The growing international pandemic has forced many companies to permit employees to work from home. In our expert interview, Ananda Yuvaraj, Lead Planning Specialist for Business Operations gives a unique insight on this subject from his expertise. Ananda has over 20+ years of experience implementing critical projects for several Fortune500 companies in a wide range of industries including Biotech-Pharma, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Textiles, Transport and Mining.
What are the challenges of remote work?
Remote work on such a large scale is an uncharted territory for most companies, making it hard for them support and cater for this demand. When on-site work isn’t possible, and when employees themselves aren’t tech experts, these challenges can affect productivity at a time when they may already be low.
What is Automation and why automate?
Automation is the use of software and computer-controlled devices to undertake control of processes. The goal of automation is to boost efficiency and reliability.
While people are excellent at adapting to new unpredictable situations and exploring new possibilities, machines are great at repetitive, mundane tasks. Every dollar invested in automation helps your company to maximize everyone’s potential. If you could automate a process, then there’s a high chance that people did not add any value to that process at all.
Work processes when automated the right way allows for people to focus on more creative and engaging tasks. Automation also improves the accuracy of tasks as machines are more precise.
How do companies start Automation?
The best place to start when looking for automation opportunities is to evaluate your processes. Identifying your business workflows across every branch, department, and team and accurately figuring out where the inefficiencies are is a critical first step in successful automation. In the end, automating a bad process does not make the process efficient, it just makes it worse. The key to successful automation initiatives is found within accurate and in-depth process intelligence that will be indispensable for identifying scalable automation initiatives.
Would you like to share a successful automation process you implemented?
In a service based industry planning tools like CLICK, Multi-Resource Scheduling (MRS) are integrated with GIS application, identifying communication route information to the backend system helps to locate and assign the suitable specialised skilled service technicians to assign the repair tasks. The suggestion of the most efficient route for service technicians to reach customer locations helps save fuel and time. This optimized planning process was implemented for both predictive as well as on-demand tasks to bring tremendous savings to clients.
Another example is of a complex process to perform notifications, work order quotation to completion, invoice billing, payment settlement and work order closure all in one screen electronically helping in a paper-free digital transformation. This brings about a leap of advancement in the service industry by optimizing and reducing the service turnaround times, minimise service costs and also improve customer satisfaction.
