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Over the last six months, you’ve had to take some drastic decisions to keep the lights on at your business. Whether that’s setting up remote operations, adapting your business to a digital-only economy, or taking tough financial decisions, every move you’ve made has had continuity at its core.
But as you start planning into the next financial year and what coming out of the other side of the pandemic may look like, you’ll be considering what the priorities are for sustaining your business for the long term.
The problem is that with a vaccine not yet available and global market uncertainty, the next few months are hard to predict, let alone a year or more ahead. In light of this turbulence, we’ve seen organizations like yours make substantive changes so they can be agile and adapt at speed using digital workers from the cloud to overcome business challenges.
Let’s take a look at how this can help your business.
How is Cloud Intelligent Automation Helping Companies Become Agile?
The current situation has exposed the necessity of agility. We’ve seen clients respond quickly to dramatic changes in their industry, for example getting testing up and running in healthcare, and solving payment challenges in finance. Whatever unique problems you’re facing, the need for your digital workforce to be agile has never been more important.
This is where a cloud approach comes into its own. With its ability to scale infinitely, you can flex resource to wherever you need it in your business, meeting demand by maneuvering digital workers to assist your people with work that doesn’t require their unique skillset. In doing so, you can ensure continuity of great service and simultaneously deliver digital transformation at the speed. What’s more, as you look beyond the current environment to what the future holds, you can start to work in a new way and become a leaner organization.
(If you’d like to understand more about the importance of agility, watch our webinar with CFO magazine and Sony Music.)
So, that’s how cloud can help organizations become more agile but which areas of your organization are best suited to automation?
How to Work Out Which Areas are Best Suited to Automation
When you are looking at the areas to deploy digital workers, a good place to start is by looking where you could free the most time for your employees. We understand that finding ROI is typically where most people direct their search, but by thinking about it based on the human aspect of processes you can achieve both parts at once.
If you think about processes that take up a lot of time and your employees don’t enjoy doing, it’s likely that the process can be automated from end-to-end. This is what we’d refer to as the easy wins and where to direct your attention to early on, giving you much needed efficiency and productivity.
Once you’ve picked off the processes which can be automated without intelligence, think about the processes that require some human expertise. Here you can free your people to concentrate on meaningful and strategic work, while digital workers can refer to them for approval or input when required. One thing to keep in mind here is; are you sure that the process requires human expertise? Because it may surprise you what is possible by digital workers applying artificial intelligence (AI) to a process.
(If you’d like to understand more what areas are best suited to automation, listen to our webinar with CFO.com and Sony Music Entertainment.)
How to Approach the Business Case and Strategy
From the outset, we’d advise approaching your business case and strategy with intent. By this we mean, having the end outcomes in mind but with quick wins early on. The best way we find to achieve this is by breaking down into three chunks, which we typically refer to as the three waves of value.
In the first wave, you want to get some quick wins under your belt. Think about what we’ve discussed above, and you’ll likely hit the mark. Following on from that, in wave two you are looking at improving indicators like your NPT score or customer service stats. Ask yourself; what processes matter most to your desired business outcomes? Are you looking for financial benefits, or softer benefits such as using automation to wow your customers? Once you’ve set your desired goals, think about how they would translate across your organization.
Now, for the best bit. In the third wave, you are looking at full transformation and new services or resourcing you can now perform. In the current environment, we’ve found companies change their approach to rapidly move to wave three and transform the way they do business.
Sustaining Your Business with Intelligent Automation
Digital workers have been key to many organizations adapting to an uncertain environment. In some instances, it has even helped them deliver services that have been key for citizens, or even helped the business survive.
As you look to the future and how to sustain your business, ask yourself the following questions:
- How can I resource my business with reduced risk?
- How can I act rather than react to the uncertainty in the market?
- How can I be agile enough to compete with any other business?
- What can I make my business leaner and more productive post-pandemic?
As you think about these questions, you’ll quickly see that intelligent automation and cloud should be part of your future plans. Sure, it won’t solve all of the challenges that you face. But by having an augmented workforce of human and digital labor, you’ll be in a position to thrive in the new economy and act at speed to sustain your businesses growth.
Click here to learn more about operational agility at speed.