How to Power Digital Transformation Amid Extreme Volatility

Volatility is the new normal. Over the past few years, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukrainian crisis and other geopolitical tensions have had an unprecedented impact on businesses across the world. Supply chain disruption and a significant drop in sales and demand have been accompanied by strengthening economic headwinds. All these factors expose gaps in businesses’ operations and the failure of inadequate strategies to address sudden, unexpected changes in market conditions.

Businesses have also had to adjust to the massive growth in the digital and ecommerce sectors and a surge in demand for blockchain, Web3 and other forms of decentralization. Enterprises are under pressure to collect more data on their operations to help them enhance productivity, anticipate fast-evolving market needs and secure an advantage over their competitors.

We have also seen massive disruption in the workplace. Increasingly, employees say they want their work to matter. Many staff are demotivated by having to carry out mundane, repetitive tasks or because their time-consuming manual roles give them no autonomy or opportunities for creative input. All sectors have seen a high drop-out rate of workers for various reasons, leading to The Great Resignation. Some workers seek better career opportunities or a fresh start elsewhere when demand in their sector is high. Others choose the quiet quitting approach, putting further pressure on business productivity. Retention takes on greater importance given the shortage of skilled talent and increased competition to hire the best people. Moreover, the cost implications are off the scale – McKinsey estimates that US$15 trillion is tied up in salaries associated with these inefficient, mundane tasks.

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How do businesses handle these rapid shifts?

Navigating this fast-changing landscape requires agility and a rethink of traditional approaches to business operations. Furthermore, to succeed, leaders’ responses must be quick, and solutions must be easy to integrate.

It is critical that the strategic focus should no longer be exclusively aimed at the customer and the bottom line but extended to address the Work Execution Gap, or the divide between the work experience employees want and the one employers offer. An intelligent, agile and holistic technology approach is the only viable solution. The result will be a digital workforce engaged and capable of delivering success, even when further disruption and volatility come into view.

For enterprises maturing in their automation journeys, it means moving beyond the simple use cases to solving business critical use cases.

Conventional RPA technology has drawbacks because it is rules-based and deterministic. It lacks the flexibility to cope with the volatile world businesses now face.  Productivity and efficiency of operations are not optimized, and it does not create fully autonomous end-to-end processes.  We have entered a new paradigm in business operations that demands fresh ideas.

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Getting your business future-ready

An advanced approach combining RPA and AI – Intelligent Automation/Native AI-driven automation is a step in the right direction – it will will unlock a new dimension of value as the organization begins automating more high-value and business-critical use cases.

To kick-start, the first step for a business is understanding how greater automation, and the ability to manage remotely, empowers employees to improve their job with the right tools and opens up continuous learning. How do you make this happen? Companies must embrace a new sustainable work model that empowers humans in the loop and provides greater control around customer and employee experience, cost and new technologies.

You cannot build such a model in a piecemeal fashion and expect great results. Conventional software is complex, slow and expensive to deliver. In fact, it renders the opposite effect of what a business actually needs - a robust, scalable and maintainable solution.

Laiye’s Work Execution System encompasses workflow automation, intelligent document processing and conversational AI, as well as process mining, to identify inefficiencies. This approach allows businesses to process data faster and more accurately, creating better customer experiences, enabling 24/7 business operations without burdening employees, automating long, arduous processes, and ultimately fostering employee engagement, creativity and skills retention.

Business volatility is not likely to go away any time soon. However, companies that deploy holistic automation solutions to tackle these issues head-on will succeed in keeping calm in choppy waters and creating a competitive advantage. Are you ready to take back control of your organization’s destiny?

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Learn how Laiye’s Work Execution System can help your business navigate increased  volatility. Arrange a chat with our friendly team today.

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