Automate to Elevate: Streamlining Core Processes for Peak Efficiency

With digitization and foundational data engineering established, the next essential move is to leverage the power of automation (which I’ve been passionate about since I entered the tech world ??) to boost operational efficiency.

In the whirlwind business landscape, providing exceptional customer and employee experience is imperative in the fiercely competitive environment. As a result, every organization must now strive to do more with the tools and resources at their disposal.

Automation in Various Industries

Automation has already marked the multifold impact in many tasks like manufacturing and repetitive tasks that require repeated command. In any business, we have multiple divisions or departments like Operations, Human resource, Finance, Research & Development, Sales, IT, Customer Service, Marketing, Legal Department, Production, Communications. Despite the difference in responsibilities and operating features, these departments need to perform recurring tasks daily. Let's look a at few examples in some departments:

• Operations: Inventory Tracking and reordering, Scheduling and tracking deliveries, generating operational reports etc.
• Human Resources: Employee Onboarding and offboarding workflows, Leave and attendance tracking, payroll processing etc.
• Finance: Invoice generation and payment processing, financial reporting, tax reporting and regulatory compliance reporting etc.
• Research and Development: Data collection and analysis of experiments etc.
• Sales: Lead generation and follow-up reminders, customer follow-ups for re-selling or cross selling, order processing and tracking etc.
• Information technology: User access and permission management, routine system backups and software updates etc.

Similarly every departments has repetitive tasks that can be automated, saving significant time and money.

Benefits of Automation

Automation tools improve both business and employee performance by enabling the employees to carry out tasks more efficiently. The Automation can have multiple impacts and benefits for businesses:

1. Improved Accuracy: Manual tasks and multiple steps are prone to human error. Automation can validate data, perform calculations with precision, resulting in reliable and error-free outputs.
2. Cost Reduction: Automation reduces labor costs associated with tedious tasks, eliminates the need for additional personnel, and optimizes utilization, improving operational efficiency.
3. Scalability: Automations can handle increased volume of tasks, allowing businesses to scale up the operations easily.
4. Streamlined Workflows: Automations can help to streamline the workflows and increase productivity by reducing the amount of time and effort required to complete these activities.
5. Enhanced Customer Experiences: Automating processes and operations that impact the customer experiences lead to faster and more efficient services, enhancing overall customer experience.

Types of Automation

Now that we have covered the benefits of automation, we should also cover the types of automations, which are used in specific types of industry.

1. Fixed Automation: Used for manufacturing processes where the process remains fixed. It involves fundamental functionalities like rotational or plain linear motion or both. These automation are best suitable for high demand and generic production without changes, such as soft drink factories.
2. Programmable Automation: Involves automated or robotic equipment controlled through programming for batch production. These automations can be controlled through a program, which allows easy product or process changes by modifying the control program. Suitable for low/medium demand production and occasional product changes, like logistics programming, intelligent robotic machines, and industrial robots.
3. Flexible Automation: An extension of programmable automation, it provide greater flexibility. It allows different product types and task switching, minimizing downtime. Examples include industrial robots, warehouse automation, food processing, textile manufacturing, and paint manufacturing.
4. Process Automation: Automates processes through data and system integration, commonly used more in businesses where software programs/apps execute sets of tasks. Examples include operational backend processes, workflow automation, condition monitoring & I/O, managing and gathering files, connecting and integrating data sources and services.
5. Integrated Automation: The automation by integrating multiple automation units or processes, streamlining communication between various automated processes. For example, Robotic manufacturing, computer-aided manufacturing, computer aided design etc.
6. Robotic Process Automation: Uses software technology to create/build, deploy and manage robots that emulate and do human actions/steps. Businesses can work, communicate with other digital systems, capture data, process transactions and retrieve information using the RPA.
7. Cognitive/AI based automation: In such automation we use Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms to predict the outcome. These are generally used as automated assistance which improve the decision making capabilities of the workforce but also process or complete. For example, in Banking we can use the help of the Cognitive systems to process the loan applications, the virtual agents to support customer queries.

Technologies enabling Automation

1. Control System languages: Proficient in programming and troubleshooting major brands of industrial equipment and/or software and PLC systems. widely used systems include, Citect, SCADA, WinCC etc.
2. Programming Skills: Proficiency in programming skills like C++, Python etc. is crucial for building automation systems.
3. Data Management and Analysis: Acquiring, managing and analyzing the data to provide valuable insight into the automation for continuous improvement.
4. IoT (Internet of Thing): Essential for building integrated automation system which communicate with each other via sensors, IoT is very important for implement the automation systems.
5. Robotic: Understanding of the robotic engineering to build robotic automation system.
6. Artificial Intelligence: The Artificial intelligence skillset can be used to implement the automated system for decision making.
7. Workflow Design: The capability to create a logical and efficient of steps for executing a process is essential for developing an efficient business automation.
8. Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Pipelines: The knowledge of CI/CD pipeline help the team to integrate and deployment the changes in the automation easily.

When considering automation, we need to determine the Process that needs to be automated. Below we have outlined the process to identify the best opportunities:

1. Identify Processes for Automation: Determine the processes within the organization that are prime candidates for automation.
2. Map out major processes: Map all the major process in organization across each department including the steps and stakeholders involved.
3. Analyze each process: Analyze each process for impact based on volume, frequency, complexity and time/cost. Identify the low hanging fruits by identifying processes which are done repeatedly, take multiple steps or takes lots of time of employees.
4. Conduct Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA): Evaluate the process for CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis) based on factors like Impact, revenue, customer satisfaction and productivity and the cost of automation.
5. Prioritize process: Rank the processes based on the CBA and prioritize the processes to be taken up for automation.
6. Update SOP for Processes Post-Automation: Revise the SOP (Standard operating procedure) Post-Automation to reflect the changes bought by automation.
7. Risk Identification and Mitigation Planning: Identify the risks or errors which can impact the breakdown in automation. Create the Risk mitigation plan which could be invoked incase of Automation breakdown.
8. Develop, Test and Deploy the Automation: Develop the automation solution , test them for any errors, do the changes if any errors and deploy the solution on the ground.
9. Change Management: Facilitate change management through training and sensitizing employees to the new automated processes.
10. Repeat for Remaining Processes: Apply these steps to other processes that have yet to be automated.

To wrap up, automation is not just a trend; it's a transformative force reshaping the way we work and live. By embracing automation, businesses can achieve unprecedented efficiency and innovation. Stay tuned for our next article, where we'll dive into "Artificial Intelligence" Together, let's continue exploring the future of technology and its limitless possibilities. ???

Happy automating! ??