Tackling the productivity problem – with robots

Over the last year, businesses have been tested like never before and the accompanying strain has been felt by employees in every sector across India. Instead of slowing down, many businesses have pushed onwards at a faster and harder pace than even before the pandemic, trying to ensure that their services remain top of mind with customers and profits don’t lag to the point of no return.

This situation creates a challenge for business leaders – how to increase productivity without overburdening already over-stretched employees.  Automation has the answer.

Before the pandemic, labor productivity grew by a yearly average of 5.23 percent from 1992 to 2019, and knowledge workers – anyone whose job involves handling or using information – were already finding that they had more work than they could handle.

According to Blue Prism’s “The Impact of a Digital Workforce on Business Agility and Survival” research study, 63 percent of these workers in India said that they were already struggling with workload demands prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. This sentiment was shared by a majority (72 percent) of local business leaders, who felt that their organizations were struggling to meet customer demands due to too much time being spent on administrative tasks.

As you can imagine, this presents a hard situation for businesses to cope with and overcome, especially if they are looking to scale operations and focus on growth. So, where should business leaders turn?

The Case for Automation

In India, you only have to look at automation in manufacturing, where it helped create a US$3.5 billion sector and 90 million new jobs by 2020.

What was true of manufacturing in the last century is now becoming true for services, and it is important for us to go beyond the headlines to consider more optimistically how automation will impact businesses.

Seventy nine percent of local business leaders now believe that automation offers more to the business than just time and cost savings, and that it is essential for their organizations to remain competitive. In addition, businesses no longer need to have a sophisticated technical team to introduce automation-related capabilities. Instead, even those without a software engineering background can access digital workers to enhance business. These ‘workers’, which are essentially a scalable team of low or no-code software robots, can be trained by any business user to perform basic tasks like payments processing right through to more complex ones.

With digital workers in place alongside knowledge workers and taking on excessive, tedious and repeated processes, humans can exercise their creativity, empathy and critical problem-solving ability and focus on more value-adding tasks or projects. At a business level, this means increased cost savings and operational efficiencies - with fewer errors. At the human level, it means less time working on mundane administrative tasks and more focus on fulfilling work duties.

A Shift in Perception

Blue Prism’s research study found that 76 percent of local business leaders and 79 percent of local knowledge workers said that they appreciate the opportunities that automation will create. Eighty-five percent of local knowledge workers even said that they are comfortable with the idea of being reskilled for a role change within their organization. This represents a huge shift in the perception about automation across the workforce.

A unique opportunity is presenting itself to businesses, and it’s one that should not be ignored or missed. The COVID-19 pandemic has made a strong case for leaders to start thinking differently about business operations, their employees and their collective potential. With a reach that far extends individual process automation, intelligent automation has the ability to help organizations strategically transform entire operations, creating resilient workforces and businesses that can face any future uncertainties with more confidence. Intelligent automation has the ability to increase productivity across the enterprise, to improve customer experience and to increase competitive edge.

If growth is your goal at a time like this, imagine what your human workers could build with extra digital workers at their fingertips? It’s time to start thinking about innovative ways to scale, which don’t overburden employees. It’s time to think seriously about automation.

 The author is Peter Gartenberg, Managing Director and President, India, Blue Prism.