The Most Common Automation Mistake Companies Make and How to Avoid It

According to a McKinsey report, Process Automation can automate up to 45% of current paid activities, equating to $2 trillion dollars in savings. This is exciting for many businesses, with around 74% of organizations actively looking for new cases for automation. But with so many companies under pressure to implement Process Automation, they often overlook the technical challenges required for a successful outcome. This is a common automation mistake, and as Peter Drucker says, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all”, and this can be applied to the incorrect use of Process Automation.

Like all technological innovations, the sole objective of implementing a new solution such as Process Automation must be to improve the organization. Technological innovations such as Process Automation can be applied to enhance all areas of business, from increasing profits, cutting costs, streamlining processes, improving culture, and many more. But despite the many benefits of Process Automation, it should never be applied for the sake of simply using a new technology. 

Overall, Process Automation shouldn’t be applied just for the sake of using new technology. Doing so is an assured path to failure, and those who have been in the business for a long time have seen this happen continuously every time a new promising technology comes along.

Here, we’ll teach you how to avoid making the same mistake that many businesses make: rushing into an automation project without making proper preparations. We’ll also break down the steps to ensuring your next automation project is a success, and how to elevate your technology to get more from it.

Five Tips for Project Success

There are five ways to implement your next automation project successfully that many businesses overlook. These are: 

• 1. Understanding automation: Talk to automation experts and try to gain as much understanding as possible before implementation. These experts have spent years researching and developing many forms of automation technology, have failed and succeeded along the way, and can teach you throughout each stage of production.
  2. Determine the areas of use: Do your research and find out which areas of the business you want to apply automation to and how it can be implemented into production within a short period of time at low cost.
  3. Don’t aim for project of the year: when choosing where to use process automation, don’t set unrealistic expectations, especially if it is the first time this technology has been used within the organization.
  4. Don’t assume you can do it alone: If this is one of your organization’s first automation projects and there is no department dedicated to this area, working with an expert is key to success.
  5. Calculate the ROI and consider the next stages: Once the automation project is finished and in production, make sure to calculate the actual ROI achieved as a result and consider the next potential stages:– Which other aspects of the project can be taken further
     – Is it time to start a more ambitious project
     – Communicate the impact of the process automation with other areas of the organization
     – Work with a new partner for your next project
     – Come back to automation solutions at another time for another project

By following these five steps, you can ensure that your first process automation project is a success far beyond implementation.

Elevating to A.I. Enabled Process Automation

After successful implementation, you may wish to find ways to elevate your automation project and further enhance your business processes. Process automation projects are highly predictable and in many cases provide a substantial ROI, and an effective way to get more from your automation project is to elevate it to A.I. enabled process automation.

A.I. enabled process automation allows you to automate manual tasks which would previously require human intervention, like Process Automation does, but with the application of A.I., it can also perform cognitive decision making to the process. In many cases, A.I. enabled process automation can remove the need for human involvement entirely. 

To discover the best processes that can be elevated to A.I. enabled process automation, look for the following criteria:

• Simple and repetitive tasks which require human decision-making, for example, a task where a person must decide if the information they receive is correct or not. 
• Tasks which require the extraction of specific information within unstructured data, such as scanning an email to extract specific data needed to continue the process.
• Tasks requiring image reading to extract information, such as detecting anomalies within an image.

These three examples may initially seem difficult to automate, but by using A.I., the process can be elevated to A.I. enabled process automation. 

Once you’ve identified some potential tasks for automation, you need to verify that there is a sufficient amount of high quality historical data that the A.I. use to base its decisions. If there isn’t enough, additional data collection and storage would be necessary before A.I. enabled process automation can be implemented.

Many organizations that wish to apply A.I. to their processes often choose A.I. enabled process automation to help them reduce costs, increase capacity, and improve the quality of their offerings.

What We Do

At Intelygenz, we have helped many organizations follow the simple steps shared here to successfully implement their A.I. projects and avoid this common automation mistake. We do this by:

• Offering our Academy service which allows organizations to better understand what A.I. can help their business achieve.
• Following our methodology which helps companies detect their potential first cases for automation with ease and with less risk. 
• Calculating the ROI of the project before it even begins by following a preliminary phase which allows us to forecast whether or not it will work as intended once implemented.

By following these steps, you can ensure that you can avoid making the common automation mistake of rushing into a project for the sake of it, and that your automation projects will help your business achieve its goals, enhance efficiency and achieve a high ROI.

To find out what your business can achieve thanks to automation, check out our MetTel success story: