Logistics firms are struggling to cope with the demands of the market when there are so many challenges globally in the industry. If that sounds like your logistics operation then read on – logistics automation is here to help.

What is logistics automation?

Logistics automation, much like business automation, is the use of control systems and software to reduce or remove the need for human intervention in a task or process. In a logistics setting that could be printing despatch notes, updating tracking information for customers, or having robots assemble packed kits ready for delivery. The possibilities for logistics automation are endless.

Big Challenges and Opportunities

Automation is spreading in logistics at a key time for the industry. In fact, automation is uniquely positioned to deal with several of the challenges the sector faces.

Changes in the way we shop has created greater demands on the logistics industry. Deliveries need to be faster, cheaper, and more reliable. All of these benefits can be drawn from good automation and so the need for this technology is growing. Yes, there are challenges that face the industry, but there is an opportunity to solve them with logistics automation.

The Great Resignation

The move to remote work and the gig economy experienced in the US is now happening in Europe too – leaving many empty roles. Recently, the UK had in excess of 1 million job vacancies. This lack of a workforce is a great thing for automation as it’s driving adoption. Bots can take on the tasks people aren’t willing to do and keep logistics operations running smoothly. If you’re struggling to fill your vacancies then ask yourself – could a bot do this?

Trade Challenges

With Brexit, we’ve seen that countries can leave the EU, but this does result in a very complicated import/export system. In more recent times, sanctions on countries affect the way that cross-border goods movements happen. Rather than have people scramble to manually create commercial invoices or pre-calculate new duties – a bot can be put together to take that headache away.

Cost of Doing Business

Rising inflation and hikes in commodity prices mean that businesses are looking to shave costs wherever they can. They might not be able to affect the price of raw materials so they’re going to pressure you to help them out. You’re already contending with climbing fuel prices – so what can you do? Well, automating parts of your business can bring cost savings and these can be passed on to your customers while you reap the benefits of scalability and error reduction.

We’ve helped a transport company by taking their 6-8 week refund claiming SLA down to 2-3 hours and with 0 errors. That right there is the potential of RPA in a logistics setting. Take the claims seriously, the benefits are available to you too. Logistics automation can transform how you deliver and help your business succeed while others struggle.

Facing challenges in your logistics operation? We can help – contact PAteam today!

People are starting to wake up to the power of automation. The clever cats over at Gartner have made a list of the top tech trends for 2022 – and, unsurprisingly, it includes hyper-automation. To be precise, they predict that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% simply by combining hyper-automation technologies with redesigned operational processes.

While hyper-automation is a specific area in the broader field of automation, the impact of that prediction cannot be understated. Imagine if you could save 30% of your operating costs. Future automation is almost here – are you ready for it? In case you aren’t, here are the top 5 future automation trends of 2022.

Semantic Automation

Semantic automation is a move away from rule-based approaches where developers tell bots what to do in a step-by-step way. Instead, the bots are able to observe a task and begin to emulate it. This emulation includes the action itself, the data required, and where the data is to be sent. The bots will then start to do the heavy lifting on their own. This really is the next step in accessible machine intelligence.

Automated Process Discovery

You need to know that understanding processes comes before automating anything. Once you know what you’re doing – you can make it better. Automated process discovery offers huge potential for your business. A bot can watch your people interact with your systems, which can be office suite, ERP, CRM – everything. It can then bring all those data points together to find processes you might not even know about that can then be automated.

Process Intelligence

Adding data and further machine intelligence to your organization will be a key part of the future. Bots won’t only be able to work with less supervision, they’ll also do a better job of reporting on the quality of your processes. Small changes in the way your business works create ripples throughout your departments. Being able to see that impact in real-time will help you keep your processes healthy.

Automation’s C-suite Champions

In 2022 CSOs and CIOs everywhere will fuse their powers of sustainability and information by using automation to create more sustainable IT. Automation saves time and money and these things can be invested back into our world and the people on it. Whether it’s cutting down on processing time and therefore power requirements or creating additional tech jobs for the underserved – future automation is the catalyst.

Human-Digital Workforce

The future of automation isn’t just reserved for behind-the-scenes processing improvements. It’s going to directly help HR teams everywhere meet employees where they are. Whether it’s automating new starter onboarding or driving social engagement between distributed teams – management of the digital workforce will rely on automation. Your people are going to become used to working with bots and begin to really value how much time they give them back.

Your 2022

So that’s what we see as some of the major future automation that will impact us all this year. But what are you going to do? If automation isn’t already a part of your business, can you afford to miss out on it?

Whatever type of automation you want to pursue – we can help. Get in touch with PAteam today!

Are you trying to make the most out of your business’ capital? Are you always looking for the best way to reduce costs and become more efficient? Productivity boosting and cost savings go hand-in-hand with automation.

Simply put, in business, automation is the use of software to carry out repetitive tasks with the aim of reducing – or even eliminating – human interaction. Automating processes frees up time to focus on business development – and your bottom line.

But why is it important? Let’s consider five key reasons.

1. Accuracy and Consistency

If you want a job done the same way every time – day in and day out – choose a robot. They do exactly what they’re programmed to do. A bot that automates what you do ensures every piece of work is consistent. This can be great in finding further optimization. Remember – consistency is the key to success in your business.

2. Time Savings

The headline of any automation pitch is the time-saving aspect – and rightly so. Automation takes the time out of basic processes and gives it back to your people. Time saved can be turned into money earned. Just think about what you can do with all that time(!).

3. Risk Reduction

People are unfortunately prone to error. That imperfection is part of what makes us, us. But in a business, errors can often cause far bigger problems. Perhaps it means you aren’t compliant and receive a fine or make a mistake that leads to a customer complaint. Automation takes people away from repetitive work where they are likely to make mistakes.

4. Better Collaboration

Workflow automation can be used to automate the process of bringing team members into a piece of work. If you want to involve ops or accounts at a certain point in every process – automate it.

5. Reduced Employee Turnover

If there is one thing that drives people crazy at work, it’s feeling like they are wasting their time. Automation gives you the chance to take away the boring work from your team and let them spend their time adding value to your business. It really works. They’ll be much happier and that means they’ll stay with your company in the long run.

What are the best ways to automate processes?

Start with low-hanging fruit. What is a reasonably simple process that you or your team find themselves doing daily? It could be updating a CRM or closing down old tickets on your support system. Whatever it is, first understand the process, then work with an expert – and tick it off your list.

What processes or services do companies most often want to automate?

Deep breath in and… sales processes, tasks assigning, employee onboarding, employee offboarding, expenses, payroll, accounts, data entry, call logging, call attending, surveys, feedback monitoring – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ultimately, with all the automation software available on the market, you can automate pretty much anything. And if you can automate something, then why shouldn’t you? Too often business owners spend their time getting dragged into the day-to-day grind – when they should be focusing on the bigger picture. The solution is business automation.

Automation can be great for your business. Interested? Contact PAteam today!

Is your company struggling with the heap of tasks it has to carry out, day in, and day out? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. But help is at hand – in the form of workplace automation.

What is workflow automation?

Workflow automation is defined as the design, creation, deployment, and automation of business processes based upon preset rules where tasks are automatically triggered and routed between people, technology, and data.

In business today, we use all sorts of different applications and services to get our jobs done – everything from ticket management, task tracking, social media, email, calendars, spreadsheets, invoices, forms, etc. And with the right strategy and software, every single one of these processes can be automated.

What can workflow automation be used for?

Some great examples of workflow automation are email marketing and employee onboarding.

By using a bot to automatically follow up on emails, you free up the person who normally monitors and carries out the process to engage in more meaningful work.

When it comes to employee onboarding, all the relevant screening processes and form filling can be automated to pull through the info held on the new candidate. This can then be sent out for references and then reviewed, on completion, by a person – letting them add their value.

What’s the biggest challenge automation faces in a business?

The greatest resistance you will find to workflow automation, and making people’s lives easier, is surprisingly from those very people. Naturally cautious of technology that might steal away their job, – or make an error out of sight – your staff and senior management may be hesitant to dedicate resources to developing or maintaining something they can’t have a conversation with. Business automation starts with people, so get your answers to their questions ready.

FAQs

Questions like “how will this help us grow?” or “will it really save us money?” are common And handled correctly, automation can add more value than many realize.

When it comes to growing your business, you need your talented teams to focus on making your product or services better. You don’t want your top-tier marketer replying to feedback emails, you want them organizing the next great campaign to push your product, right?

And when it comes to saving you money, think of it like this: a bot can outwork any person if you build it properly. Sorry, we’ll rephrase that: a bot can outwork all of your people. Computers are built to deal with operations at an unbelievable speed and scale unmatched by human input.   As a result, they can churn through your tasks quicker than a room full of people. While the performance benefits are clear, the cost impact is too – even with programing and maintenance costs factored in, automation is much cheaper.

What are the pros and cons of using an integrated workflow automation system?

An integrated workflow automation system bridges the gaps between your business’s different programs and automates process flows that run across multiple platforms. Naturally, this makes things a lot quicker and allows teams working over different areas to communicate with each other more effectively.

Workflow automation needs to be seamless, so if you don’t do a good job of building it in full or haven’t finished it – your staff have to fill the gaps. People are great at workarounds and patches, but if you subject them to that for too long they’ll become frustrated.

As long as you reach out to an expert and get the guidance needed to do it right, workflow automation has the power to transform your business for the better.

Caught up in workflow automation? Get in touch with PAteam today!

Why are people so bad at getting automation into their business? It’s pretty simple: they lack the knowledge to do it right. Combine that with a need to chase trends rather than results and it’s no wonder that so much automation falls flat on its face. We’re here today to hold up a mirror to the attitudes that plague so many businesses.

For Good Reason?

Let’s talk about what the logic behind most pursuits of automation is made up of.

Say Business A becomes aware of automation, either through leadership or expertise within an IT department. If identified through leadership, it’s almost always to keep up with the competition. If it’s introduced through the expertise of an IT team member, then unfortunately their vision will likely be warped when it is debuted to leadership.

It might seem like we’re being a bit down on the C-suite, but really it isn’t their fault. The idea of adoption curves is not a new thing. However, because of them, the enthusiasm that surrounds new ideas is often far ahead of the understanding that should underpin them. This is most often why automation fails in a business – because of a lack of knowledge and strong implementation.

Roadblocks

Every activity you pursue in a business should have a clear purpose. Without that, any success you have is built on luck. To find the things you can improve, you need to map out your business and the processes within it. Find a process that isn’t working as well as it could be. Improve it. Then, if it warrants it – i.e. you want it to scale and not involve people – bring in automation.

The hard work doesn’t stop there though. Once automation is in place you need to track it; using specific KPIs built to assess how well it’s doing. If anything isn’t crystal clear, then you need an expert to tailor your automation to your business needs.

Once it’s built, tried, and tested, well, then it’s got to be maintained. This is without question the most overlooked step in RPA. Cowboy suppliers in the industry conveniently forget to tell new clients this – something that we certainly always cover during onboarding.

Despite all of these steps, most companies give up on making RPA a success long before they should. Whether it’s down to poor planning, a lack of expertise, or a commitment to trends rather than effective tools – most don’t make it.

Buck The Trend

RPA is built to take humans most of the way out of the processes that take up too much of their time. They’re still going to deal with outliers and exceptions but to give the space for all this to happen you need a good culture that focuses on improvement and learning above everything else.

At PAteam we set the right expectations from the start. We’ll give you insight into how businesses just like yours have succeeded and help you take the next step in your own journey. This all comes together in building automation that is tailored to your business needs.

We draw from our customers’ goals to think in terms of giving them solutions. Any innovation that we develop is because they have some great problems to solve. The best part is, every time we work with someone new, we get better for every client.

Need help with automation? Contact PAteam today!

Libraries by their very nature are brilliant resources with so much knowledge and a never-ending subject list that tapping into it all is more than a life’s work.

But, with all that information it’s easy to get lost and even easier to find something that isn’t actually useful to you. Just like the brick-and-mortar outfits, software libraries are much the same. They’re cool and have value at a basic level but beyond that, they begin to struggle.

Here’s where we’re at with them.

Hot Take

As always, this is just our opinion and there are others in the industry who really back software libraries. But it’s our belief that these repositories for automation don’t really, truly, serve people to the fullest. Like many things today people want a quick fix, a shortcut, 10 tips to…, but in reality, there aren’t shortcuts or a one-size-fits-all approach that is going to work with RPA.

Window to Another World

One advantage we will concede is that it often opens the door to what is possible with technology. If you’re in a tech-phobic business or have stakeholders who just don’t want to know, the low-hanging fruit of pre-built automation to demonstrate potential is a great starting point – especially for simple tasks.

Easing Pickings

Software libraries within a business actually make a lot of sense, particularly in very large organizations – such as SAP, TCS, and Cognizant. If your developers can quickly grab something pre-built to your standards and then tweak it to fit the scenario then that’s a win. Providing things are documented and controlled properly this approach speeds up development and implementation. In fact, it epitomizes the purpose of a library – to build on shared knowledge.

Generally Too General

So we’ve covered the good now for the less good and actually it’s just one thing – software libraries lack specificity. Don’t get us wrong, there are libraries teeming with highly niche automations but none of them will work for your business without significant tweaks.

That’s the drawback and it stems from the very nature of good automation is its granularity. Your process should be close to perfect and should fit your needs precisely, in turn, the automation needs to be built in the same way. For automation, one-size-fits-all actually fits no one.

Unlike an Open Book

Abbyy is a popular library for all sorts of automation including intelligent document processing. Using a piece of their software as an example they saw that their US invoice processor couldn’t read EU invoices because the formatting is different. Let’s take it a step further and imagine Spanish invoices, perhaps, differ from the rest of Europe. This is a really high-level example and already we’re seeing deviations. Automation needs to be built for a single process at a time.

The bottom line is that you can’t build automation with a few clicks. Using a simple fix devalues the complexity of the problem you’re solving. To get the value from automation that is most definitely there, you need to add specificity. And while a library can be great if you need to find a basic template, there’s a good chance that to understand how to make them work for your business, you need an expert.

Keen to discover the power of automation for your business? Contact PAteam today!