Five Reasons Business Automation Initiatives Fail and How to Avoid Them
By Dinesh Nirmal | General Manager, Data, AI and Automation, IBM
October 13, 2022
learn how Italian luxury fashion house Max Mara Success Implement automation Reduce customer service resolution time by 90%
Running a business in our ever-evolving business environment faces many challenges. Rising customer expectations, a skilled workforce gap, and continued digital disruption are driving organizations to turn to automation for success. Italian fashion brand Max Mara turned to smart automation after seeing its digital sales triple during the pandemic. Using intelligent automation, Max Mara is better able to satisfy the influx of customers. Automation has been shown to have a positive impact on many other organizations as well. According to the recently released 2022 IBM Global AI Adoption Index, commissioned by IBM in partnership with Morning Consult, 30 percent of global IT professionals say their organization’s employees are already saving time with new AI and automation software.
Many organizations recognize the need to operate in a proactive manner, but they may struggle to realize the full return on their automation investment. Keeping a business running requires many different complex processes – from supply chain management and order flow (ie order to cash) to procurement (ie procure to pay). These processes are often hindered by bottlenecks or inefficiencies that slow down response times, increase risk, or compromise customer satisfaction. Intelligent automation, the use of artificial intelligence, process mining, task mining, and robotic process automation (RPA) to simplify and expand decision making across an organization, can help reduce these problems.
Intelligent automation streamlines processes, frees up resources and increases operational efficiency, accelerating your return on investment. Process mining is an ideal starting point for organizations looking to implement intelligent automation. Businesses can use data from key business systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) to continuously identify and optimize these processes. This provides businesses with a detailed view of how processes work, where inefficiencies are, and where intelligent automation can have the greatest impact. This is why process mining is an ideal starting point.
IBM has decades of experience working with enterprises on their digital transformation journeys, and we often hear stories of automation initiatives failing to get off the ground. Here are five common reasons these initiatives fail, and how starting with process mining can help avoid these common pitfalls:
- Deploy automation in the dark
- Too often, organizations automate broken or poorly executed processes that show little improvement.know what and what is not Automation is the first step in a successful automation program.Process mining provides completely transparent See how your end-to-end processes actually work. Data-backed insights gained from an organization’s information systems provide business and IT teams with a shared view of process inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and deviations.
- Do not test before implementation
- Before investing in business automation, organizations must analyze, plan, and prioritize.A successful implementation requires extensive testing and simulation Or revised business processes to help analyze possible bottlenecks and the impact of potential changes. Change planning decisions and prioritization should be driven by ROI forecasts from what-if scenarios/simulations.
- Automate tasks instead of entire processes
- Worker productivity often increases when tools like RPA are used to automate repetitive, mundane tasks. However, these benefits are often dwarfed by a fully modernized end-to-end employee and customer experience. Instead of focusing on personal tasks, automated advice The low-hanging fruit of automation can be identified and a holistic view of the process is provided, including insights from Process Mining, Task Mining, and Decision Mining.
- Iteration failed
- Organizations that deploy process reengineering and automation without measuring impact and outcomes often 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 running at optimal levels.a new one Insight Action Features in IBM Process Mining allow organizations to continuously monitor KPIs and trigger precise corrective actions when operations deviate from predefined thresholds.
- Lack of skills to scale automation
- Today, talent availability is becoming a major adoption risk factor for most businesses looking to implement intelligent automation technologies. Very few employees have the right skills and expertise to use tools such as process mining and RPA. How can we help those automation builders focus on higher-value work like planning and analysis? The insights provided by IBM Process Mining can be used to quickly create RPA automation to accelerate development time, while enabling you to scale automation across the enterprise.
At IBM, we’ve seen firsthand the benefits of starting with process mining. Take the Italian fashion house Max Mara, for example. Ensuring a satisfied customer buying experience is Max Mara’s top priority. However, their digital share of business volumes has nearly tripled during the pandemic, leading to many potential process issues or bottlenecks. The Max Mara team wanted to understand how to optimize the after-sales support inquiry process to remove bottlenecks and provide a better customer experience during times of high seasonal demand. By using IBM Process Mining, they identified repetitive parts of the process that could benefit from intelligent automation. By simulating these changes, they were able to demonstrate a 90% increase in customer service resolution times and a 46% reduction in average cost per resolution.
Max Mara is just one example of the success organizations can achieve when they begin their journey to intelligent automation through process mining. To help organizations get started more easily, IBM has released the latest version of its process mining software to easily trigger corrective actions and custom automation, accelerate process optimization in procure-to-pay processes, and deploy RPA bot comfort.
IBM Process Mining is available as a standalone product and as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, it can be integrated with RPA, decision making, workflow and other automation technologies. It is part of IBM’s portfolio of end-to-end intelligent automation solutions for business and IT, many of which are developed by IBM Research.
For more information on IBM Process Mining and how it can help organizations accelerate automation, join the webinar on November 2, 2022.