Step-by-step process automation in the retail energy market

Using automation for effective growth

At a great many organisations, the finance team still spends a lot of time correcting invoices. These days you would rather automate that: it prevents delays in handling and it prevents human error. We recently worked this process out further for one of our clients. Previously the largely manual process was not a problem, given how often it ran and how little work the manual steps involved. As the company grew, and with it the volume of the processes, there was now a positive business case for further automation.

Automating a single process

With this particular client we once started by automating a single process: because of their concrete growth plans, the biggest initial business case was automating acquisition and onboarding of new customers. For most other processes the volumes were too low to justify automation. As the customer base grew, more and more business cases turned positive. Moving house, for example — something roughly one in seven customers does every year. But also optimising specific steps in existing processes: collecting meter readings, say, which in the first version of the process was done by hand through personal email.

Just over six years on, there have been almost a hundred iterations of that first new-customer process. But how exactly do you determine whether a process is valuable enough to be automated (further)?

Insight through visualisation

Drawing out manual processes — which often exist only in people’s heads — creates insight. Because everyone has a different approach, those visualisations regularly spark lively discussion. Using free online tooling, this process drawing, modelled with the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) method, can be loaded straight into our platform.

Thanks to the CodeCast low-code platform, value is created the moment a process drawing is stored in the system. From then on, stakeholders across the organisation have perfect visibility of how often processes run, how many tasks of each type arise and how much time handling them takes — all without anything having been automated yet. That helps calculate the value of a business case for phasing out one or more manual tasks. In the process drawing, a manual task is replaced by an automatic one, creating a new version of the process that can be put into use from that moment on.

There are always exceptions, and by no means every special case occurs often enough to justify the IT costs that come with automating it. That is why a step-by-step approach usually works better. Have the process run automatic checks that let the system handle 80% of cases without human intervention, for instance. The remaining 20% create a task for a colleague, who ends up with less work and more interesting work. An obvious win-win.

In summary

1. 1Every company has business processes, even if they sometimes exist only in the heads of employees. Putting them on paper delivers insight and consistency.
2. 2Information about how often processes and specific tasks run is extremely valuable when making decisions. With that knowledge you know for certain that automation will save money.
3. 3By replacing manual work with automated processes step by step, a business case can be made in advance and validated afterwards. That makes controlling the (IT) budget considerably easier than it is in long, complex projects.