By Kent St.Vrain

Like most thorny problems, automating processes while maintaining or increasing quality would greatly benefit from a magic wand. With one flick of the wrist, the wand would create the pros and eliminate the cons associated with automation. Everyone would go home on time, and they would have a smile on their face.

The reality, or course, is something quite different. To obtain the benefits of any automation, a company must be willing and able to manage the change and all of its attendant issues. And any company working to improve processes with automation should realize that there are, of course, many benefits that will drive quality up, but that there needs to be focused effort on the process to achieve a significant level of quality improvement.

Quality Has a Cost

We all know that quality is a good thing. It enhances a company’s reputation and encourages repeat purchases; and since you won’t get many product returns, it reduces warranty costs. Quality creates confidence in the sales channel, ultimately leading to increased revenue. Furthermore, it creates a sense of pride among a company’s employees when high-quality goods are the focus of the business.

A report by Boston’s Aberdeen Group indicates that best-in-class companies have a focus on quality that is being driven by market pressures. However, herein lies one of the problems inherent with quality management, whether via an automated or mostly manual process: The market pressures that drive quality are in conflict with each other.

Certainly, it would be simple to increase quality if time and money were no objects. But, the other objectives clearly indicate that quality must be improved while reducing costs and getting to market faster. This is where the benefits of process automation truly can help.

A Precise View

Visibility is the key to enabling an organization to improve processes that affect quality. The data already exists, but unless there is an automated way of capturing it, it is nearly useless in determining what must change relative to quality. An automated process will capture this data as a by-product of people’s work.

Automated systems also help build best-in-class, repeatable processes that continue to get refined but do not have to be re-created. This helps the quality objectives significantly — it helps companies learn and repeat what works best, while also creating templates for future projects.

This approach can save millions in rework while continuing to advance quality in the process.

For example, one company in the pharmaceutical industry had a process that dealt with label deviations. We have all experienced the need to resolve deviations with new labels, stickers or other methods of ensuring the proper label gets to market. The pharmaceutical company’s manual process required a label-deviation process that alerted a plant when changes were required to labels already in-plant. After automating the process, the label deviations were reduced from more than three per week to zero. The automated system made sure that the right data was in the right place, and if not, it alerted employees in plenty of time to make the necessary adjustments prior to label production.

Stumbling Blocks

But what are downsides to process automation? Do they outweigh the benefits?

There are three areas to consider. They are not explicitly “cons” but rather pragmatic considerations that must be addressed to ensure a successful implementation.

First, process automation systems cost money. However, they are not inordinately expensive, particularly when return-on-investment (ROI) is calculated. Speed to market, less rework, visibility and transparency, real-time status, dashboards and other benefits of these systems create significant ROI for most companies.

The second area to address is the across-the-board commitment that companies must make to quality and process automation. These initiatives must have executive ownership across the enterprise. Quality processes and workflows must be established at the corporate level and delegated departmentally. When the data is collected about quality (or any other area the process automation covers), this data actually must be used to take action and improve the quality and/or the process.

Finally, change management is generally the most difficult issue for any change in work habits, including changes that occur with process automation. To ensure success, there must be a corporate champion who will help set and manage priorities across business units, provide executive visibility and remove roadblocks. A project manager should be in place for the duration of the implementation rollout, with assistance from subject-matter experts who must be part of the team that designs and then implements the solution.

The benefits of process automation are great, and the demands it makes on the organization in the early stages are significant. Fortunately, the results are even more impressive.

Kent St.Vrain is vice president of marketing and business development at Paxonix Inc. He can be reached at 978-582-0767 or kent.stvrain@paxonix.com.