Digital Transformation under COVID-19: Bots to the rescue

C-level executives are expected to deal with challenges brought about by COVID-19 and its impact on the world of work and the bottom line. These executives have to ensure that businesses remain going concerns, employee impact is minimised and customer service is maintained. Now more than ever, business leaders must save not only organisations but people too. Additionally, customers demand more for less and are not budging, if anything, they expect organisations to be empathetic to their struggles.

Innovation, speed of delivery, and efficiency sit at the heart of this challenge. But how do organisations free up their employees to innovate and find new income streams while at the same time delivering efficiency and cost savings? The answer is in Hyper-automation. Gartner says everything that can be automated will be automated. This is not IT’s problem, it is a problem for every operation.

Throughout history, disasters often fuelled innovation, resilience, and adapting to new circumstances. It is often said, “never waste a disaster”. The worldwide disaster necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity for organisations to consider productivity solutions that they would otherwise have procrastinated or deferred to a later time.

Interventions like remote working, video conferencing, online collaboration, and others have enabled organisations to get work done when employees can’t get to the office. Unfortunately, employees find themselves still burdened by tedious, rules-based and repetitive work which is often essential but not value-adding. The new world of work requires people to think, share ideas, collaborate, strategise, and open new revenue streams; while, only if they can get around to doing that.

What is the solution? Simply put, let machines do the work meant for robots and empower employees to do things that add dignity to the value of their work. Technology can help employees look good, while the technology works in the background; providing employees with data, insights, and outputs. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) does just that through bots. Bots execute rules-based processes, can work alongside humans, can be scheduled to work automatically, and can even learn. RPA is not just the future, but the way to do business today and is already saving organisations time and money, while at the same time improving performance and producing error-free results.

A report by Forrester highlights that CIOs are considering spending their budgets on RPA. Any C-level executive must consider the advantages of RPA and how it can be implemented in their organisations to realise cost savings, improve efficiency, and increase productivity through automation.

RPA is a proven solution that addresses many of the pain points experienced by Finance, Procurement, Human Resource, call centres, and many other shared service functions. All these functions have a lot of repetitive tasks such as reading information form email and documents and inputting it on various systems, consolidating spreadsheets, capturing customer or employee information, and many more.

RPA: The Art of the Possible. Contact us to discuss how Altron Systems Integration can help you on the journey toward automation.

By Dr. Ntsako Baloyi
AI and Advanced Analytics: RPA Manager
[email protected]
0112057062