So, this happened …

Austin-based automation services and solutions company BP3 Global Inc. said Nov. 30 it raised $33 million in a new funding round led by London-based private equity firm Horizon Capital. The funding will fuel growth and acquisitions, according to an announcement.

And it has me thinking about the future. The future, to me, looks like process and automation. Now, many people misunderstand what these two things are, so let’s try to clear that up:

• “Process” is how we do things (or how things work). Everything a business does is a process — even if it is a broken one. But processes are really, really important. Processes are the algorithms that run your business. Your customer experience is the sum of the processes that produce that experience. If you’re not working on improving your processes, they’re likely not keeping pace with the world around you.
• “Automation” isn’t just replacing human effort. It is thinking about where people are being asked to act like machines, instead of adding value to the business. As one of our HR partners recently said: no one in HR has ever said, “I just wish I had more time for the administrative work.” Automation makes it possible to spend more time where it matters. Automation is turn-by-turn directions on your phone, it’s email auto-replies when you’re on vacation, it’s faster responses to customer inquiries, and it is “Zoom calls” instead of traveling on-site.

So we’re pretty excited about where we’re going with Automation and Process, because they are changing everything about how we do business today.

Automation and Process are changing everything

Automation and process are changing everything about how we do business at scale. If processes are the algorithms that run your business, automation is the realization of those algorithms at unprecedented scale. Digital transformations and moves to the cloud are simply putting more pressure than ever on *every business* to automate more and improve their processes.

A recent article from Forbes got me thinking about transforming a business incrementally vs. big-bang changes. After all, our clients are generally asking us to help them transform their businesses: the label on the initiative might be digital transformation, process improvement, or operational excellence. Our clients might be rethinking their customer experience, or they might be looking for massive improvement to the back office or fulfillment.

The article in Forbes is written by none other than Jakob Freund, the CEO of Camunda. He asks the question:

What company is the master of automation today? Most CEOs would probably answer Amazon. Nearly every new market Amazon enters — from book sales to prescription medicine — is disrupted by the company’s ability to create a better user experience through automation. Why can’t large enterprises do the same?

I believe large enterprises can adapt and transform their businesses with automation. In fact, one of the reasons BP3 is such a good partner for our clients undergoing these transformations is because we’ve gone through a few transformations of our own.

BP3’s Own Transformation

BP3 started life as just a discussion over coffee. We built a great business in the early years by helping our clients make the most of business process management software from Lombardi, and later, IBM (IBM bought Lombardi in 2009, and made Lombardi one of the Crown Jewels of their Websphere business… and now of their IBM Automation business). We transformed our business from a small consultancy into the biggest IBM partner specialized in business process management and automation. It doesn’t feel like a transformation because the decisions are a logical consequence of success: hiring, growth, operations to support the bigger team, and more maturity.

The current term of art for what we do at BP3 is Automation. Business Process Automation. Robotic Process Automation. Intelligent Automation. We’re okay with that. Because we never believed that just having a good understanding of the process was good enough. Companies need software automation to make those processes work efficiently, consistently, accurately, and at massive scale and performance.

Since 2016, we’ve been in the gradual process of transforming our business. To take BP3 where we ultimately wanted to go, we deliberately set out to leverage our strengths in process and software engineering to expand into new offerings and markets. We ran a number of experiments, and set most of them aside to focus on the ones that worked well. The process of gradual transformation can be summed up by just three core ideas:

• Be humble. Good things start with humble beginnings. So what that means is that we start with practical work on the business that isn’t the sexy strategy big-picture stuff — but the down in the weeds getting stuff done and proving it in the real world.
• Think big. While doing that practical work, keep the big picture in mind — how do we philosophically align our organization and organizational goals, and fit the practical work that needs to be done within that framework?
• Hypothesize and Test. We form a hypothesis — and we figure out how to test it and prove it true or false. This is often the bridge between the big picture idea and the practical execution.
• Scale what works. Once something is working, give it more gas. We put more emphasis on it in sales and marketing, we put more people on the effort in delivery, and we start hiring into it. We also start assertively partnering with software vendors that know how to partner with a specialist like BP3.

How does it work in practice? Our thought process around RPA was roughly:

• Big picture: “RPA is the hottest new enterprise software category… and RPA feels like it fits well with our process expertise, and might be a faster way to get process improvements implemented.” (though, at the time, the RPA market was still quite small)
• Hypothesize and test: “It feels like lots of our process automation clients are also evaluating RPA — perhaps we can be of differentiated service there. Let’s get educated on RPA, deliver real RPA projects for clients, and figure out if our process expertise is differentiating”
• Be humble: “ask our client for the work. Ask for feedback on how we’re doing. Be open minded to learn.”

We also looked at design. Big picture, we believed that it made sense for us to invest in design for ourselves and for our clients. And then we tested that hypothesis by getting educated and working hard to earn some practical design work in the field. Always keeping the big picture in mind.

• Big picture: Design feels like a parallel skill to what we do with process. If we’re going to deliver mission critical applications to our clients, or to their customers, we need world-class design capabilities.
• Hypotheses: 1) Design is our path to a faster way to defining the right solution and creating buy-in. 2) Design is about how things really work, not just how they look…
• Humble: Skill up and work hard on practical design work for one of our clients. Build a practice brick by brick, and learn how to incorporate it into everything we do, but be patient and build it up.

We also took this approach to building our practice around open source process engines, building mission critical applications for our clients that quite literally serve billions of dollars of revenue and spend. We had to start small, test the hypothesis, with the big picture in mind.

How does this apply to you?

When you’re embarking on adding process improvement and operational excellence to your growing company, take two tracks:

1. First, find practical, valuable work to do right away. Take our design practice. We didn’t start by telling all of our project teams that they had to use design. We started by finding one client, one project team, that clearly would benefit from great design. In your business, find one practical problem that would clearly benefit from a better automated process, and solve it.
2. Second, get your Big Picture context. You need a strategy for how you will address hundreds of process opportunities, rather than just one. You need a strategy for processes that span your whole business, as well as for processes that are localized or departmentalized. Your practical experience with one problem will inform these decisions. Will you adopt BPMN as your lingua franca of process? Will you leverage a standard process software or will you use a miso-mash of applications that you bought for other reasons? Will you create standards and approaches that everyone can learn from, or will you let each project throw some spaghetti on the wall? Will teams have freedom to experiment and improve on the standard?

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to do both. If you only focus on the strategic big-picture view, you risk:

• taking too long to add value
• missing out on opportunities to add value immediately
• having another team or group prove the value of their approach first
• making suboptimal decisions simply because you don’t have the practical learnings to go with your strategy
• choosing the wrong software

But if you only implement the practical solution, and you don’t work on the strategy, you risk:

• getting pigeon-holed in one team or business unit.
• never getting past a small number of projects that don’t impact the big-picture at your company, because they’re not part of a larger strategy to build momentum
• building solutions that don’t scale
• failing to find standardized approaches to common problems
• choosing the wrong software

When you work with BP3, we can help them navigate the twin pressures of strategic and pragmatic. And with process automation software, we can satisfy both needs with the right tools and projects. The balancing act isn’t so much hard, as it is necessary. Doing it this way makes it *easier* to build a successful process automation program, and it makes it easier to transform your business over time!

What’s next for BP3 and Horizon: Trust the Process (Automation)

In this next phase for BP3, I think we have found our growth engines for the foreseeable future, and that’s why I’m really excited about having Horizon Capital investing in our growth plan. We will continue to transform our business — because the opportunity to improve our business as we grow is too good to pass up. We’ll need new processes to support the scale we’re building to. The scale we’re reaching will allow for new approaches that we couldn’t support when we were smaller. And we have new investors to learn from as well.

And that’s really what I’m most grateful about over the last 5 years. Our work to transform our business has made us more resilient, more open-minded, and more capable to take on the challenges ahead. The journey has made us better partners to our clients, and it has led to us winning exciting work with our clients that we wouldn’t have had access to before this journey began.

Nick Saban’s famous quote is “trust the process” — and that’s just what we’re going to do: trust the process (automation).