Why deployment speed is vital in maximising ROI

More businesses than ever are looking to create new opportunities using technologies such as A.I. enabled process automation. However, a lack of in-house skills, tools, and methodologies make extracting real world value incredibly challenging. That’s because, without these elements, the vast majority of solutions never make it into production where they’re able to make an impact.

Countless businesses invest significant time and money into coming up with an idea or hypothesis for an A.I. solution, and some might even get as far as building models. But a lack of expertise and experience around development practices often slows production down and these solutions fizzle out without even getting past the research phase.

So obviously, your aim is to avoid becoming part of this majority, and instead find a way to guarantee (as much as possible anyway) that any ambitious A.I. enabled process automation project you pursue reaches production. If you read our blog on outsourcing, you’ll know a specialist partner can help you achieve this if you don’t have the means to do it yourself.

If built correctly, the moment your solution enters the production environment, you’ll see an immediate impact across your operations. But what if you could take this even further, and instead of just achieving ROI, you could actually maximize it?

You might have the drop on the majority of other businesses, but there is always a chance that your most advanced competitor has the means to launch solutions of their own. So, to be the best of the best, you’ll need one more edge.

This is where deployment speed comes into play.

Rapid production. Rapid returns.

The quicker your solution is launched into production, the sooner it starts delivering value and generating that return. In many of our own projects, clients have been able to recoup the cost of their solution in a matter of months, from which point the benefits of A.I. and automation begin to exponentially create value. Whether it’s reducing costs by completely digitizing a human activity, or driving customer satisfaction by elevating product/service quality, the profitability of such solutions grows rapidly past the recuperation point, where they often begin to increase revenues.

Another aspect of these benefits are the impact it allows your business to make on the wider industry. Custom solutions often provide capabilities that competitors cannot emulate, giving you a distinct market advantage and allowing you to actually disrupt or shape your industry as a whole. Of course, in any industry, speed is key here too. You need your industry-shaping solution to make an impact before competitors can push innovations of their own.

So how can you both guarantee production AND deploy quickly?

3 production workflow tips

Every business is unique, so the skills, tools, tech, and partnerships you have at your disposal will play a crucial role in how quickly you can reach production. What we can share with you is a few tips from our own workflow that will hopefully help you guarantee production and increase speed as much as possible.

1) Prioritise process scoping and testing
Start every project by scoping your current processes thoroughly and methodically. By considering the systems, data, people, and commercials of the “as is” process, you can discover what would be required to automate it partially or entirely. With a “to be” process defined, you then need to test it for feasibility. If you’re going to be using A.I., it’s best to test the model hypothesis here too.

By doing both of these things at the very first stage, you can proceed only with solutions that are highly likely to deploy successfully into production, and dismiss those that fail testing before any real investment has taken place.

2) Shadow test during build
Testing shouldn’t stop at the first stage. Instead, it’s best to continue testing in parallel with the build process. By running models both in real-time and in production, you gain very early feedback that can help you fine tune the solution and improve both its performance and accuracy.

3) Automate the automation
With the right tools, it’s possible to automate several key aspects of both the building and maintenance of solutions. That’s right – software building software! From structuring data, to ensuring model accuracy, any opportunity to execute the production workflow automatically will save significant time and costs. We achieve this with our own proprietary tool Konstellation, which is present in every single Intelygenz project, and one of the main ways we reach production in a matter of weeks.

To learn more about our approach to guaranteed production and rapid deployment speed, download our latest company brochure. We also uncover the A.I. and Automation revolution, explore today’s key market trends, and share some of our real projects where businesses have used these techniques when maximizing ROI.