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Go ahead and automate that bad process

ARTICLE | April 24, 2024 | VOICES

Go ahead and automate that bad process 

AI can help turn a bad process into a good one

By Patrick Tam, Workflow contributor

Thirty years ago, when I studied industrial engineering, my professors drilled a fundamental principle of operational excellence into me: Never automate a bad process. Their logic was simple. By automating a bad process, you only speed up bad results.

Today, as an industry practitioner and professor, it’s time to rethink that maxim. In this AI-driven world, my advice is this: Go ahead and automate that bad process. You’ll be glad you did.  

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What is operational excellence? 

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Operational excellence is a mindset that embraces specific principles and approaches to drive a culture of continuous improvement and excellence. These approaches harken back to the Industrial Revolution and have been refined over the centuries. Such approaches include time-and-motion studies, process standardization, and lean thinking, which are all still being taught and deployed today.

In this burgeoning era of AI, those principles aren’t irrelevant. But, given the pace of change, we need to think ever faster and compress the time from process improvement to real-world business impact.  

The old-world mindset demanded exhaustive process analyses before automation. Often, we would deploy a system such as Lean Six Sigma and go through steps to define, measure, analyze, improve, and control a process. This effort involved detailed time studies of each task in a process known as a process decomposition. From there, a new and improved process would be mapped out. The proposal would need to be reviewed and improved before it was implemented, potentially taking years or quarters at best.  

With today’s automation and AI tools, it’s time to rethink all that.

Instead, we can realize process improvements and operational excellence in a matter of months, weeks, or even days. How? The critical first step is to automate the process through digitization and mapping it out in a digital workflow system. Once the process is digitized, it can leverage AI-enabled technologies to track task time, detect process bottlenecks, summarize issues, and build a dashboard of all your metrics. And with AI, you can do all of this almost instantly. You can even leverage AI to generate various options to consider for greater efficiencies.

With dramatically compressed process improvement cycle times, the system can run even more cycles of improvement. Through the power of iteration, you can unlock operational excellence across an entire organization and multiply the impact substantially.  

The big difference between this new world and the old one is that we’re no longer trying to build the perfect process; instead, we’re focused on making incremental improvements every single day.

The potential for AI to transform business is both amazing and kind of scary. That’s never been more obvious to me than when I’m chatting with my kids. My son wants to be an industrial engineer just like me. When we talk about the exciting ways that AI is redefining operational excellence, he asks me a question that a lot of today’s employees are probably asking too: Does this mean we no longer need humans?

My answer is a resounding no. Process transformation is an inherently human activity. The difference is that with AI you can accelerate your impact significantly.

While AI speeds up data gathering, inefficiency identification, metric collection, and other tasks related to process transformation, you will always need humans to decide the best course of action, to implement suggested changes, and to adopt improved processes.

As I’ve told my son, the futures of operational excellence and AI are bright. Thanks to AI, you can see an impact in weeks, days, or even hours. And those impacts stack up. The big difference between this new world and the old one is that we’re no longer working on the sidelines and trying to build the perfect process; instead, we’re focused on making incremental improvements every single day. Like award-winning NFL coach Vince Lombardi said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”

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Author

Patrick Tam headshot

Patrick Tam is vice president of operational excellence at ServiceNow.

Articles by Patrick Tam