What is Targeted Automation (the TA method)?
Targeted Automation is the simple principle of finding and automating the one activity in your business that will bring the highest returns in the shortest payback period.
Our methodology allows you to begin incorporating automation technology immediately without breaking the bank and requiring massive financing to pay for equipment. It is a shortcut to the many benefits of automation: increased productivity, increased safety, risk reduction, workers comp and insurance reduction, increased employee engagement and retention, and improved product quality.
The process begins with identifying the most hazardous, labour intensive, high volume, and error prone activities in your business. By filtering through these activities, we have helped our clients determine at least one or two activities that will benefit immensely from automation.
Some of the filters we use to identify the ideal activity are:
a. financial analysis to determine if the payback period will be less than 2 years;
b. technical feasibility to determine if the solution is a mild derivative of currently available technology or if it will take a lot of resources to develop the solution;
c. do the potential benefits (safety, productivity, engagement, etc.) outweigh the cost of development
d. will your company own the solution and be able to exclude others from using it. Or will it provide the company with a significant market advantage.
In subsequent videos (chapters) I will walk you through a step by step process to come up with this list of business activities and narrow them down to a short list of ones that can be automated easily in a short period of time.
Once we have determined the ideal activity to automate, we analyze it further to ensure that investment makes sense. We do this by quantifying the projected gains and savings that will be obtained by automating your process. These gains could be anything from labour savings to increased employee engagement.
Ultimately the goal is to have the gains and savings in your business pay for themselves within the Payback Period. The Payback Period starts once development and integration of the automated process is complete and ends once the development costs have been recouped. If you follow the steps outlined in our video series, and you are strategic about choosing which processes to automate, a good payback period is 2 years. However, this can depend a lot on the nature of your industry and how aggressive your business growth plan is.
By analyzing your business in this way, you can find the best processes to attack with your next investment in automation.
So again,
Targeted Automation is the simple principle of finding and automating the one activity in your business that will bring the highest returns in the shortest payback period.
And we’ll show you how to arrive at that one activity in this video series.
I’m Stephen Bruce Wong, from Automation Experts, and I’ll see you in the next one.
