How Automation Can Add Speed, Agility And Efficiency To Intelligent Workflows

Automation is all the buzz in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges in business volatility. It’s clear that businesses need to improve when it comes to their digital transformation initiatives in order to truly stay competitive and reap the full potential of what technology can offer. Without automation and efficiencies, business performance and sustainable growth will suffer.

According to Thomas Ivory, VP and Global Leader of IBM Automation explained that companies are looking at leveraging automation to make their supply chains more efficient, flexible and resilient; make their finance and accounting more intelligent; ease procurement; and bring autonomous processing throughout their enterprises.

As advances in artificial intelligence, software robotics, machine learning, and innovative technology platforms enable businesses to redefine processes, workplace automation is expected to provide a significant opportunity for improvements in performance and efficiency.

This makes it even more important to understand the benefits of automation that enable success.

Doubling Down on Collaboration and Productivity

According to a recent study, repetitive tasks cost around $5 trillion a year globally. Office workers spend an average of 69 days per year on mundane tasks. As time has gone on for businesses, workflows have become highly complicated and, frequently, quite manual in nature.

Companies with successful automation efforts are liberating their employees to work at a higher level every day. This advances competency and creativity and allows a remote workforce to take quicker, more decisive action. McKinsey’s data shows that automation represents a tremendous opportunity to bring creativity and meaning to the workplace by replacing mundane and repetitive tasks with ones that require innovation and emotion.

In addition, companies are seven times more likely than others involve the communications function with automation.

Lower TCO, Scalability for Growth

Organisations in every region and industry are automating at least some business processes, according to a new McKinsey Global Survey. Most of the business leaders understand very well the total cost of ownership (TCO). They not only seek to increase the efficiency of business processes but also reduce the long-term TCO of automation assets.

TCO is a model for capturing all of the costs associated with a technology investment over the life of its installation. TCO has different implications for plant automation systems than a traditional IT infrastructure. Having workflow management systems, even as the number of entities grows, affords lower TCO than alternative solutions, including the benefits of automatic updates provided by the multi-tenanted.

Automation Can Save You Time in Constructing Workflows

Extreme automation applies exponential technologies—such as robotic processes, intelligent business process management, deep analytics and AI technologies like machine learning and natural language processing—to deconstruct and re-architect workflows to optimise ways of doing business in a state-of-the-art.

This allows any business process to be automated by a powerful point-and-click workflow engine. With automation, rather than a user constructing the workflows, the system will create them based on previous valid decisions and similar successful workflows that have achieved the goal. In the future, rather than manually carrying out the process, the system will do it automatically.

Conclusion

Making automation a strategic priority will allow organisations to keep pace with the rapid advances being made, rather than rethinking their approach every time they adopt new technology.

For many employees, removing mundane, repetitive tasks from their workflow improves job satisfaction and may increase retention. It affords lower TCO and can be a competitive asset for growth.

Automated workflows are key to remaining competitive in the coming years. Steve Jobs said, “Computers are like a bicycle for our mind.” They won’t replace people, just help us move from point A to B faster. Start streamlining your processes today, and don’t get left behind.