4 Steps To Create a Self-Sustaining Automation Flywheel Within an Organization

Through a flywheel model, the scaling of automation investments across organizations can become self-sustainable. Diego Lomanto, vice president of product marketing at UiPath, elaborates on how the continued consumption of automation leads to ideas about and the creation of new automation by end-users that feed the program and spin the flywheel even faster.

As more and more organizations recognize the value of adopting robotic process automation (RPA) to support their operations, investments in automation technologies are becoming commonplace. However, many companies struggle to scale their automation programs to serve needs more evolved than those that initiated the investment, as they’re often unsure of what to automate next.

Continually leveling up an automation program may sound cumbersome for executives—but it doesn’t need to be. When designed strategically, automation programs can become self-sustaining, fueled by employee enthusiasm and participation. We call this model the automation flywheel. In order for it to take off, organizations need to approach automation as an employee-driven venture rather than an executive-driven one.

The notion of a flywheel isn’t new. Consider Amazon’s flywheelOpens a new window , an economic model that uses growth and massive scale to improve the customer experience through greater product selection and lower costs. In turn, customers are encouraged to purchase more, which provides Amazon the capital to continue expanding. 

The automation flywheel is similar. It follows the ideology that the more an organization deploys and actions automation, the more ideas for new automation applications its employees are likely to conceptualize. As end users take these ideas and create more automations, the program continues to be fed, propelling the flywheel to spin even faster and increasing momentum for automation across the organization. 

This flow helps accelerate digital transformation and enables enterprises to achieve an advanced automation program faster. Here is how organizations can create effective, self-sustaining automation programs with an automation flywheel.

Step 1: Introduce RPA To the Organization

The typical way companies approach automation deployments is through a top-down practice. This approach starts with the Center of Excellence or CoE, driving the initial RPA adoption to solve simple but glaring operational bottlenecks. The CoE is a team of automation specialists responsible for the implementation and regulation of automation deployments.

These include processes that, if executed by a robot, could drive major value for the company (e.g., having a robot execute the tedious, time-consuming activity of processing invoices frees up an employee to focus on more strategic work). The robots created for these activities can be unattended automations, meaning they don’t require human assistance to execute them.

Additionally, the CoE can create attended automations, which work in tandem with employees to help them with their daily responsibilities. For example, attended automation could be a robot that gathers data for an employee to reference when a customer calls a contact center with an issue. Assisted by the robot, the employee is empowered to deliver a more valuable, informed experience to customers and increase organizational output.

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Step 2: Educate Employees About Automation’s Potential

Once employees work with automation regularly, they begin to witness benefits such as enhanced productivity and improved satisfaction now that the tasks they dreaded doing are being assigned to robots. Simultaneously, customers also experience increased satisfaction because the staff can dedicate time to create more meaningful, personalized service. 

After employees reach a level of comfort with automation (understanding, too, that automation enhances their jobs, instead of replacing them), they begin to think of new applications for RPA based on what would be most valuable to their unique roles. They submit these ideas to the CoE, who then assesses, builds, and cycles the automations back into the organization. 

At this point, while employees are contributing to the conceptualization of robots, they are still relying on the CoE to bring them to fruition. Therefore, the typical automation cycle within an organization moves at a relatively moderate pace, as the staff doesn’t yet have the resources to contribute to the program’s expansion. For the flywheel to take off, it’s not enough for employees to be comfortable with the automations presented to them—they need to understand the mechanics for themselves.

Before an organization’s automation program can go further, employees need to be educated on building their own automations. There are a number of automation training and certification programs available online, and often ones offered by automation vendors that can go deep on the unique capabilities and applications of their RPA.  

With the right training, it’s possible for employees in any role—technical or not—to contribute to automation efforts and become citizen developers. Employees must understand the mechanics of expanding their robots’ capabilities; otherwise, RPA programs remain executive-led initiatives.

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Step 3: Let Employees Put Their Automation Knowledge Into Action

Here is where the automation flywheel takes effect. Now that employees have the resources and knowledge to create robots themselves, they can execute their ideas on how to solve bottlenecks within their personal workflows (e.g., organizing calendars) without needing to wait for the CoE to deem the automations as worthwhile company-wide initiatives. 

These personal robots shouldn’t be siloed from the overarching automation program, though. To ensure their personalized automations are secure, employees need to submit them to the CoE, who then reviews the codes and applies any other forms of governance needed, like adding functionalities or adjusting to abide by best automation practices. 

If the CoE deems these automations useful to other employees, it can then scale and distribute them to the entire organization, further encouraging the use of automation across the company. Nielsen Holdings, a data analytics company, has already actualized the momentum of the flywheel model. Recently, it distributed automation originally created by one staff member to 3,000 other employees.

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Step 4: Apply AI and Crowdsourcing To Accelerate the Flywheel

With the flywheel in motion, two additional accelerators can be tapped to increase its momentum. First, by making investments in AI, organizations can automate many more workflows that require some sort of decision or pattern recognition skills. 

For example, if a company leverages a sophisticated document-understanding model that can read unique documents without a prebuilt template, it can automate more document-based tasks. The number of models that can be injected into a workflow to make a robot smarter is endless. 

The more models, the more work that can be automated. In addition, by leveraging pre-built components from an automation marketplace, organizations can also expand their use cases to cover applications that they do not have the time or expertise to build workflows from the ground up. With much of the workflow pre-built, they can then customize it to their unique needs. Both of these accelerators expedite automation and open more use cases for the flywheel to cover.

By pulling employees into the automation scaling process, the automation flywheel helps organizations accelerate their digital transformation efforts. Employees will be empowered to drive new RPA applications—without having to rely on the CoE to roll them out—making it easier for manual tasks to become digitized on a larger scale and more frequent basis, which leads to more efficient workflows and a more productive organization. 

Under the flywheel model, organizations can action employee enthusiasm to fuel company-wide momentum and establish an automation program that is effectively self-sustaining. 

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