Automation - The Backbone of the Digital Enterprise

Apr 25, 2023

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION | 5 min READ

The recent market disruptions and significant data challenges paired with the rapid shift towards digital-first experiences and customer-centricity have paved the way for businesses to adopt automation. Automation has evolved from being a driver in smaller individual projects scattered across the business to driving enterprise-level transformation as a digital accelerator. It is becoming increasingly evident from the current landscape that organizations that work on automation capabilities across their business are most likely to drive growth and succeed.

Harshad Parmar

Practice Head -

Customer Experience & Automation

Birlasoft

Rishu Sharma

Practice Director -

Digital Evangelist and Storyteller, Digital BU

Birlasoft

Digital Transformation powered by Automation

As organizations move on to the later stages of their Digital Transformation journey, there is an increased focus on autonomy, agility, and efficiency. Automation emerges as a key tool from the DX toolbox for organizations to leverage and meet their transformation objectives quickly, reliably, and efficiently.

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As organizations embark on the digital journey, automation takes a front seat in the overall adoption and is pivotal in achieving the associated objectives.

Efficiency and Agility

Swift and dynamic scaling is a pre-requisite for Digital Transformation, and enterprises can achieve this through automation. Automation speeds up processes, mitigates errors, reduces manual intervention, and integrates systems and databases, leading to operational efficiency. Data-driven automation can help analyze data from disparate sources and provide valuable insights to drive profitable decision-making. Automation can eliminate silos helping the business achieve more agility in shifting to new processes, systems, and technologies.

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Competitive Advantage

Evolving from a siloed view of automation, organizations must instead focus on automation as a strategic priority across functions and as a lever for transformation rather than a confined technology process for cost optimization. A unified and collaborative view of automation across the business can help create a significant competitive advantage by leveraging efficiency, accuracy, adaptability, and speed. For instance, automation can help with economies of scale and accelerate delivery, helping organizations build a competitive advantage.

Enriched Customer Experiences

Customer experience is a top priority for Digital Transformation. With end-to-end workflow automation, businesses can monitor desired metrics in real-time and enhance customer experience with actionable insights on customer behaviors, patterns, and engagement history. For instance, personalized product recommendations can help in upselling and improving retention.

In the demand-driven market, customers expect immediate responses to their queries. Providing seamless, tailored experiences with chatbots and virtual assistants across channels can ensure that businesses deliver enhanced customer experience and build loyalty. As routine and time-consuming tasks get automated, employees have more opportunities to apply creativity and critical thinking for innovation, focus on customers, and get involved in tasks that require human intervention and add value.

Business Process Improvement

While process improvements are primarily driven by Digital Transformation, automation helps in speed and reliability. Streamlining processes with automation can make businesses more responsive and flexible. Optimization and quicker implementation of new processes can accelerate the transformation process within the deadlines.

Automation-driven speed, accuracy, and consistency can establish process quality and dependability. With performance tracking enabled by automation, organizations can rapidly identify bottlenecks and remedy otherwise costly situations. In specific industries like retail and e-commerce, automated warehouse and inventory management can ensure smooth operations while helping to identify issues well in advance.

Business Adaptability and Resilience

Automation can improve resilience and business continuity with automated backups, incident responses, and escalations. When paired with ML, runbooks for automated responses can be created and leveraged for proactive improvement and diagnostics. Businesses can also benefit from automation of early fraud detection and automated fraud intervention responses.

Digital Supply Chain: Unlocking the Potential of Emerging Technologies

Effective Governance and Compliance

With evolving privacy and data security laws and regulations, compliance must be continuously monitored and improved. With automation, compliance can be built into processes, simplifying them, and eliminating the need for manual checks leading to better risk management and reporting.

Automated bots can extract and update regulation data and notify employees about changes in policies and regulations. Businesses can also use automation to eliminate unauthorized data access and monitor activity.

Enhanced Collaboration

The critical feature of digital transformation is to enable collaboration and effective communication. Automation helps in collaboration by providing platforms for simple and easy communication with the help of standardized and automated processes that move the task to completion. Automating an approval process, for instance, can save a lot of time and effort in sending timely alerts to the parties involved, tracking the status of the request, monitoring the progress, and keeping a log of requests.

Enterprises can also incorporate automation for recommendations and suggestions while raising service requests and for incident management.

Employee Performance and Productivity

With the automation of routine tasks, employees are freed from tedious processes and heavy workloads. They can focus on tasks that add the most value, increasing their productivity. Automation enhances employee performance with exposure to meaningful and satisfying work without repetitive tasks. For instance, automating time-intensive processes such as loan pre-approval and claims processing helps financial organizations' employees focus on areas aligned with business objectives that directly affect revenue.

With access to quality data, reports, and insights from automated processes, employees can make better decisions, leading to better overall productivity.

Sustainability

Automation can accelerate progress toward ESG objectives by identifying, boosting, streamlining, and tracking relevant processes for efficient operations and accurate reporting. Automation can also help address the challenges of data availability and quality. Furthermore, businesses can leverage automation to reduce the organization's carbon footprint.

Automation can help track energy usage, waste generation, and carbon footprint to streamline operations, especially in manufacturing, with significant benefits to organizations and the environment.

Cost Optimization

Automation lowers operating costs and helps to optimize resource utilization. Automated processes ensure sound financial forecasting and management through access to accurate data. Automation can also help combat higher labor costs and turnover while minimizing the cost of human error by enabling remote collaboration. Automation drives cost optimization with early fraud detection, monitored compliance, and proactive responses.

To conclude, Automation serves as a means to achieve the desired end goal of Digital Transformation. Birlasoft partnered with a leading FMCG on their supply chain automation and citizen development journey leading to enhanced supply chain agility, real-time data visibility and reduced PO issues. Birlasoft can help your organization achieve enterprise-level transformation powered by automation and accelerate your digital journey. Visit our Automation page to unleash your automation potential!

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