Liberated by Automation.

All industries are not equally advanced technologically, nor are all organizations the same in an industry. Particular sectors in many industries remain behind too. Often, technological ‘laggardness’, when it becomes an everyday stumbling block, leads to work stress and frustration. Stretch it a bit more and it often relates to high attrition rates. The employers often throw in sops, claim high engagement but people just keep leaving.

Allow me to narrate three true anecdotes.

This is a billion-dollar insurance company, has a contact centre with about 200 associates all working with 15” monitors. The applications that they use, go way beyond the page fold. Data that they receive over the phone (from the calls) and type into certain fields must be verified / matched with other data already in the system. They spend above 20% of their time scrolling up and down, and sideways. The company doesn’t want to spend a little bit more on larger monitors.

Second, is this large life sciences organization; a particular unit employs extremely talented and skilled folk with Masters degrees to process documents and records. The backbone system isn’t integrated with the particular application that they use to enter data by matching with the document being processed. They actually use three screens, one showing the backbone system, the second to show the document being processed and the third shows the application they are entering data into, from the other two screens.

The third is a back office, a unit processes documents which are scanned and uploaded by associates from all over the globe. There is little quality control, process compliance or accountability. People on the backend QC the documents to check for orientation of the documents (portrait or landscape), readability of the document, and correctness of numbering. Because of the drudgery, misses happen thus resulting in the need for more than one round of QC.

Sound familiar? Or have you seen situations analogous to what is described above? You will agree, in a fashion, for a white collared worker, these situations are nothing but frustrating. Living through this, eight hours a day, every day, every month is inhuman.

In each of these three scenarios, the people in these jobs are paid well (relative to the market), show high level of engagement with the organization that they work for. What also is common, wait for it, is constant attrition between 22 – 30%. Not surprising, is it?

Strangely, many of these (otherwise successful) organizations continue to be technology laggards and have still not really figured how to use tech to makes lives easier. The low cost point of labour, often prevents these companies from taking that vital step forward. While in some cases, why change something not broken. It also has a lot to do with company values and philosophy too.

These are exact situations where process automation helps significantly. Bots or other types of automation under a planned and well executed Robotic Process Automation (or Intelligent Process Automation) program can bring back the ‘humaneness’. Easily. In the first situation, automatic verification; in the second, automatic matching and data input; in the third simple, automatic checks and OCR.

Clearly the investment made to alleviate these frustrating situations with automation will pay for itself rapidly just in terms of cost of attrition; not even counting the large jumps due to gain in productivity by eliminating process and IT-integration stupidity.

One must see Process Automation in a light, sometimes, other than just cost take out. There are other areas e.g. Quality of Output, overall Productivity, Increase in Capacity (leading to increase in revenue) that Process Automation can help with. Above all it can take the drudgery out of human work lives and liberate them.

Have you considered that automation has really more to do with people than just technology? Your ROI might not always be direct in cost save, but in quality or relocating your people to higher value roles.  Visit the 3nayan web site or write to us.