How Automation Reduces Dependence on Labor During Global Crises

Global commerce is severely affected by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. This global health and socioeconomic crisis is spreading at an alarming rate, making the health safety of your workforce and other people a top priority. Business disruption is so widespread that it might affect your onsite workforce and outsourcing provider in similar ways. Many businesses have asked their employees to stay at home, but most of them aren’t equipped to allow their employees to work from home.
Businesses that want to improve operational resilience and operate disruption-free should invest in automating their business processes. If your business hasn’t already adopted time and cost-efficient process automation technology in the recent past, now’s the time to act.

Bots are always available

If your business relies on a sizable team of knowledge workers, investing in enterprise automation solutions like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can reduce dependency on your local and remote workforce by performing the same actions and tasks without human interaction. Businesses that have already implemented automation services can continue uninterrupted, even if their regular and outsourced workforce isn’t available.
Read more: 4 hot new features in leading robotic process automation solutions
Using RPA, you can build and train a virtual workforce of software “bots” on tasks like copying, pasting, and comparing information between applications, and checking information against hundreds of regulations and business rules. A typical bot completes the same amount of repetitive work five to fifteen times faster than a full-time employee, which can help your team focus on higher-value tasks that require human creativity. Automated processes are consistently fast and accurate. They also never have to go offline to rest; they’re functional 24x7x365.

Bots don’t cost much to train, run, or re-train

In challenging times, businesses look for ways to reduce operating costs. Since businesses can easily add or remove bots to match variable workloads, RPA is also a more scalable option.
Bots can be trained to perform many kinds of tasks with near-perfect accuracy in a few short hours. They can be re-trained just as easily when your business processes need to be changed. For example, if your organization switches logistics vendors, then you can re-train the bot that processes customer POs so it knows to use the new vendor’s website to request pickups and track parcels.

Conclusion

Efficient, scalable, flexible, affordable, and highly available. These four reasons should be enough to convince most businesses that RPA can help them maintain uninterrupted operations, especially during a sudden skill shortage or unplanned workplace closure.
For best results, partner with a technology provider that has experience implementing RPA for other organizations in your industry. Start with a pilot project that quickly automates low-effort, high-value processes. For a deeper dive into how to automate your organization’s labor-intensive processes, please get in touch with Visionet.