Why do automation implementations fail

Most industries are fast while adopting robotics, automation, and AI to digitise their operational processes, technology infrastructure, and support. Automation has reaped huge benefits in efficiency and productivity while driving costs down. It has resulted in many organisations going with the flow and applying robotics and AI to select processes. However, there have been some wrong implementations, which has raised the need to do it right. To uncover the answer, we first need to understand why some automation initiatives fail.  

Firstly, many organisations have attempted to take advantage of free pilots to ‘test’ the feasibility of automation. It caused ad hoc pilot deployments that don’t consider regional business unit process deviations. Hence, benefits are seen in isolation for a subprocess rather than a holistic view of an end-to-end process, resulting in greater efficiency and process effectiveness.

Sometimes, automation is attempted ahead of technology implementations. The technology transformation agenda should always be ahead of deploying BOTs for a broken process. One can argue that intelligent automation can ‘fix’ a broken process, but this shouldn’t be done at the cost of postponing transformation and modernization projects. If the underlying technology supporting the process is unstable and IT integration isn’t complete, the full benefits of automation won’t be realised.

It is important that organisations review their processes and create an automation roadmap. Many automation initiatives often struggle owing to the lack of a targeted approach for each component of the Targeted Operating Model (TOM), allowing for a messy automation journey. A proper automation roadmap will help align both the human and digital workforces, especially since more manual work is going to be taken over by technology. Appropriate collaboration between humans and the digital workforce will reap the desired business outcomes.