Disadvantages of automating a business process?

Question

What would be the disadvantages (if any) of automating business process for a Enterprise/organization?

Answer 1

• Loosing discretionary error checking, i.e. numbers that look out of line;
• Potentially, knowledge of how a process is operated could be lost if it is automated but not documented. More often than not, manual processes are passed on;
• Accountability for the process becomes muddled.

Answer 2

The money you need to spend to automate it.

Answer 3

Would depend upon the process, but the classic situation where automation fails is when the automated system decides badly or masks a problem.

Another might be where it becomes a maintenance issue. Humans adapt pretty well to fluctuations in the process flow, typically automated systems don't.

Again, its a fairly vague question so it is hard for me to talk specifics. Do you have a particular process you want to automate?

Answer 4

• It's always difficult to find a right tool for it.
• You may end up ordering a custom tool and it's risky. However an off-the-shelf tool might be as difficult to implement.
• It's very difficult to capture the business process right. Sometimes it's quite convoluted - especially in a big and old organisation. You may end up having 80% of cases automated and the other 20% being impossible to do at all
• It's an investment for which a ROI should be calculated carefully. Sometimes you are better off just not doing anything at all.

Saying that I was involved in the projects where the automation of the business process allowed 1 person to do the work of a small department and that department was able to spend their time on significantly increasing the company revenue

Answer 5

You lose some flexibility on unplanned situations. On a manual process, you can often "work around" the process when there is something you did not expect, but with automated processes, you cannot.

Answer 6

Automation is set of tools and procedures to make things work more effectively, but there might be problems:

• If user support is automatic (and non-relevant), customers might start to feel that you don't care about them. Some people want personal support instead of automated replies.
• If there are problems that are not covered by set of features in the system and data gets missing because of it.
• If there isn't anyone to check frequently that system is still working in right way.
• If automated system haven't been tested enough and errors cause big losses (financially or in reputation).
• If something else goes wrong (and there isn't anyone to fix it).

Make sure that you have enough people to maintain and support your system so if automation fails, your business wouldn't fail with it. There are many examples of failures in automation of business processes so plan your projects well before attempting to do things. Think of possible (and impossible) ways of how automation might fail and make enough of error checking to make sure that things go right way even in case of errors (in input data, processing of information or at some another level of system).

Sometimes it is better to do things manually while in other situations automation is way to go.

Answer 7

Automating a business process just for the sake of automation is a fools errand. And is likely to cost your business A LOT (in every way you can imagine - financial impact, business disruption, new technical issues, morale, etc...).

Without care, automating a business process can:

• cost lots of money (without necessarilly the possibility of making it back somehow)
• take a long time to implement (use of resources that would be better used elsewhere)
• make the proces more brittle (loss of flexibility / adaptibility)
• uncover issues with the current process that are minor and blow them out of proportion
• create errors if something in the process is overlooked
• demoralize your staff