Nearly half of survey respondents said their automation projects have not delivered the expected savings
Getting Employees to Embrace the Bots
Automation won’t improve business processes unless companies apply the technologies strategically, and spend as much time on the people left behind.
Automation of business processes is rapidly scaling up, with fallout from the coronavirus likely accelerating adoption. Bain & Company’s survey of executives worldwide finds that companies report cost savings from automation of roughly 20% on average over the past two years.
Other reported benefits include improved process quality and accuracy, reduced cycle times and improved compliance.
But the path to benefits is bumpy. Some 44% of respondents said their automation projects have not delivered the expected savings. The major barriers all involve execution—notably, competing business priorities, insufficient resources or lack of skill.
Best-practice companies overcome these execution barriers by grounding automation in the corporate strategy and customer experience; devoting significant time to what comes after automation; and actively managing automation as a transformative change.
Automation is changing how companies operate and how people work across a broad range of business processes (see Figure 1). At times, the pace of adoption has been frustratingly slow for many companies. Fallout from the coronavirus outbreak may change this. As companies lose critical staff and the fragility of manual business processes is exposed, many companies will have no choice but to turn to automation to keep the business running.
Some functions and processes have more automation potential than others.
Bain expects that by the end of the 2020s, automation of business processes may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, hitting lower-skilled workers the hardest, and benefiting highly skilled workers and the owners of capital. In the US service sector, for instance, automation could spread through companies two to three times more rapidly than in previous transformations in agriculture, manufacturing and construction.
Companies that lack an ambitious and rigorous automation agenda thus risk falling behind in their industries. Over the next two years, according to a recent Bain & Company survey of nearly 800 executives worldwide, the share of companies scaling up automation technologies—ranging from low code automation, optical character recognition (OCR), robotic process automation (RPA) to conversational artificial intelligence (AI)—will at least double, depending on the particular technology (see Figure 2).
