Large-scale automation projects fail at a frankly astonishing rate. More often than not, this is due to a lack of clarity and accuracy around exactly what (or what not) to automate. Three in 10 projects have been shown to fail because the intended automation processes are not properly understood.
Businesses know they need to digitally transform – it’s a message that gets hammered home at every industry conference and in every other op-ed. But the questions that rarely get properly answered are: what, where, how and why?
But instead of addressing these fundamentals and building business cases in a thoughtful and strategic way, we frequently see businesses rush into automation for automation’s sake. Ultimately this results in businesses sinking resources into making inefficient processes run faster.
The human impact of automation failure
It’s not just financial damage at stake. When automation initiatives go downhill, it can be a seriously demoralising sinkhole of time and energy for employees and IT teams. They can be left wondering what was achieved – or even attempted.
When automation opportunities are missed altogether, employees end up being either overworked or stuck performing repetitive tasks beneath their station – which may explain why turnover is currently so high.
A lack of clarity is so often the defining feature in these automation failures. Businesses need to start using more empirical, data-driven methods to build watertight automation cases around clear strategic objectives. Only then can they establish higher-value roles for their best people, rather than wasting time and resources on rote tasks or misguided automation projects.
Find new clarity with an empirical and strategic approach to automation
A business can get through thousands of processes and decisions daily, each with differing strategic value and unique resource requirements. At any one time, many of these processes are likely to be under-resourced or acting as workflow bottlenecks; others are unnecessarily occupying the valuable time of a skilled knowledge worker.
Nestled in amongst this daily workload are golden opportunities to automate processes, simplify workflows and move people further up the value chain. The problem that most organisations have is that they lack the tech capabilities, user–centric design skills to pinpoint the prime candidates for automation. Alongside this, they often lack the holistic perspective to be able to deliver immediate results while serving their broader ambitions.
Knowing which processes to automate is a case of combining extreme detail – using technology to identify specific under- or over-resourced areas that only a machine could spot – with the holistic perspective to ensure that each business case ties into a strategic whole.
How do businesses work out which processes to automate?
This is where Profit Finder comes in. Profit Finder is a tool that enables an MRI-style scan of the entire eco-system within the business Using AI-powered software, it captures real-time data on the processes, systems and people that make an organisation tick. It then pulls this all together into an integrated dashboard that gives leaders a bird’s eye view of where resources are being under- or over-utilised.
The outcome is a uniquely fast and accurate snapshot of opportunities to re-allocate and optimise business processes with automation. Emergence Partners then combine this empirical approach with human-centric strategic consulting. This execution phase is crucial in helping the business form an action plan to implement best-in-class technology and deliver the optimum solution.
At a time when budgets are restricted and every investment needs to deliver immediately tangible cost-savings, Profit Finder brings together empirical automation mining with strategic, human-centric consultation to ensure that no automation investments are ever left up to a judgement call that puts the business at risk.
A new breed of tech consultancy specialising in the thoughtful adoption of advanced technologies
