Digital Transformation has been a favorite boardroom discussion point for a while now. With ever-growing competition, getting on the bandwagon has become abusinessimperative for organizations. Yet despite massive investments, most transformations struggle to demonstrate tangible outcomes. New systems get deployed, automation initiatives are launched, but organizationsare not able to quantify visible results in productivity and customer service.
This is validated by industry reports, which suggest 70% of digital transformations fail to deliver on their objectives. But why is the figure so dismal, despite best efforts?The reason: Organizations often skip critical steps along the way and proceed to digitization without fixing underlying process issues.
Why Digital Transformation Initiatives Miss the Mark
More often than not, transformation is approached with a technology-first mindset. Organizations spend a large amount of time and effort in selecting, testing, and deploying technology platforms. However, many skip the critical step of understanding and documenting current processes and improving them before the digital transformation leap. When digital transformation is applied to a broken, inconsistent, or inefficient process, it just makes the inefficiencies more visible and even more costly.
How BPM Sets the Foundation for Digital Transformation Success
Apart from technology, the other critical piece that needs to fit in for maximizing transformation outcomes is complete clarity into current processes and ensuring they are optimized to align with business strategy.
Business Process Management (BPM) does exactly that. It lays the strong foundation for successful transformation by providing insights into:
- Inefficiencies and areas for improvement within current processes.
- Creating future-state processes, removing bottlenecks and enhancing efficiency.
- Ensuring optimized business processes are aligned to maximise the impact from digital tools.
- Understanding opportunities for automation and digitization.
These insights and groundwork provide the baseline for digital initiatives to be targeted and designed to deliver measurable, sustainable outcomes.
AI + BPM: The Combined Power
AI is making inroads in every function and transforming every industry. BPM is no different. From mapping, analyzing, to improving AI is fast-tracking BPM with its ability to process vast amounts of data, learn patterns, and adapt in real-time.
Here’s how AI improves BPM:
Process mapping: One of the biggest impacts AI has is on speeding up process mapping. Traditionally, mapping has been a time-consuming exercise, with many organizations struggling to document and not being able to move to analysis and improvement. AI-Powered BPM tools can address this. For instance, AI-powered PRIME BPM software helps to convert your images and Excel sheets to BPMN-compliant process maps, saving up to 90% time in process mapping.
Process Analysis: AI enhances process analysis by providing data-driven insights into waste removal, cost optimization, and automation opportunities. By analysing historical and real-time data, AIgives a clear snapshot of inefficiencies, deviations, and opportunities for improvement within processes, cutting analysis times from weeks to minutes.
AI-powered BPM systems go beyond traditional analysis and provide a clear view of how each improvement will deliver in real-time with instant simulation.These systems provide actionable recommendations for process optimisation, standardisation, and enhancing operational efficiency.With real-time monitoring, companies gain instant insights into process execution, allowing them to swiftly address issues and seize opportunities. This dynamic approach ensures organisations maintain agile and efficient operations.
Process Automation: AI is also redefining what’s possible with process automation. Modern BPM solutions infused with AI will be designed to handle complex activities that require context, reasoning, and judgment. Through cognitive technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, automation can extend beyond repetitive tasks to full, end-to-end, and cross-functional processes. What this means is that as these technologies mature, organisations could delegate even complex, multi-step workflows to AI, allowing people to focus on strategy and innovation rather than repetitive task execution.
AI and BPM – The Multiplier Effect for Digital Transformation
Digital transformation isn’tjust about digitising what exists; it’s about re-imagining how organisations operate, how they serve their customers, and ensuring growth and scale to stay ahead in the competitive environment. When we look at Business Process Management, it lays the groundwork for transformation by ensuring clarity into operations and optimizing them. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence builds on that foundation, adding the speed, flexibility, and intelligence needed to keep pace with constant change. Together, they create a multiplier effect, enabling a transformation that is scalable and sustainable.Organisations that are leading the race in embracing the AI + BPM formula for transformationare truly setting the pace for being afuture-ready enterprise.
