Operations Best Practices

Promote Communication

At many organizations, one person or team builds a robot, and another person or team designs the integration that calls the robot. Sometimes a third person or team is responsible for monitoring the automation after it goes live.

In such cases, communicate your goals and timelines early and often. Identify people's availability, create a schedule for the work, and schedule periodic check-ins to ensure that everyone is working toward the same deadlines.

Automate Today, Iterate in the Future

If today's business process is working for your organization, you don't need to redesign the process before you can automate it. Automate it today, and use the insights that you gain to find opportunities for efficiency and effectiveness.

For more details, see Identify the Problem.

Plan Strategically Across Teams

At many organizations, different people and sometimes different teams are responsible for building robots and integrations. Oracle Integration supports this collaborative work by allowing integration and robot developers to complete their work in parallel or sequentially, all while collaborating within a project.

While planning and working, follow the best practices for the development of component-based software. Work intentionally by defining the contracts up front, and make sure everyone agrees to them. For example, a contract might state that a robot expects to get a purchase order and deliver a supplier name.

After everyone has agreed to the contracts, work can begin. A robot developer can build and test a robot, even if an integration developer isn't available to start work on the integration yet. Similarly, an integration developer can start working after a robot developer creates only the shell of a robot, a task that takes just a couple minutes. See Create a Robot.

Understand a Problem Before Solving It

It's important to fully understand the problem you're trying to solve before you start trying to plan a solution.

All too often, software has limitations and restrictions. Because you know your applications so well, you might focus on what your software tools let you do rather than on your business goals. As a result, you could start making compromises from the beginning. Your solution becomes what your software can support, not what your business requires. The end result is often a solution that solves only part of the problem.

With Oracle Integration, you don't need to make compromises on automation because you can design API-based automation and UI-based automation in the same place.

Oracle meets you where you are and helps make your applications more intelligent. With Oracle Integration, you can create a complete, simple, observable, and intelligent automation strategy.

Strive for Continuous Improvement

Deploying your automation solution to production is, in many ways, the beginning of your automation journey. After deploying a solution, you can analyze and optimize it.

After you deploy an automation solution, analyze your solution, and look for opportunities for tactical improvements that move your organization toward a more perfect business process.

Remember that automation offers three key benefits:

Efficiency: For example, fulfilling the same number of orders using fewer resources.
Effectiveness: For example, fulfilling orders with fewer errors and in less time.
Insight: For example, identifying the issues that require more resources to fulfill orders, the issues that lead to errors, and the issues that lead to order delays.

The insights that you gain from your automation are the keys to optimizing the automation. These insights help you identify the changes that you need to make.

For example, after you automate an approval process, you might see that a team requires 6.5 days on average to offer their approval. This delay leads to inefficiencies, downstream delays, and stress. The insight and an understanding of its business impact help you determine next steps, such as:

Expanding the pool of approvers
Removing the approval requirement
Identifying a daily designated approver who must approve all open requests by the end of each day