Knowing where to automate

Luckily, there are insights available that will prevent both excessive resource investment and less-than-optimal uses of automation.

Businesses are susceptible to inadvertently inflating their staff and technology expenses by maintaining inefficient processes that don’t make effective use of employees. While a bottleneck in a workflow might seem to indicate a need to hire more, doing so may simply shift the bottleneck to a later point in the process that will have a more visibly negative impact on employee and customer experiences. Automating processes arbitrarily can have a similar effect. Without a clear understanding of every step in a process, businesses cannot reach optimal efficiency and are more likely to hire excessively.

However, organizations can gain better insight through process intelligence. By observing an accurate and detailed model of how individual steps in a process are completed, managers can implement automation solutions in the right places, ensuring that automation does not inhibit productivity and employees’ efforts are spent where they’re needed.

Process intelligence augments task and process mining to generate timestamps throughout stages of a workflow. While task mining records individual employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks, process mining sees the completion of steps within the larger timeline. Using these front-end and back-end insights contributes to a comprehensive understanding of a process’s efficacy and guides more meaningful application of automation. Banner Health works closely with front-line staff, nursing teams, and physicians to understand their efficiency needs and where they have identified bottlenecks. These types of internal interviews can validate or serve to educate stakeholders when process efficiency gains can be made. Once automation is implemented, process monitoring provides a means to assess the impact of these changes and provide a roadmap for continual improvement.

Advanced forms of process intelligence also offer simulation capabilities, allowing managers to adjust variables in their model to account for hypothetical changes to a process, yielding a useful forecast without incurring any tangible risks. Business leaders can leverage this predictive power to proactively prepare for any possible changes to their operations, such as labor shortages, supply chain disruption, or other challenges inherent to economic turbulence.

Invest in an intelligent future

Many organizations’ AI journeys begin with the acquisition of off-the-shelf solutions from external vendors. While that might have been enough to differentiate a business when AI was earlier in its infancy, many organizations are left with technical debt—when point solutions are not fully deployed or adopted by staff. It is necessary to work with partners who can not only streamline the initial implementation of AI but also the necessary training that must take place for its adoption, ongoing use, and future adaptation.

Considering that 70 percent of organizations’ attempts at automation fail,working with partners who can augment your current IT and staff resources is a necessary step to safeguarding the efficacy of automation. However, it’s also a proactive measure to contribute to an organization’s health and competitive edge in financially uncertain times. With 44 percent of private companies planning to invest in AI in 2023, automation will no longer be a means of getting ahead, but rather required to keep up. If businesses don’t effectively digitally transform amidst business challenges, chances of success in a healthier economy will wane. Investing in intelligent automation solutions that bring out the best in humans and technology alike will ensure the greatest return on investment (ROI) in the long term.