Do more with less

Do more with less. Its a phrase that sounds simple enough, but is also something easier said then done. The initial reaction when hearing this may be to "batten down the hatches" in order to weather the storm. This is one approach. Keep a stiff upper lip, work harder and longer to make it through. But this leaves you at the mercy of the intensity of the storm. If the storm gets too strong, no matter how hard you and your organization work to over come it you will not walk away unscathed.

Recent events in the airline industry show how hard it can be quite literally to "weather the storm". Subject to a sudden drop in demand due to the pandemic then a massive surge in the summer of 2022 and capped off with holiday winter weather events exposed the importance of being able to scale more dynamically. Just working harder doing things the same way is not enough.

How is it possible to do more with less when faced with unpredictable changes, not knowing where the bottom is, the middle or the top. How can you maintain customer experience, retain customers, expand and continue to build brand under such conditions?

We see a number of customers looking to automation technologies to help them solve for this. Automation has the following advantages:

• It does not require a rip and replace of existing technologies
• It has a very quick time to value
• It is cost efficient to scale

No Need to Rip and Replace

One of the biggest barriers to scale is manual processes. Labor intensive activities that quickly bottom out when you can't "just throw more people at it". The reason why manual processes typically exist is because of fragmented IT infrastructure. The business grew over time and so did the supporting infrastructure. New products, new lines of business were formed, new systems added to support these new products and lines of business which often start in incubation and therefore didn't warrant the "fully integrated" infrastructure investment at the time. Getting to the "fully integrated" end state takes time and significant investment which in times of "do more with less" is not practical or quick enough to be the immediate solution. So it is very important to be able to digitize a process across siloed system quickly, securely and with technology that can scale up to high volumes quickly when required.

Time to Value

Anyone who has worked in IT knows that one of the most expensive and time consuming tasks is integration. To architect and write robust integration code, leverage middleware, monitor integration executions, take corrective action, secure the integration and build in elasticity is time consuming and costly. So how does automation solve for this? There are some key capabilities that an automation solution can offer over traditional middleware and custom code. Here are some examples: proven connectors to a wide variety of existing software solutions/APIs, built-in telemetry, monitoring, integrated security and the ability to kick-out to a human gracefully when required. The ability to gracefully escalate to a human is important for time to value because it ensures that you don't have to solve for every scenario. Most of the value is in scenarios that happen 80% of the time. Typically the last 20% will cost the most and provide the least business value.

Ability to Scale

Automation technology is not new. It has existed in various forms for at least 3 decades. In one of my very first jobs I remember writing macros to automate entries through a "green screen" into an AS/400 application. However, there are some very important advancements that have taken automation to the next level in recent years.

The first is hyperscale cloud computing. When I was writing those macros "back in the day" I needed to know how many I would need to execute per day because I needed to setup the right number of worker threads to execute these macros and the server infrastructure which provided the resources to run them. If suddenly we had a spike in demand, thousands of more requests we could not easily just add more servers and resources. Also the costs of those servers and resources were fixed. They cost what they cost regardless of use. Today the elasticity of cloud makes this easy because cloud compute resources and software platforms can automatically scale up to meet an increase in demand and organizations only pay for what they use.

Second is the ease at which you can integrate human collaboration. Modern automations can be triggered by a vast number of events such as emails, chat bots, SMS messages, files, record creation, instant messages, so many different types of events that it makes it far easier to integrate a human (or humans) into the process when needed. Sometimes you just need a human decision or an expert opinion. The key is to make it easy for that person to make the decision quickly and accurately by providing them with the information they need, when they need it on the channel of their choice.

Finally, artificial intelligence when integrated into automation makes it far less brittle, more accurate, can handle more complexity and reduces the moments when you need a human. For example using AI to look at a paper copy of an invoice accurately extract the data and start an approval process or payment process. The ability to recognize an object, person, pattern or solution quickly and accurately.

These three advancements have really improved the ability to use and scale automations like never before.

How does this help my business

The scenarios that we see most in helping organizations do more with less are increasing self-service for both customers and employees, removing paper/manual processes and increasing collaboration/access to help and answers.

Customer Self-service

Its no secret that to scale to meet demand you either have more frontline workers or make it easier/possible for customers help themselves. The main reason why organizations don't currently have extensive self-serve capabilities is the complexity of integrating the siloed systems at the backend. So automation as I explained earlier is of great use here to fill the customer self-service gaps and do more with less.

Employee Self-Service and Collaboration

Making it easy for employees to get expert advice, approvals, answers, access to the data they need when they need it helps them to do more and be less reactive and more pro-active. Happy employees provide better customer experiences. For example automation can read your work schedule and automatically put employees into a collaboration group each day. This makes it easy for them to know who they are working with, ask questions, get status and be more proactive. Automation can digitize paper processes or run tasks that would have been manual. It can do this attended if the employee needs to see the progress and sometimes intervein. This can also be unattended so they can focus on other activities while the automation works in the background.

Summary

Continuing to create a more efficient, collaborative experience for employees and helping customers to help themselves are some the most effective ways to do more with less. This not only allows your business to scale and get the work done but also to do it in a way that empowers your employees and increases customer experience. Automation technology is an excellent tool to get there quickly, safely without the need to rip and replace your existing systems. Microsoft is recognized as a leader by both Forrester and Gartner as a leader not only in automation but also low code, artificial intelligence and cloud services. Take a look at how Power Platform and Automation can help you do more with less today! Power Automate | Microsoft Power Platform