2020 has been a challenge, but there is now a need to focus on recovery, resilience, and expansion. The big question now is how to minimise disruption, be agile, and prepare business for the challenges of 2021 and beyond.
The disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic continues to evolve and present daily challenges. New rules and restrictions, social distancing, remote working, and changing consumer behaviour are forcing companies to change the way they operate.
Now more than ever it is critical for organisations to be agile, resilient, and respond to change quickly and decisively. The big question is - how?
As we plan for the next normal, there is a need to maximise the constants and leverage technology solutions that reflect the complexity of today's and future business.
The future of work is now
Deloitte reports that one of the main forces driving the future of work is the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI). What has seemed like an innovative forward-thinking distant approach, is now becoming essential for all. Covid-19 has forced businesses to initiate or accelerate their digital transformation efforts. Companies that planned their digital destination for a few years’ time, now need to scale their initiatives in a matter of weeks.
Although unexpected, a crisis is a time to make a bold move towards your digital transformation.
67% of respondents in the McKinsey survey said that they have accelerated automation and AI since the start of Covid-19 outbreak. When scaled correctly, automation drives productivity, reduces costs, increases accuracy; and improves customer experience. However, automation does not happen overnight.
Intelligent Automation for Business Outcomes
When starting an automation journey, it is essential to understand your company’s needs and the current technological environment. Some vendors could argue that their tool can solve all problems at once which is not necessarily the case. A single technology solution (such as RPA) can cut costs and deliver short-term wins but is incapable of improving business outcomes long-term.
To gain a sustainable competitive advantage through business process transformation a more holistic approach is required. As obvious as it may seem, leveraging the capabilities of several technologies provides the most effective solution.
A combination of automation and cognitive technologies is also known as Intelligent Automation blends:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Machine Learning (ML)
- Smart Workflows (SW)
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
These allow companies to automate complex tasks at scale thus improve everything from decision-making to customer experience. By leveraging the benefits of collective technologies, companies can control and maximise the acceleration of digital automation to create process unification across the enterprise.
This next-generation target operating model integrates and optimises interactions between employees, customers, and suppliers and always allows businesses to stay connected. Employees are freed from repetitive, manual tasks so they can focus on more important, higher-value work. Intelligent Automation allows harnessing the real value of employees which is the ability to absorb knowledge and apply it to benefit a business.
Intelligent Automation enables you to accelerate the digital transformation that underpins the future of work and creates a Unified Enterprise target operating model. At a vastly lower cost base, it drives the adaptability, flexibility, and resilience required to address current and future challenges, even in the current climate of change and uncertainty.
The old ways of working are over
The past few decades have witnessed significant changes in work due to increasing competition in the marketplace, technological developments, globalisation as well as demographic and social changes.
The recent disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the long-standing models of where and how we work (WEF, 2020). Pre-pandemic, conventional wisdom had been that the office played an essential role in workforce company culture, productivity, and the war for talent. Most companies have competed for prime office space in major cities around the world (McKinsey, 2020).
Despite the changing nature of work, there is a constant – the absorptive capacity of employees. This concept has been described as a ‘’firm’s ability to recognise the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends’’ (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990).
In practice it means employees absorb knowledge from activities and tasks they perform and then interpret it to the next best action to benefit the business outcome. This capability allows workers to leverage internal and external knowledge for innovation purposes and enables organisational adaptation, transformation, and seizing of opportunities.
If you could go back and automate pre-pandemic, would you?
The pandemic has resulted in many companies struggling to keep up with increased demand, integrate new processes and procedures, meet customer expectations, adjust to new regulations, and manage capacity. Many companies have lost valuable time and resources from not having the necessary infrastructure and technology in place prior to the crisis.
However, reports show that companies who had, ahead of these unprecedented times, implemented technologies such as Intelligent Automation multi-cloud computing and cybersecurity have benefited from their digital transformation. Early investment in automation pre-pandemic could have effectively mitigated the disruption of Covid-19 on your business.
Imagine you could automate your entire end to end processes enterprise-wide, quickly and easily.
In doing so, not only would you be able to address forthcoming disruption but allow real innovation and growth. With our Intelligent Automation Platform, you can easily take control and create your own enterprise-scale, AI-enabled digital process automations.
What makes the Catalytic platform that Aurora uses different from all the others?
- User-friendly – no-code services allow almost anyone in your organisation to control, deliver and manage your process automation
- Human-centric - people remain first where they add the most value. Employees are built into automated processes to make complex decisions and handle exceptions.
- Open-ended - the platform is built as an open system, enabling you to pick up where digital workers leave off and use third-party capabilities to augment our technology which gives you the flexibility and agility to make any ‘’on-demand’’ changes
Those qualities and technology solutions allow you to automate between 50% - 100% of a process, with an average 45% of an employee’s time spent on the mundane, repetitive, and unsatisfying tasks which can be eliminated as part of the business process automation. The added capacity enables the repurposing of people to focus their time on higher-value, more rewarding activities while increasing engagement, job satisfaction, and employee wellbeing.
The new wave of disruption and future of your business
In these times of uncertainty, the key to ensuring business continuity is to implement technologies that can better equip your company for future disruption. Enterprise-scale Intelligent Automation will drive increased operational effectiveness, realise incremental financial benefits whilst creating market agility and mitigation against future challenges.
Automating with us will give you the ability to scale quickly, adapt, and innovate. To kick-start or accelerate your automation journey book a free consultation.
Sources:
- https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/tech-trends/2019/executive-summary.html
- https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/what-800-executives-envision-for-the-postpandemic-workforce
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/covid-19-future-of-work-employees/
- https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/reimagining-the-office-and-work-life-after-covid-19
- https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.268&rep=rep1&type=pdf
