Empower Your Manufacturing Organization With the Potential of Intelligent Automation
Delight customers with enhanced manufacturing productivity and operational efficiency.
Intelligent automation combines artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies to automate high-value manufacturing workflows. However, leveraging existing systems and data for high-value automation is challenging for the following reasons:
- Most processes are executed manually and have complex workflows and manual approval dependencies.
- Manufacturing IT is full of fragmented and legacy systems. Integration is a challenge.
- Access to relevant data is difficult to achieve. There are vast amounts of data spread across the IT environment and not all of it digitized.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
By leveraging intelligent automation, businesses can not only streamline operations and improve productivity, but also enhance customer experiences, and position themselves for overall business growth and success.
Impact and Result
Intelligent automation adds significant value to organizations. Intelligent automation has a variety of real-world applications and can simplify processes, reduce resource use, and improve operational efficiencies.
- Extend and speed up innovation, automate R&D, and integrate products and services.
- Streamline supply chain operations and enable access to accurate information.
- Improve customer experience by automating sales, services, and marketing.
- Streamline core corporate processes across finance, sales, HR, and IT.
Empower Your Manufacturing Organization With the Potential of Intelligent Automation
Delight customers with enhanced manufacturing productivity and operational efficiency.
Analyst Perspective
Deliver customer delight with enhanced manufacturing productivity and operational efficiency.
Sudden, widespread lockdowns triggered by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 thrust IT leaders into the spotlight. Chief information officers (CIOs) and their teams faced the dual challenge of ensuring business continuity by facilitating the shift to remote working, while launching new digital customer engagement channels to meet demand. COVID-19 forcibly accelerated companies’ digital transformation plans. However, against this backdrop, IT departments have often found themselves side-lined from digital transformation decisions. Exacerbating a trend that predates the pandemic, siloed, distributed teams within organizations have increasingly made their own choices over new tools, technologies, and digital strategies. With the focus now on business recovery and renewal, the IT function must forge itself a new role based on its ability to deliver long-term business resilience.
Intelligent automation is a key driver of business resiliency, offering numerous benefits to organizations. Firstly, it streamlines operations by automating repetitive tasks and minimizing errors. By reducing manual interventions, businesses can maintain seamless operations, even during challenging times. Secondly, intelligent automation enhances scalability and flexibility. Organizations can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and fluctuations in demand. This agility enables businesses to respond effectively to disruptions, such as supply chain interruptions or unexpected shifts in customer needs. With automation technologies in place, businesses can ramp up or down their production and service delivery without significant disruptions, ensuring uninterrupted operations. Overall, intelligent automation empowers businesses to build resilience by optimizing processes, enhancing adaptability, and leveraging data-driven insights to make informed decisions and respond swiftly to challenges.
Shreyas Shukla
Principal Research Director, Manufacturing Industry
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your ChallengeManufacturing companies face several challenges in today’s hyper-competitive and uncertain macro-economic environment.
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Common ObstaclesIntelligent automation combines artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies to automate high-value manufacturing workflows. However, leveraging existing systems and data for high-value automation is challenging for the following reasons:
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Info-Tech’s ApproachInfo-Tech Research Group recognizes that intelligent automation contributes to business resiliency and agility. Choosing the right technology will help accelerate progress on sustainability. Info-Tech will provide:
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By leveraging intelligent automation, businesses can not only streamline operations and improve productivity but also enhance customer experiences and position themselves for overall business growth and success.
Manufacturing IT is facing turbulence
IT in manufacturing environments is becoming more distributed, siloed, and disconnected from central strategy. The pandemic put a spotlight on challenges within the IT ecosystem. CIOs encounter demand for more resilient systems from business leaders as well as many other challenges – ensuring business continuity, facilitating remote work, and enhancing engagement channels to meet customer demand.
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Existing IT systems have serious shortcomings.
83% of organizations believe that their IT ecosystem needs to significantly improve. -
IT projects are backlogged.
3-12 months is the average backlog for planned IT projects. -
IT teams are battling business for control.
55% of organizations have business units procuring/ developing more IT applications than IT teams. -
Data collaboration between business and IT needs to improve.
61% of digital projects are canceled due to unavailability of the right data. -
Executives worry about projects leveraging advanced tech.
57% of robotic process automation (RPA) projects fail.
Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit
IT teams are struggling to keep pace with change
Several challenges prevent IT from contributing to business objectives. Technology has grown more complex and support workloads have increased putting stress on IT teams. The heavy demands from routine, day-to-day work burden IT and prevent them from contributing to transformational change.
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Resource Availability
IT spends more than half their budget keeping the lights on. There is no budgetary room left to explore innovative solutions to new problems. -
Routine Tasks
Time-intensive, routine tasks can overwhelm IT staff preventing them from contributing to more strategic, value-driven work. -
Complex Environments
IT environments today consist of an ecosystem of varied technology. This is difficult for IT to manage without automation. -
Changing Organizations
IT must constantly meet the demands of changing business needs, forcing companies to increase their IT headcount just to stay in control of IT issues. -
Remote Work
Telecommuting and remote work makes the working environment more disparate and adds complexity to routine IT tasks. -
Innovation
Business leaders depend on IT to drive technology-led innovation while CIOs lack the budget, time, and manpower to achieve this.
Impact of the pandemic and remote work:
37% increase in overall workload
66% increase in number of security issues
39% increase in service desk issues and requests
Source: Deloitte
92% of CXOs say that improvements are required for IT to better adapt to external change.
– The Economist Intelligence Unit
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