Process optimization Out of the efficiency crisis with Autonomous Enterprise

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Companies currently face a whole range of challenges: rising costs, a shortage of skilled labor, and increasingly demanding customers. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tackle this triad of problems with traditional, inefficient processes.

Ileana Honigblum is Vice President Sales & Managing Director DACH at Pegasystems.

The pressure to increase efficiency has always been one of the main drivers of innovation. And right now, they are urgently needed. Many companies are not to be envied for the construction sites they are currently fighting on. In addition to the individual challenges, there are three general problems that need to be solved. One of the biggest is the shortage of skilled workers. This can in principle be solved by two approaches: on the one hand, by increased efforts by the HR departments. However, their chances of success are relatively low given the lack of candidates and tough competition. On the other hand, the actual need can be reconsidered and processes checked to see if as many heads are required for it as have been usual so far. Many tasks such as annoying routine tasks, unnecessary process loops or bottlenecks increase the demand for personnel without productivity gains being against it.

On the other hand, it is the ever-increasing demands of customers that keep those responsible in companies awake at night. In a current study by the market research firm Savanta, almost one third of those surveyed in Germany indicated this. Globally, 36 percent of those surveyed even fear that their customers will move to the competition because they do not offer them good experiences. They often see the cause of this in their outdated and fragmented IT landscape, which leads to poor services and customer experiences and thus to customer and revenue losses. These observations run through all sectors, from production and logistics to banks and service providers. Customer expectations are high, competition is huge, and cycle times are getting shorter.

And as if that weren't enough challenges, rapidly rising costs are also added: It's not just the high energy prices that are impacting the balance sheets to varying degrees. There are also homemade budget eaters causing headaches. For example, the Savanta study also shows that far too much money has to be spent on outdated IT technology. About a quarter of all respondents, for example, spend more than half of their annual IT budget on maintaining solutions that no longer fulfill their tasks. In extreme cases, it was even the entire budgets.

Innovations urgently needed

Companies are thus left with extremely thin air for innovations. But these are urgently needed. The companies face the challenge of reconciling three competing imperatives: Firstly, they must create the conditions for ever-better customer service. Secondly, they need to increase productivity despite, or perhaps because of, the tense personnel situation and thirdly, they need to restructure and optimize internal organizational structures so they do not obstruct the operational business in line with the business strategy, but rather promote it.

Often, automation comes to mind as a way out of the difficult situation. But beware: simply automating bad processes leads to little gain. Real process optimization has to encompass the entire process chain, self-regulating through the use of artificial intelligence and constantly evolving both actively and reactively. This succinctly describes the concept of the Autonomous Enterprise. Broken down to the aim of greater customer satisfaction and associated value creation, this means targeted, automated support and relief for employees with customer contact. This has two positive effects: fewer employees are needed and the quality of customer interactions increases. For this purpose, transactions are checked in real time and NBA recommendations (Next Best Action) are displayed. They find the currently most attractive offer for the customer, which at the same time best suits the overarching business strategy of the company.

The influence of AI

Of course, this is only possible with AI support. For the optimization of internal processes, this mainly involves Robotic Process Automation (short: RPA). In the context of customer interaction, Natural Language Processing (short: NLP) is preferred. An Autonomous Enterprise is characterized primarily by the use of AI technologies for continuous, targeted, and automated process optimization. Both the backend, i.e., the office functions, and the frontend, i.e., customer contacts and interactions, are tracked by AI-supported process mining. Above all, however, the connections between the two are constantly checked for bottlenecks, media breaks, superfluous process loops, or elaborate reworking. This principle is known from predictive maintenance, which ensures longer machine running times and shorter downtime in factories. But it can now also be used for the automated optimization of end-to-end process chains. Just as potential weaknesses are constantly sought there, adaptive predictive models here identify incompatibilities or potential causes of failure and eliminate them before they slow down or impair processes.

The Autonomous Enterprise is not a state, but a path, a journey. This must be well planned and constantly adjusted, because the development speed of AI-based tools and platforms is enormous. Therefore, the Autonomous Enterprise should not be misunderstood as an invitation to sit back and let artificial intelligence do the work. The responsibility remains with the human - and he or she must act.