Many firms have prioritised automation but are struggling to scale and achieve hyperautomation, the Kofax 2020 Intelligent Automation Benchmark report shows.
Meanwhile, taking an integrated approach to intelligent automation can result in accelerated ROI, enhanced customer success and employee satisfaction, and reduced technical debt.
The 2020 report is based on a January 2020 survey of 450 automation and AI decision makers, and 450 individual contributors in North America, Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
“The 2020 Benchmark data clearly tells a story of enterprises moving beyond siloed, ad hoc automation and toward integrated, single-vendor intelligent automation platforms,” said Chris Huff, Kofax’s chief strategy officer.
Boards and executives understand the value of a single platform that can digitally transform a multitude of processes while providing an open architecture capable of easily connecting to third-party applications,” said Huff.
For the second consecutive year, the report reveals firms are making considerable headway automating key front- and back-office operations. More than half (58%) of firms have deployed automation technologies to digitise information and (52%) are using it to automate front-desk interaction.
Also, 49% of firms have implemented automation for fulfillment and verification, 45% use it to perform rules-based tasks, and 44% use automation for business spend management or automate back-office tasks.
Despite automation gains, the report points to several factors preventing organisations from achieving hyperautomation.
On the one hand, respondents said that siloed automation leads to technical debt (46%) and delayed success (35%). Nearly all decision makers surveyed (98%) report adopting an unintegrated approach to automation resulted in unanticipated challenges. Nearly half (45%) of enterprises report they’ve taken ad hoc approaches, automating their many use cases via siloed solutions from a multitude of vendors.
On the other hand, integrated intelligent automation accelerates digital transformation, and 99% of decision makers believe there would be considerable value in working with a single automation vendor and automation platform.
The majority (52%) of decision makers cite improved customer experience as the top benefit of leveraging a single-vendor platform. Also, 78% of employees say a single-vendor automation platform provides greater efficiency of their daily tasks, and 65% say it allows them to be more productive.
