Do’s and Don’ts of Automation

According to Fortune business insight, the worldwide industrial automation market will increase by 9.8 percent a year from 2022 to 2029, worth USD 205.86 billion to USD 395.09 billion. The world has undergone a greater degree of digital transformation than ever before. For businesses and enterprises around the world, digital transformation is now a necessity rather than a nice to have or an additional aspect. It’s undeniable fact that having the appropriate digital tools and technologies would allow businesses to run more quickly while improving their overall quality.

Autonomous robots perform better and required less supervision in real-world scenarios. Since they entirely replace all manual laborers, robots will increase material handling efficiency but may not necessarily increase plant efficiency. To ensure plant efficiency businesses must understand where to put automation and where not.

The Do’s of automation:

• Assembling sales data and customer feedback: It is a tedious effort to consolidate all input into a single database. By automating this process, you can step back, consider the larger picture, and arrive at a decision.
• File management: Automation enforces data use limitations, cuts down on administrative time, guards against unauthorized access to intellectual property, and deletes unused files automatically. It can enhance security, free up IT resources, and assist in establishing order and control in a setting where file transfers are currently not appropriately governed.
• Customer service and engagement process: You can stay in touch with clients without having to think about it and prevent clients from slipping through the cracks. When an automation program determines that a lead needs more time, it might send a monthly email reminder that gently encourages the lead to proceed with a transaction.
• Active and inactive customer identification: You may eliminate inactive subscribers from your list using automated tools. The ability to identify subscribers who have lost interest in your product is made possible by software that measures engagement indicators including openings, clicks, orders, and online form opt-ins.
• Social media engagement: Share the information about your product or new launch or event through social media via automation. You don’t have to sit a long way to post it at the exact time. You can simply set a timer and post content. Automation reflects it on your social media platform.
• Hiring processes: Gather the essential details from the website where you posted the job description. Then refer the applicant to a section where they must enter answers to a few preliminary interview questions about their qualifications and job history. The interviewer is then contacted through automation to handle the task of reviewing the application.

Businesses can offload mundane, repetitive work and simplify difficult manual tasks by using business automation. Process simplification can help employees focus on more crucial tasks while freeing up time. You should not completely rely on automation to handle critical functionality. When automation is implemented poorly, it wastes time and money and confuses both customers and employees. Knowing what not to automate as well as what to automate will help you avoid this automation misuse.

The Don’ts of automation:

• Telephone support channel: Automating a large portion of your telephone support channel creates an impression of your attitude toward client communication. Their time is wasted, and they could feel ignored or even become furious. Thus, increasing the risk of losing your company’s reputation. Customers will unavoidably feel alienated if they can’t contact a live person for assistance. So, if there’s one thing you should avoid automating, it’s extensive phone trees. Whereas automating FAQ and user interaction reduces lots of stress.
• Changeable Procedures: Is it something you must perform continuously, like manual data entry? Then automation is a wise course of action. Automation works well for routine, methodical processes that always follow the same format. Automating a procedure that isn’t routine, simple, or time-sensitive should be avoided.
• Creative task: Neural networks cannot adapt based on social conventions and interactions that go beyond their specialized purpose and data collection scope since they can not grasp them. They are therefore lacking social intelligence, which is crucial for creativity.
• Disaster Relief: Some business choices are too significant to be handled entirely by automation. One area is data center failover and disaster recovery. Many organizations will automate the majority of this procedure, but there are a certain set of stages that might not work through automation. These stages require human inputs to avoid cyber threats, unethical practices, and catastrophic coding flaws.
• Human collaboration: Automating communication won’t be useful. Even while affective computing is developing, we are still a long way from being able to comprehend, analyze, and appropriately respond to emotion. Effective human collaboration involves creativity, critical thinking, and emotion in equal measure, and those are the characteristics that machines now lack.

You should ideally be aware of what and how much money you are saving before these robots enter your business. When spending a lot of money, ensure that your efforts will not only result in increased productivity but also efficiency. Other elements that support your operations include a decrease in product damage, accidents, and time savings. You must continuously analyze and optimize your processes to ensure that your KPIs are being fulfilled if you want to completely benefit from automation. It is crucial to take safeguards to guarantee that your business operations continue to be favorable for the use of your robots despite changes in material flows. Under ideal conditions, robotic performance can be beneficial and a foundation for future scaling.