Three Major Reasons Why Business Automation Fails

I’ve been on both sides of business process automation, the vendor and the user. In the past 20 years, I was able to implement automation over hundreds of small to medium size businesses or even national government agencies as a business solutions provider.  

As CTO of technology companies, I’ve been in the end-user side and implemented business automation internally.

Studies have found that business process automation particularly ERP systems fail at a percentage of 65% and some have implemented only 50% of the benefits from the use of such systems.

I was contemplating on this recently and I’d like to share my thoughts on how businesses or solutions providers can do in avoiding these failures.

1. No internal project manager who can balance goals vs. reality. A project manager can be the business owner themselves specially for a small business.  
   1. If the business owner or the assigned project manager is not experienced in business process automation then it is a major factor for failure because they tend to set non-realistic goals and expectations.  
   2. They don’t filter out end-user requests, and they antagonize vendors if the vendor can’t keep up with user wishlists.  
   3. They should be on top of the scope, schedule and resources.
   4. They should break the entire process in chunks of tasks and quickly automate them and iterate.
2. No concrete business process blueprint. If this is the case, then businesses should perform business process review and re-engineering even before sourcing for a software or vendor. Or another way is to adapt the business process templates from the vendor and if the business opts for this, then they have to extend trust to the vendor and give them the authority to lead them in the automation.
3. Inexperienced vendors who say yes most of the time. Vendors should educate their clients and pre-qualify them if they meet the above criteria. Because if they get the project for the sake of making a sale and not knowing that the client doesn’t have enough resource to comply, then it will end up a failure.

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