Intelligent automation serves one key purpose above all and that is to assist humans in conducting various intermediary business processes that act as a bridge between different departments. It can add value to monotonous, highly-repetitive, data-intensive tasks and these are fairly ubiquitous across numerous processes and several industries.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, Hyperautomation – that is the end-to-end process automation through IPA solutions, will lower operational costs by 30%. Bringing in digital workers to tackle half the challenge can have a significant impact especially in businesses still employing legacy systems.
Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is usually looked at as a quick fix to underperforming processes. This can be a grave mistake because in actuality implementing IPA for your business requires a great deal of diligence and foresight. Applying IPA solutions to gloss over broken processes or unstable systems can render processes worse off than when you began if you don’t think through your use case carefully and consider the hurdles you may face.
Consider these 4 obstacles that can potentially disrupt your IPA implementation.
1. IPA Projections are Usually Misunderstood
A growing number of organizations are looking to adopt digital innovative technology as a means of enhancing process efficiencies and revolutionizing their operational procedures. IPA has been recognized as the front runner in this regard. As such the IPA market is predicted to exceed $4 billion by 2026.
The majority of companies make the rookie mistake of diving headfirst into an IPA implementation project and can often fail from lack of planning. Forrester observed that less than 1% of companies achieved multi-bot deployments inter-departmentally within a business operating model. To make matter worse some solutions are offering complex pricing brackets making it difficult for businesses to estimate speculating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI). Without a clear picture of TCO and ROI, your IPA implementation can end up costing more than expected or grinding to a halt due to inadequate funding.
2. Poorly Mapped Use Cases
Collaboration and coordination are crucial in implementing an IPA solution. The downstream effects of a non-coordinated approach can lead to gaps in processes, bottlenecks, and a rise in operating costs.
Even IPA bots can break down over time and will need routine maintenance in order to sustain business activities. If not planned properly certain bots can begin to perform the work of other bots causing a lot of chaos and confusion. In addition to this, it is important to consider the security and governance aspects of it all.
Laying out a detailed document that can clearly demarcate which bots are responsible for which task. How many levels of security access do they need to be granted? Which specific bots were responsible for a certain task and in what order they must proceed in order to fix it?
Ideally, clearly mapping out your use case can avoid such overlaps and redundancies and establish clear flow and governance for processes to be automated. These overlaps result from a haphazard, hasty IPA implementation that is not clearly thought out.
3. Absence of the Appropriate Skills
Automation specialists are now highly demanded because of the sudden surge in IPA implementations and technological adoptions that many businesses are undertaking. The average number of roles created through leveraging intelligent automation is about 10 to 15 or so according to Forrester.
Creating a Centre of Excellence (COE) involves managers, stakeholders, business analysts as well as engineers. They are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing the IPA initiatives that your business has decided to undertake. Depending on the nature of the selected IPA platform the required amount of expertise may also vary.
When using an application that does not require any customization managing the IPA solution can be relatively easy. However, this is rarely the case. Most IPA applications will need to be modified in order to meet company needs and expanding use cases. This requires appropriate skills, either in-house or from your IPA partner.
4. Documentation Falls Out of Date
Detailed documentation can also become outdated over time. This is particularly the case in scenarios that involve a high level of collaboration where people end up becoming more reliant on human nuances instead of rules and procedures.
A lot of self-developed pathways and rule of thumb come into the picture which does not get translated into the automation procedure. This can prove challenging as it is imperative that the automation process be able to oversee every aspect of the process that renders it complete otherwise human intervention will be required again.
Avoid these obstacles through these 7 Steps to Identify an AI or IPA use case. You can also learn more about the best way to approach an IPA implementation by taking a look at our Guide to Ensuring Value from Your Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) Use Case.
Understand the true value of How IPA Can be a Game-Change for Modern Businesses – Part 1.
If you’re interested in exploring opportunities to harness IPA solutions for your business, the Rapid Acceleration Partners team would be glad to help. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow enables full lifecycle AI orchestration on a single platform. When used in tandem with our RPA tool RAPBot, it provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just weeks. You can even build your own use case and the platform can easily integrate with your existing systems. Book a demo to get a more detailed understanding of how our products can transform your business.
