Automation First? Try Optimisation First!

A recent study by Honeywell notes that more than 50 percent of surveyed companies in the US are increasing their robotic process automation (RPA) investment to survive and thrive in the post-pandemic world. E-commerce, FMCG, and logistics industries are top investors in RPA. The pandemic-driven supply chain transformation focuses on helping businesses to anticipate disruptions early and stay resilient in face of disruption. 

While most enterprises are taking the “automation-first” approach to reducing manual tasks, automating without optimization of processes only brings minimum returns while shortening RPA life. In fact, according to various studies, almost 50 percent of RPA initiatives drown after deploying just a few bots.

Without process discovery, there can be no RPA success

The key to successful automation is building and maintaining a healthy pipeline of automation opportunities. Each process or task leads to the next automation opportunity, helping create a continuous cycle of process discovery, prioritization, and value realization. Up to 80% of your RPA effort goes into evaluating individual processes to identify the best automation opportunities. But the manual process is time-consuming and inefficient. When organizations work in silos and fail to document end-to-end processes, it becomes more complex to understand which processes can be automated.

Image source: Automation Anywhere

Most of the enterprises that directly jump into RPA, go ahead with a huge blind spot in their current processes. These blind spots, in the best-case scenario, limit the benefits of automation investment and in the worst case put you in the cost-draining limbo of fixing broken bots.

Effective automated process discovery helps identify high volume, rule-based processes that are frequently prone to human errors – making them an ideal candidate for automation. An accurate and fact-based process discovery helps to get granular visibility into the as-is state of your business processes. Comprehensive visibility into key processes performed using enterprise IT systems such as ERP, CRM, and SCM helps to understand bottlenecks, and determine broader process optimization opportunities. It helps identify task-level improvement opportunities and analyze their impact on overall process performance.

The insights help enterprises to identify process improvement potential in an integrated manner. While a stand-alone automation approach can help make some tasks more efficient and drive quick cost savings, it typically fails to deliver transformational benefits. In fact, automating poorly designed, non-standardized, and broken processes can amplify inefficiencies and result in heavy technical debt. Moreover, process simplification and standardization alone can create a significant business impact even before automation.

Where are you in your RPA journey?

As the RPA market continues to surge, it is evident that more companies are investing in automation and have already implemented their first few bots. And chances are that most of the early automation opportunities are piecemeal tasks, but not end-to-end processes, that fail to scale in the long run. Therefore, it’s critical for businesses to evaluate their processes before implementing the first bot.

Whether you are thinking of investing in RPA for the first time or trying to scale the current implementation, SurfaceAI can help you uncover hidden automation opportunities that bring the maximum ROI. Talk to our experts today!