5 Reasons Business Automation Initiatives Fail and How to Avoid Them
By Dinesh Nirmal | | IBM General Manager, Data, AI, Automation
October 13, 2022
learn how italian luxury fashion House max mara success Automation implemented 90% reduction in customer service resolution time
Operating a business in an ever-evolving business environment presents many challenges. Rising customer expectations, shortages of skilled workers, and constant digital disruption are driving organizations to turn to automation and succeed. Italian fashion brand Max Mara turned to intelligent automation when digital sales tripled during the pandemic. Max Mara used intelligent automation to keep its influx of customers happier. Automation has been shown to have a positive effect on many other organizations as well. According to the recent IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, commissioned by IBM in partnership with Morning Consult, 30% of IT professionals globally believe their organizations’ employees are already saving time with new AI and automation software. says there is.
Many organizations recognize the need to operate proactively, but may struggle to get the full return on their automation investments. From supply chain management and order processing (order-to-cash) to procurement (procure-to-pay), complex processes are required to keep your business running. These processes are often hampered by bottlenecks, slow response times, increased risk, and rife with inefficiencies that threaten customer satisfaction. Intelligent automation, which uses AI, process mining, task mining, and robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline and scale decision-making across an organization, can help alleviate these problems.
Intelligent automation simplifies processes, frees up resources, improves operational efficiency, and accelerates return on investment. Process mining is an ideal starting point for organizations looking to implement intelligent automation. Businesses can continuously identify and optimize these processes using data from key business systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). This gives businesses a detailed view of how their processes work, where their inefficiencies lie and where intelligent automation can have the greatest impact. As such, process mining is an ideal starting point.
IBM has decades of experience working with companies on their digital transformation journeys, and we often hear stories of automation initiatives going awry. Here are five common reasons why these initiatives fail, and how starting with process mining avoids these common pitfalls.
- Deploy automation in the dark
- Organizations often automate broken or poorly executed processes with little improvement. what do you know nothing Automation is the first step to a successful automation plan.What Process Mining Offers full transparency Find out how the end-to-end process really works. Data-backed insights derived from an organization’s information systems give business and IT teams a shared view of process inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and deviations.
- don’t test before implementation
- Before investing in business automation, it is important for organizations to analyze, plan, and prioritize.A successful implementation requires extensive testing and simulation of revised business processes to help analyze possible bottlenecks and potential change impacts. Determination and prioritization of change initiatives should be based on ROI projections derived from what-if scenario analysis/simulations.
- Automate tasks instead of entire processes
- Automating repetitive and mundane tasks using tools like RPA generally increases employee productivity. But such benefits often pale in comparison to what can be achieved by completely modernizing the end-to-end employee and customer experience. Rather than focusing on individual tasks, Automation recommendations It can identify simple outcomes of automation and provide a complete picture of the process including insights from process mining, task mining, and decision mining.
- failed iteration
- Organizations that deploy process reengineering and automation without measuring impact and consequences typically fail to continuously optimize their processes. Post-deployment monitoring enables organizations to compare process performance against predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure projects are operating at optimal levels.new Behavioral Insights The capabilities of IBM Process Mining enable organizations to continuously monitor KPIs and trigger precise corrective actions when operations deviate from predefined thresholds.
- Lack of skills to scale automation
- Talent availability is becoming a major recruitment risk factor for most companies today that want to implement intelligent automation technologies. Few employees have the right skills and expertise to operate tools such as process mining and his RPA. How can we enable these automation builders to focus on higher-value work such as planning and analysis? Use the insights provided by IBM Process Mining to rapidly create RPA automations, Reduce development time while scaling automation across the enterprise.
At IBM, we’ve seen firsthand the benefits of getting started with process mining. Take Italian fashion house Max Mara, for example. Providing customers with a satisfying buying experience is a top priority for Max Mara. However, over the course of the pandemic, the digital share of business volume nearly tripled, leading to a number of potential process issues and bottlenecks. We wanted to understand how to optimize our post-sales support contact process during periods of high seasonal demand to deliver an experience. They used IBM Process Mining to identify repetitive parts of process flows that would benefit from intelligent automation. By simulating these changes, we were able to demonstrate a 90% increase in customer service resolution time and a 46% reduction in average cost per resolution.
Max Mara is just one example of the success organizations can have when they begin their intelligent automation efforts in process mining. To help organizations get started quickly, IBM has released the latest version of its process mining software. This allows you to easily trigger corrective actions and customized automation to accelerate process optimization and deploy RPA bots in your procure-to-pay process. Easy.
IBM Process Mining is available as a stand-alone offering and as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation to integrate with RPA, decision making, workflow, and other automation technologies. It is part of IBM’s end-to-end portfolio of intelligent automation solutions for business and IT, many of which are developed by IBM Research.
To learn more about IBM Process Mining and how it can help your organization accelerate automation, join us for a webinar on November 2, 2022.