Increasing Efficiency with Automation

It is highly crucial to recognize the potential for automation where it can have the greatest impact. Embracing easily-navigable, time-saving technology in the face of increasingly more complex processes not only boosts a company’s productivity but also prepares it for the ongoing dramatic rise in competition.

It is no secret that automation and AI-based solutions are growing across all industries. Our world is moving towards simplification to manage increasing complexity in the workplace and beyond. If you’ve ever discussed accuracy and efficiency at a Lessons Learned meeting with your project team, you may have already begun brainstorming how to automate the tedious and cumbersome processes that can rob time from your projects’ key players and detract from the project quality. That’s why streamlining business and sales planning through an automated approach enhances scalability, collaboration, and strategy, leading to a net gain in time, performance, and innovation.

Imagine your business is a team of pole vaulters. Envisioning business planning strategies as pole vaulting is a useful way of gauging how high your current abilities are lifting you. It is a sport that requires agility, speed, strength, and technical skills. If your business is not able to achieve high technical skills due to a lack of these other categories, whether it be mitigated collaboration or exhausted resources, there is still a lot of potential to unlock. Automating and integrating simple but essential tasks is the key to reaching greater heights.

What the numbers say

McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has reported that by 2030, automation and AI-based solutions will be one of the main sources of higher productivity and improved business performance. Anything that is predictable and generic, such as certain manual tasks and ones that require basic cognitive skills, will be replaced by automation at a forecasted rate of 14-15 percent. This does not only apply to physical labor, as we often imagine; these can include basic administrative tasks in business and sales planning, such as generating data reports and manual updating of information. More companies each day are eliminating the need to sweat over spreadsheets where integrated IT platforms and machine learning can swiftly and accurately serve them what they need.

At the same time, MGI continues, tasks that are geared towards higher cognitive functions and social interaction will substantially grow in demand. This transition highlights the gradual need for new skills once technology has relieved workers of routine operations and long processing times, thereby opening the door for more meaningful collaboration. Anticipating progress in these areas means prioritizing the development of your business’s digital navigation along with the management of resource expenditure where it counts.

The challenge, of course, is recognizing the potential for automation where it can have the greatest impact. There are many reasons why your business should embrace easily-navigable, time-saving technology in the face of increasingly more complex processes. Not only does it serve your team by way of productivity, but it also prepares your company for the ongoing dramatic rise in competition. Thus, we must ask more specifically: what are some of the ways automated Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) can be adopted into business processes to ensure efficiency and success?

Agile systems for higher productivity

Let’s address the obvious. Higher productivity can be achieved through smooth and efficient collaboration between leaders and team members. However, this goal calls for condensing unnecessary steps in accessing information and making processes more user-friendly.

Openness to automated solutions allows for more creative approaches to everyday problems. For example, consider what a disruption in the supply chain can do to sales and planning, sometimes at a moment’s notice. This is an issue whose effects can be felt intensely at various stages in production. In circumstances like these, the need for agility in sales planning is a pivotal factor in ensuring the effective completion of the processes at hand.

What happens when referencing data reports is hindered by stalling load times, asynchronous inputs, or even falling down the rabbit hole in search of files and documents before finding the exact piece of information you need? How fast and strong can your business react when issues arise? Situations such as these make it clear that directing focus towards quick methods for accessing data across multiple platforms allows communication and decision-making to proceed without a hitch. Indeed, solutions to problems in business planning can often be barred by separate and unexpected obstacles in collaboration.

For an effective illustration of what success in this area can look like, we can turn to stories of optimization, such as the internationally-based mechanical engineering specialist the MS Group that revamped its project and process management systems through parallel processing and reporting conversion. It achieved this success-critical modification by replacing its manual project plan with a daily updated multi-project management system that worked in conjunction with synchronous mapping of relevant supply chains. Rather than wading through disjointed sources of information and risking miscommunication, this update removed the tedium and inaccuracy of manual input, among other improvements to accessibility. This example sheds light on how teams can rely on the resourcefulness of automated solutions to bring out the best quality in their work and reach the finish line on time.

Time-saving strategies for busy planners

Automation can enhance resource allocation in many business functions concerned with planning and analyzing data. By condensing project management and financial resources into simpler interfaces that do the work for you, the time and energy spent swapping between platforms and tasks that have not yet been integrated can be drastically reduced. Workers who were once bound up in complicated, or at the very least strenuous processes, are now to spend their time on strategy and creating value for the company in new ways.

For a good model of responding to outmoded systems with creative, automated solutions, we can look at the success of Interstuhl, a Germany-based office furniture manufacturing company that wanted to smoothly manage the expansion of its business. The goal was to address the need for secure IT solutions that integrate well with internal resources and eliminate manual reporting in favor of automated systems. Not wanting to ditch existing platforms whose potential was not yet being realized, the company discovered easy-to-learn cooperative systems that brought much-needed harmony among the tools they had already been working with. Furthermore, these systems lifted the burden of scanning error-prone Excel sheets that impeded strategic analysis. By incorporating manageable interfaces, Interstuhl optimized time savings for the generation of reports by 30 percent.

Improving business performance permanently

Freedom and flexibility are valuable. When employees are freed up to work more on strategy and value creation, a natural outcome is improved long-term business performance. Quality-driven strategies have started expanding to include automated methods for gathering and organizing accurate data. Although you can’t make up for lost time, the greatest advantage of automated processes is that once they are established, the benefits are significant right from the start.

Investing in these areas leads to positive outcomes across the board, and the market is catching on to this fact very quickly. It has been reported that one of the two most common deployments of automation technology is in business-process platforms. Business leaders everywhere are waking up to the lasting benefits of machine learning, which can include boosting profits, cutting down on waste, improving employee satisfaction, and overcoming competition.

From Starting Line to Gold Medal

Vaulting over the obstacles that stand in the way of creativity and efficiency allows workers to exert their skills on new, more rewarding challenges that can make or break business outcomes and reputation. Zeroing in on these obstacles is not always easy but is absolutely crucial in the pursuit of successful process implementation. When businesses expand their ability to maximize their time collaborating, especially by eliminating the need to tediously crunch and manage data, there is no telling how far they can go. What will your business accomplish with all the time you’ll be able to save and the high-accuracy data you’ll be able to reference?

Viewing business planning holistically means you will be prepared to stick the landing and go for the gold. And here is the beauty of digitalization: Olympians must train for years to arrive at their goals; automation can transform your business within months and sustain it with a few clicks. The real, more satisfying exercise you will be truly responsible for is the refinement of your business’s insights and creative skills, the aspects of business that propel society into a new age of human development and achievement.

Mark Velthuis
President
Jedox Asia Pacific

Source: Magic Wand Media

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