When it comes to implementing a large-scale automation project, banks have to learn to walk before they can run. But they’re under intense pressure to accelerate digital transformation and make it easier than ever for their customers. Financial institutions waste at least $5.9 billion every year due to the poor customer onboarding experience.

The new customer wants everything digital, wants it now, and at the best price available. Sixty-three percent of customers in Europe abandoned a digital account opening application last year due to difficulties in the process.

To ensure that your bank’s automation project is focused on the right processes and the right way to complete them, financial services companies must first master operational excellence. It’s about understanding the best route to optimizing mundane processes — all the steps that must occur on the back end to open an account.

Your human workforce has its own preferred way to complete these processes. But is it the most efficient way? That’s where operational excellence comes in. Too many companies are skipping this step, which can lead to problems with automation rollouts.

Automating processes without first focusing on excelling the operations of an organization will further stall financial institutions from transforming digitally.

What is operational excellence?

Before we begin to dive into the role operational excellence plays in automation, let’s define the term. It’s really a combination of leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills that align across the organization, continuously. The result is a more customer-centric enterprise that empowers employees to work together better and assist in digital transformation.

In today’s world, we all carry the internet in our pockets, so the evolution of operational excellence will be seen by the user in the form of a mobile-first, seamless interface that provides all their relevant data and capabilities on one screen. Behind this lies a mass of process re-engineering that completes back-end processes faster and more accurately than ever before.

Let’s provide an example. For years, financial institutions have been practicing Lean and Six Sigma, sets of techniques and tools to improve their processes. Both were quite standard to implement and successful across the board. Unfortunately, both required large modifications in the workplace, which led to failure because the companies were not initially aware of the drastic management changes needed to implement the methodologies.

Even more challenging was that, throughout the financial sector, managers were not all educated on what a ”process” was or what an “end-to-end program” would accomplish. Most didn’t understand those phrases or have any background knowledge to share within an organization. Additionally, the managers alone could not be the only team members to comprehend this approach.

Financial institutions had to bring the entire organization on board to understand what was meant by a “process.” Not only that, but there are different levels to a process, who owns what part of it, and where teams can gain value from it. Every level wanted to know how our approach would be deployed, how to measure success, what to do about any challenges, and how to overcome them. No small task.

Implementing change

What really matters when implementing change is people. You can ask anyone in operational excellence and the answer will be the same: The approach doesn’t matter if the people are not on board.

Also important is the strategy.

Remember, to be successful operationally, you have to have leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills all working together in concert, providing tangible results simultaneously for the employees and the customers they serve. Now that you have outlined which parts of your organization to focus your improvement efforts on, you can focus on streamlining the work into a workflow or process automation.

The digital workflow

While automation is closely related to digital transformation, automation is the exchange of human- or paper-based systems with automated, digital workflows. Automation may augment your human-centric or system-centric processes. For example, automating the process of account opening may lead to savings of $10.5 to $21 million for a mid-sized bank.

By automating human-centric tasks, manual and redundant activities, and other business processes once only performed by humans are minimized. For example, in the accounts receivable department, an invoice could be generated automatically on a recurring basis without having to manually send out handwritten invoices.

Regarding system-centric processes, a document requiring signage can automatically route between parties until all signatures are collected. Again, the requirement for human intervention is limited and operational efficiency is increased. More complex automation is handled through sophisticated tools and platforms. While not all of an organization’s processes are solved with automation, a significant number will and the most complex may still be handled manually.

Lastly, when thinking about automation, not everything has to be heavily specified, planned and implemented. You may find yourself implementing a process discovery tool where robots automatically identify work processes, visually map the main path and variants of any given process, evaluate their suitability for automation and generate workflows instantly. This solution will provide your organization with an easy workflow tool that will create the systems and automatically implement them on its own.

Zuker has over 20 years of experience helping global technology corporations grow in global and regional markets. He previously served as a senior marketer at Amazon Web Services, business group lead at Microsoft and a business unit lead at IBM.