 customers, great for 50000 customers and-done.io
12. 2. Constantly analyze improvement opportunities and collect feedback
Also actively seek feedback, don‘t just wait for it
Escape feedback inertia: „Nothing will be improved anyways“
Try to link issues to the actual process step
3.Weigh relevance for conflicting need
Establish process for objective weighting (The loudest is likely not the most important)
In doubt always favor longterm process stability
4. Adapt process
5. Announce changes to all active and passive stakeholders
Example
4. How to iterate and optimize a process
(Examples)
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14. 1.What is Process Automation?
„Automation of complex business processes by means of advanced
technology to achieve higher process efficiency and save costs“
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15. 2.Why automate?
1. Less errors
Wrong data entries, typos, wrongly filled documents
2. Scalability
Growing requirements for larger amounts of customers etc.
3. Less costs
No additional headcount for „monkeywork“
4. Better tracking
Automated processes can be precisely debugged as everything is clearly defined
5.Work ethic improvements
Less repetitive work and more focus on meaningful problem solving
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16. 3. Should I really waste Coding
resources?
1. No, because it‘s not necessary, there are other ways to automate
2. No, because it‘s not the best way, there are better ways to automate
3. Integrated platforms as a service (IPaaS) like Zapier require no coding experience and can be used to build highly scalable and flexible
automations
4. Focus tech-talent on product improvements and real competetive advanages (good processes can be a real competitive advantage but
even then most steps can be done without coding – sometimes coding might be needed)
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17. 4.What can be automated this way?
Almost Everything
Goal-Tracking
Appointment
Management
Invoicing
Finance
Customer
Notifications
Reporting
Stakeholder
Communications
Price-Calculation
Lead-Acquisition
Email Cycles
Data Entry
Record Syncing
Alerts
Logistics
Management
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18. 4.What can be automated this way?
„But we have a special business model and we have specific requirements“
Your business might be special, your business processes most likely are not
Two categories of automations
1. QuickWins
2. BigWins
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19. Categories of Automations: QuickWins
Simple automations that are mostly aimed at improving ones productivity
Receive once every 3 hours a Slack message with the subjects and senders of all the
received mails of the past 3 hours
Extract the attachment of every incoming mail where the subject contains „invoice“ and
store it in a dropbox folder
Can be implemented in less than an hour and have almost no base requirements
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20. Categories of Automations: BigWins
Flows that automate complex business processes with many possible variations and
integrated complexities
Automate all client sided financing operations from collecting invoice data to generating
and sending out invoices, payment reminders and matching incoming payment streams
Automate an appointment booking system to match customer records with available
appointments and inform partner over bookings
Automatically move a customer through CRM stages dependent on his actions and
create tasks for stakeholders if necessary
Those automations create significant longterm business value but require strong
foundations and a structured approach
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21. How to automate BigWins
1. Do it step by step
Break processes down into subprocesses that can be tackled individually
Client side financing = Invoice generation + payment reminders + cashflow tracking
2. Foundations are established processes
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an
efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.The second is that automation applied to
an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.“ - BillGates
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22. How to automate BigWins
3. Understand your processes and be able to map them out
„If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're
doing.“
4. Centralize or at least standardize your inputs
Any relevant information can be found in trusted central system (CRM)
Entry level: Pipedrive,Close.io etc.
Pro level: Salesforce
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23. How to automate BigWins
5. Ensure data and data format reliability
Enforce data inputs with gentle nudges or validation rules
Validations should be set up in way to prevent wrongly executed flows not to require all
data just for keeps sake, otherwise stakeholders will lose buy in
6. Minimize the amount of free text strings
Use Dropdowns/Picklist to structure your data and make it analyzeable and machine
readable
Free text strings should only be used for human <--> human interaction
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24. How to automate BigWins
7. Build the automation
Map out the different action and interactions between various information sources and
action providers
Structure of automation services can be really helpful
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25. How to automate BigWins
7. Build the automation
Keep the number of sources as low as possible to avoid friciton and minimize downtime
risk
Make sure that every information only has exactly one Source (ofTruth)
Build step by step
8. Update process map and brief all stakeholders on changes and their new roles, include
also stakeholders that were made redundant for this process
Focus on benefits and emphasize need for high quality data entry and process
compliance
9. Monitor and optimize,iterate
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26. Is this really worth it?
1.Yes, it makes your processes more stable and scalable
2.Yes, it allows you to focus your tech talent on product development
3.Yes, it saves you money for additional operational FTE that cover „monkeywork“
4.Yes, it‘s often easier than you think
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27. Is this really worth it?
■ Case: Company that needs to create invoices that are too complicated for a simple
invoice builder (too many inputs), Company scales from 500 invoices per month to
50000
■ One accountant creates 500 invoices per month, gets 2000 EUR/Month
■ Manual Scenario: Hire 9 additional accountants = 18000 EUR/month add. Costs
■ Automation: Zapier: 300 EUR/Month + Document generationTool: 300 EUR/Month =
600 EUR/Month +Setup HR Cost (ca 500 EUR once)
■ Savings: 17400 EUR/Month
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28. Thank you very much for
your attention!
„If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a
thing, you're right“
- Henry Ford
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