Five reasons business automation initiatives fail and how to avoid them
By Dinesh Nirmal | IBM General Manager, Data, AI and Automation
October 13, 2022
Learn how Italian luxury fashion at home Max Mara successfully Applied automation To reduce customer service quality time by 90%
In our ever-evolving business environment, running a business poses many challenges. Increasing customer expectations, skilled workforce gaps, and constant digital disruption are driving organizations to turn to automation to enable success. Italian fashion brand Max Mara turned to smart automation when they saw their digital sales triple during the pandemic. By using intelligent automation, Max Mara is able to better satisfy their customer flow. Automation has been shown to have a positive impact on many other organizations as well. According to the recent IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, compiled by IBM in partnership with Morning Consult, 30% of global IT professionals say employees in their organizations are saving time with new AI and automation software.
Many organizations recognize the need to be proactive, but may struggle to realize the full return on their automation investment. Running a business requires many different complex processes – from supply chain management and ordering processes (i.e., cash) to procurement (i.e., purchase to pay). These processes are often hampered by bottlenecks or filled with inefficiencies that can slow response times, increase risk, or jeopardize customer satisfaction. Intelligent automation, i.e. AI, process mining, task mining and robotic process automation (RPA), can help reduce these problems by streamlining and scaling decision making in the organization.
Intelligent automation simplifies processes, frees up resources and improves operational efficiency, accelerating the return on your investment. For organizations looking to implement intelligent automation, process mining is an ideal place to start. Businesses can use data from their key business systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), to continuously identify and optimize these processes. This provides the business with a detailed view of how processes work, where inefficiencies exist, and where intelligent automation can have the greatest impact. That is why the mining process is a good starting point.
IBM has decades of experience working with businesses on their digital transformation journey, and we often hear stories of automation initiatives failing to get off the ground. Here are five common reasons these initiatives fail and how process mining can help avoid these common pitfalls:
- Automatic deployment in the dark
- Too often organizations automate broken or poorly executed processes that produce few improvements. Knowing what and what is What is not Automation is the first step to a successful automation plan. The process provides minerals Full transparency How your end-to-end processes actually work. Data-driven insights from the organization’s information systems provide business and IT teams with a shared view of process efficiencies, bottlenecks and variances.
- Not trying before implementing
- Before an organization invests in business automation, it is important to analyze, plan and prioritize. Successful implementation requires extensive testing and Symbols Revised business processes to help analyze potential bottlenecks and impact of potential changes. Decisions and prioritization of change initiatives should be guided by ROI estimates from which scenario analysis/simulations.
- Automate tasks rather than entire processes
- Employee productivity is generally improved by eliminating repetitive and routine tasks through the use of tools such as RPA. However, such gains often pale in comparison to those achieved by completely modernizing end-to-end employee and customer experiences. Instead of focusing on individual tasks, Automatic recommendations Automation can identify low-hanging fruit and provide a process overview that includes process mining, action mining and decision-making insights.
- It failed to replicate.
- Organizations that deploy process reengineering and automation without measuring impact and results typically fail to continuously optimize their processes. Post-agreement monitoring allows an organization to compare process performance against predefined key performance indicators (KPI) to ensure projects are on track. brand new Awareness for action The feature in IBM Process Mining enables organizations to continuously monitor KPIs and take precise and corrective actions when events deviate from predefined limits.
- Lack of skills to measure automation
- Today, talent availability is becoming a major adoption concern for most businesses looking to implement intelligent automation technologies. Employees with the right skill set and knowledge to work with tools like process mining and RPA are scarce. How can we help those automation builders focus on high-value work like planning and analysis? Insights provided by IBM Process Mining allow you to quickly create RPA automations to accelerate development time and increase automation throughout the organization.
At IBM, we’ve seen the benefits of starting with process mining. Take, for example, the Italian fashion house Max Mara. Ensuring a satisfying shopping experience for customers is a top priority for Max Mara. However, during the pandemic, the digital portion of their business nearly tripled. The Max Mara team wanted to understand how they could improve the after-sales support request process in times of high current demand to remove bottlenecks and provide a better customer experience. Using IBM Workflow Mining, they identified repetitive parts of the process flow that could benefit from intelligent automation. By simulating these changes, they were able to demonstrate a 90% increase in customer resolution times, and a 46% reduction in average cost per resolution.
Max Mara is one example of the success that organizations can achieve when they begin their intelligent automation journey through process mining. To make it easier for organizations to get started quickly, IBM has released process mining software to easily trigger corrective actions and customized automations, accelerate process optimization for payroll, and deploy RPA bots. Ease
IBM Process Mining is available as a standalone offering and as part of IBM Cloud Pak Business Automation to integrate with RPA, Decisions, Workflow and more automation technologies. It is IBM’s end-to-end intelligent automation solutions for business and IT, along with several solutions developed by IBM Research.
To learn more about IBM’s workflow mining and how it can help an organization accelerate automation, join the webinar on November 2, 2022.
