With digital technology taking over and various systems being developed on the daily, new ways to make everyday life easier have been and remain in a constant state of exploration. People enjoy convenience within and beyond the personal aspects of their daily lives. For the business, automation can bring about motivation into the workplace, eliminating mundane tasks and fostering efficiency in ways previously unknown. The benefits are numerous – it enables business owners to reduce their operating costs, and in turn, empowered workers are elevated to intellectually challenging tasks whilst achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Automation can therefore be viewed as an integrated framework that conglomerates people, systems, and processes. This innovation must consider the intersection of these 3 systems in order to derive maximum benefit out of automation projects:
Figure 1: The Systems Approach – People, Process & Technology
For many years now, automation has driven competitiveness in manufacturing industries. In service industries, it is just taking off. The rise of cloud and social computing has made it easier to integrate these systems within and beyond the enterprise. The opportunity is massive. Artificial intelligence (AI) now takes centre stage in automation projects; rendering work environments that are informed by it the best in global practice and local innovation.
Data processing engines and bots of different types are ‘trained’ to intelligently apply rational logic to everyday tasks and enable customers to navigate knowledge and other information resources through service catalogues. Users are able to relay queries and requests to appropriate departments and agents using workflow processes that enhance accuracy and expedience. Whilst the concept of AI is not entirely new, the ability to easily integrate it into our work environments is a relatively new phenomenon that is driven by technological breakthroughs in communication engineering and social computing. To capture the benefits of these technological and social advances, workplace environments are increasingly locating themselves within technology platforms that securely facilitate the integration of enterprise processes into customer and partner environments. Such technologies reduce the automation cycle tremendously, creating space and opportunity for organisations to focus on their core competencies, whilst relying on technology partnerships to drive tech innovations.
As a result, there are numerous benefits for incorporating automation in the business practice within the working environment that many business owners and employees can attest to.
Here are four reasons why automation is important in the workplace:
Figure 2: The Value Proposition of Workplace Automation
1. Saving time and money
Endless manual processes have proven to make room for human error. Too many errors can be very financially taxing for a business and can end up delaying production.
2. Increasing employee productivity and motivation
Workplace motivation has always been a victim of mundane tasks and administrative tasks that make jobs more difficult. Automation can lighten the workload whilst greatly enhancing the content of work processes.
3. Increasing output quality
Automation enables businesses to not only meet their service level standards, but to also exceed them; thus, making customers happy.
4. Maintaining output consistency
Humans are prone to making mistakes, after all ‘to err is human’. Technology systems, on the other hand, are designed to moderate human error. The integration of technology and people systems engenders a workplace environment that can be both efficient and consistent in output quality.
There are other benefits to workplace automation that may be contextual and thus, have not been included in this article. You can easily discover them for yourself as you introduce such changes in the workplace.
It is necessary to acknowledge the need to see the people in the workplace as champions of change in automation projects. Without this important ingredient, automation projects do not achieve the intended benefits, and this inadequacy has numerous implications for the business in the long run.
Billetterie Software is a Johannesburg-based platform software company that focuses on service process automation.
Billetterie Software is a proud Partner of the NSBC.