For today's businesses, automation is no longer a question of if but rather when. That reality became quite obvious in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to research firm Deloitte, a full 68% of business leaders turned to automation to cope with the effects of the crisis. But their rush toward automation came at a price.

In many cases, the sudden need to automate led businesses to favor a tools-based approach to automation rather than a platform-centric one. That's a decision that many will come to regret as they pause and take stock of their situations now that the pandemic appears to be winding down. And it's also a decision that could make it necessary for many businesses to scrap their existing automation solutions — in an attempt to pursue a more future-proof strategy. To explain why, here are the respective benefits and drawbacks of the two approaches.

The Pros and Cons of Tools-Based Automation

In a vacuum, tools-based automation seems like a good idea. In practice, it's simple: identify a task in need of automating, pick the right tool for the job, and automate away. And most of the time, it works well. But there are some long-term drawbacks associated with a tools-based approach. These include:

• Limited efficiency impact – Automating tasks one at a time using individual tools will speed up those tasks, but not necessarily the overall process those tasks are a part of. Using individual automation tools makes it difficult to orchestrate multi-stage processes, and makes human intervention a necessary and permanent part of the workflow.
• A need for intermediaries – In many cases, individualized automation solutions aren't built to coexist with other products. That means businesses that pursue a tools-based automation approach will eventually find themselves searching for some kind of intermediary technology to tie all of their individualized solutions together. And that can be expensive and time-consuming — if it's possible at all.
• Limited flexibility – Another shortcoming of tools-based automation is a lack of flexibility. In a business environment where processes evolve, the right automation tool today might be useless a few years down the line.

The bottom line is that tools-based automation works well to automate individual tasks. But it can also tie a business's hands when it tries to automate whole processes. And it also lacks the flexibility to accommodate the natural evolution of those processes.

The Benefits of Platform-Centric Automation

Platform-centric automation refers to an automation strategy that relies on a single specific automation platform to handle all of a business's automation needs. It's a way of centralizing automation systems that yields a variety of benefits when compared to a tools-based approach. IBM's Cloud Packs for Automation are an excellent example of this in action.

In that system, businesses can draw from a shared automation foundation and build their needed automation capabilities to suit on top of it. It's an approach that's flexible, efficient, and future-proof. As business needs change, new automated processes are possible without needing a whole new toolset. And by bringing all of their automated processes under a single master platform, businesses can realize massive efficiency improvements.

That's because everything connected to the main platform is accessible throughout the business. For example, automated order fulfilling processes connect with billing and shipping processes. There's no need to build bridges between those functions — they're a foundational part of the system. And much like how unified communications solutions increase efficiency by giving employees a single shared digital workspace, platform-centric automation breaks down the barriers that prevent top-to-bottom automation within a business.

The Drawbacks of Platform-Centric Automation

Even though the benefits of platform-centric automation are manifold, there are some reasons businesses don't embrace it. One of the reasons is that it typically comes with a higher up-front price tag. Businesses with little experience with using automation sometimes balk at the cost, preferring instead to adopt lower-cost individual tools to begin adopting automation technology.

And another reason is the added complexity that comes with a platform-centric approach. In most cases, businesses need to do a lot more preplanning and development to use a single automation platform across all of the parts of their business. Unlike pre-built tools, automation platforms aren't plug-and-play — which is the price of the additional flexibility they offer.

In other words, businesses have to commit to an automation strategy and go all-in if they want to succeed with the platform-centric approach. There's no room for piecemeal adoption, and it takes a far longer time for the bottom-line benefits to manifest themselves.

The Takeaway

At the end of the day, businesses choose a tool-based automation approach to deal with the pandemic because they didn't have the luxury of time to do it any other way. But the lack of flexibility and the difficulty in scaling up inherent in the tools-based approach will eventually pose problems for the businesses that embraced it.

That means those businesses will likely have to embrace a platform-centric approach eventually. And the sooner they do, the better. In the long run, it will be far more cost-effective to embrace a single, platform-based automation strategy. And the fewer individual automation tools a business adopts until then, the more money they'll save — and the smoother their path to company-wide automation will be.