Data and Process Automation Adoption: Challenges, Maturity, and Business Impact

Key Takeaways:

• Automation adoption is no longer optional – especially if your business runs on SAP®. You must navigate challenges like complexity, integration, and stakeholder alignment to drive success.
• The value of automation evolves with maturity – from saving time and costs at early stages to enhancing agility, resilience, and competitive advantage at higher levels.
• Data quality and governance are critical. Without clean, governed data, automation efforts can be undermined, impacting your business outcomes and AI initiatives.

Data and process automation used to be seen as luxury – but those days are gone. Today, automation adoption is a necessity, especially if your business runs on SAP®.

However, the journey towards automation adoption and maturity is fraught with challenges around integration, complexity, and more.

Let’s explore the top challenges to data and process automation adoption in more detail. We’ll also highlight the relationship between automation adoption, maturity, and business value, and explore the most important benefits you’ll unlock throughout your journey.

Top 5 Challenges for Data and Process Automation Adoption

In partnership with the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG), we conducted a 2024 survey of SAP customers to explore their automation adoption, challenges, and opportunities. The research revealed that only 5% of companies have achieved a “very high” or “high” level of automation adoption.​

Almost half of respondents (47%) reported a “medium” level of automation adoption, meaning they currently have a mix of automated and manual SAP processes. And many such customers are enabling their business owners or data stewards who are closest to the data and processes as citizen developers of automation solutions for those business areas.​

Certain business processes easily lend themselves to automation, including mass data management processes like querying and updating SAP master data. However, complex, data-intensive business processes involving multiple constituents across an organization are harder to automate for a number of factors – like the establishment of business rules for the process.​

Ultimately, there are five top challenges in growing your business data stewardship and workflow process automation that involve your business users:

1. Complexity of business processes and data

One of the primary challenges in automating business processes and data stewardship is their inherent complexity.

For example, SAP ERP master data processes are complex and often highly data intensive. Traditionally, these processes are managed using slow, error-prone, and ungoverned manual data management.

While some activities are easier to automate (mass data management, for example), others are much harder – these are the ones that are even more data- and business rule-intensive, involving multiple stakeholders across your organization.

Establishing the expected business rules for these complex processes can be a significant hurdle.

2. Integration with existing systems

Integrating automation solutions with existing business processes and multiple systems of record that hold related data is another major challenge.

Many organizations struggle to move from manually managing processes across multiple end user interfaces and systems, to automating them – especially when data from other systems of record like Salesforce, ServiceNow, or your MDM system are involved with SAP system data.

This integration complexity can be exacerbated by a use-case-by-use-case approach to automation, which can compound the difficulty.

3. Misalignment between stakeholders

Misalignment between technical and business stakeholders on business goals, processes, and roles is a common barrier to successful automation implementation.

Miscommunication between teams can lead to incorrect or inefficient solutions being built or rolled out, causing confusion and frustration.

To avoid this, you need to ensure that all stakeholders – especially the appropriate data and process subject matter experts – are aligned and have a clear understanding of the end-to-end process automation goals.

4. Building a business case

Convincing stakeholders to invest in or prioritize automation for a given team, organization, or cross-functional business process can be challenging.

That’s why building a compelling business case that demonstrates the potential return on investment (ROI) and business outcomes of automation is essential. This involves setting clear goals and measuring improvements within the performance-reporting area of your automation platform.

It’s also important to remember that what the stakeholders in your organization care about may vary based on their role and the overall state of automation maturity.

What does that mean, exactly? Keep reading to explore the automation maturity model and learn how to tailor your business case to different stakeholders, considering their level in the organization and their unique value concerns.

5. Data quality and governance

Poor data quality and governance can significantly impede your automation efforts. Ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and adheres to business rules and regulatory procedures is critical for successful automation.

Without clean and validated data, your automation benefits can be severely diminished. And this is more important than ever today, as so many organizations are trying to get their artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives off the ground. 

Business Value of Task and Process Automation

Despite the challenges we’ve covered, the business value of task and process automation is undeniable – and there’s an interesting trend in how the value of automation shifts as the maturity and adoption of automation strategies grow within organizations.

To explore more, let’s first cover some of the key benefits of task and process automation:

1.Increased efficiency and productivity

Task automation for data stewards involves applying no-code/low-code automation tools or platforms to complete time-consuming or mundane actions, reducing the need for human intervention and freeing up time for higher-value tasks.

This leads to increased efficiency and productivity across your organization. For example, automating repetitive tasks like data entry or appointment scheduling can save significant time and reduce errors.

2. Cost savings

Automation can lead to substantial cost savings by reducing the need for manual labor and minimizing errors. By streamlining processes and eliminating inefficiencies, you’re able to lower operational costs and improve your bottom line.

3. Improved data quality and compliance

Automating data management processes ensures that your data is created and maintained accurately and consistently.

This improves data quality and compliance with business rules and regulatory requirements. Automation platforms like Automate Evolve, for instance, enable you to create and maintain strategic data assets faster while ensuring your data adheres to business rules.

4. Enhanced business agility

Automation increases your business agility by enabling you to respond quickly to market changes and disruptions. At higher levels of automation maturity, you can leverage your agility to gain a competitive advantage during market disruptions or economic downturns.

5. Better decision-making

With automation, you can access real-time data and insights, leading to better decision-making. Automated processes provide accurate and timely information, allowing leaders to make informed decisions that drive business growth and innovation. 

Automation maturity changes as your automation adoption grows

Now, let’s talk more about the different levels of automation maturity.

What you’ll discover throughout your automation journey is that your organization will put a premium on new, different values as your automation adoption grows.

Let’s create a clearer picture of that by breaking it down according to the five levels pictured above:

• Levels 1 & 2
  In the first two levels of automation maturity, you’re likely to focus on individual roles like a Finance Analyst or a Master Data Specialist. Or, you may prioritize automating scripts and solutions for departmental/team activities.

The automation measurements of success will be time saved and/or efficiencies gained.  Department leaders tend to think about automation in terms of doing more work with limited resources.

• Level 3

Here, your business operations leaders will start to shift their automation value thinking to quantified business outcomes for each specific business use case that you automate.

In other words, what does automation success mean in terms of the business impact of a given use case? For instance, if you could reduce the time to market of introducing a new product by 50-75%, what would this mean in terms of your competitive advantage rather than just saving 90% of the effort in data entry.

• Level 4
  When you get to the fourth level of automation maturity, business leaders will value increased business agility. This enables them to respond to negative events, like an important supplier disruption, as well as take advantage of sudden market changes, like when many people had to work from home during the pandemic.

 At this level of automation maturity, great companies start to separate themselves from the good companies: they leverage their business agility gained from automation maturity during market disruptions or economic downturns.

• Level 5
  At the fifth and final level of maturity, automation is part of your organizational DNA. Here, the value focus is on organizational optimization.

 Dynamic prioritization of people, processes, and systems with automation all align to maximize the business outcomes for all the business stakeholders. This becomes your standard operating procedure.

Embrace Automation and Make an Impact

The journey towards data and process automation is challenging, but the benefits far outweigh the obstacles.

By addressing common challenges and leveraging the business value of automation, your organization can achieve greater efficiency, cost savings, improved data quality, enhanced agility, and better decision-making.

When you embrace automation adoption and grow your automation maturity, you not only keep up with the competition – you stay ahead and thrive in the ever-evolving digital age.

Precisely Automate is your key to simplifying the complexity of SAP processes and tasks. It’s an automation platform that eliminates much of the need for professional developers and enables rapid solution development and quick time to value.

The result? The elimination of manual data entry and associated data quality problems, greater business agility, and reduced reliance on overstretched IT teams who often act as a bottleneck to broad automation adoption.

Ready to start your automation journey and make an impact across your SAP landscape? Find out more about our automation solutions, and read our report for an even deeper dive into the latest trends and insights from your peers: Unlocking Automation in SAP®: 2025 Trends and Challenges.