One of the questions doing the rounds after the pandemic is how soon you should automate your business. The pandemic made this question pertinent because businesses struggled to keep afloat during the tough times. Many even had to shut shop. The ones that survived, to a point even thrived during the travesty were the ones that had been prescient in deploying automation early on.
One thing that we all probably need to understand is that automation is here to stay and the earlier we adopt it the better. Why is that you may ask? Well, for starters let’s look at the companies that did well during the pandemic – Amazon, Google, Tesla – the ones that deploy automation at their core and the ones that provide automation services. These same companies are not just the ones that are loved by their patrons, they are the ones that are valued higher with higher stock prices and increasing revenues too.
A commonly heard argument is that these companies got into automation because of their success. The reverse of the argument is true. These companies got their success because of automation. Yes, in today’s time automation and success work in tandem. The greater the automation in your organization, the greater its ability to scale. If you add cloud capabilities to the mix, the advantage of flexibility and speed sky-rockets. This provides your company with a great cutting-edge over your competitors. Those old-school businesses that have not caught-on with the automation bandwagon have fallen behind and are likely to scramble for success in the post-Covid-19 scenario.
You may have a lot of work to push out the door and that might seem to be your priority, making you feel too busy to engage in the hassle of automating your company. But, what you may not be thinking is how fast your processes and turn-around times could be if your manufacturing, services, and utilities are all automated. You will also save the precious time of your resources who may have to manually configure assets in general, coordinate with vendors for maintenance, and support, update and patch platforms separately. If you automate you can save all this time and also prevent the risk of losing data or wasting time sifting through old manually collected data.
Here are some of the key benefits of automation:
- Frees up people and businesses to engage in activities that generate higher value.
- Hiring as a process is required on an on-going basis and finding the right fit is almost always a time-consuming process. Automation can help your recruitment teams to close that gap and speed up the hiring process.
- Digitization of business is completely unavoidable today and in the future. Automation of one part of your business can help you generate the ROI that you can use to automate the other parts, achieving complete automation in a step-by-step manner.
- Identifying the processes that could be creating hurdles in your company’s growth and efficiency and those that require more manual work, might be helpful in recognizing the areas that need to be prioritized for automation. This will give you the small victories that are essential for charging ahead.
- Most automation generates a lot of precious data about and for the business. This data can be extremely useful for future business and must be used in a responsible manner. In fact, most large-scale companies that use automation end up benefiting from the scalability and business opportunities such data offers.
- Automation leads to measurable results and thus, you will have ample clarity as to the kind of ROI you generate. Make sure to adopt automation as a continuous process and keep upgrading regularly.
- Automation can give you a common network protocol that can standardize processes and make sharing data and running the system cohesively much easier.
- Automation can also provide standard equipment platforms which give a common interface to the users. This is much easier to maintain for the IT personnel and reduces cybersecurity risks.
So, if you’ve been thinking about when is the right time to start with automation, think that it is NOW. It may take you some effort and probably a sizeable investment in the beginning but the dividends it will bring are multifold. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic showed people and companies that automation is necessary to survive. Those who were postponing it were forced to implement it if they wished to stay in the fray. Those who already had it, expanded its capabilities to get themselves the much-envied competitive edge. Those who did not had to pay the price. Hence, identify how automation can be beneficial for your business and then, implement.