Eliminating Repetitive Work with Intelligent Automation

Your new hires are talented, smart, and raring to demonstrate their expertise for the high-end job they were hired for! And then you invariably assign them to mundane, repetitive tasks because they happen to be piling up fast? There goes your one opportunity to engage your best talent to contribute to the growth of your organization!

Employee churn, more often than not, has been blamed on the dissatisfaction workers experience when they are repeatedly subjected to mundane, time-consuming duties that require performing the same ‘n’ steps over and over again. Repetitive work is not only boring and laborious, but also tends to derail a worker’s enthusiasm to contribute earnestly towards the growth of an organization. Your talented workers deserve better! But make no mistake, these jobs are no doubt necessary and mission critical to any business.

Jobs like those of data entry clerk, sales representative, quality control engineer, database admin, mailroom clerk, cashier, employee onboarding, emailing, invoicing, scheduling, etc. are critical to the sound functioning of other connected processes and your business as a whole, but nonetheless boring! Employees also show low productivity levels and enthusiasm, which directly impacts your growth and revenues. Another crucial point to remember is that manual effort always induces some errors and delays — incorrect data entry can lead to incorrect processes and wrong business outcomes. That means more delays and costs due to rework or re-processing. Manual effort also limits the workload that can be taken up, lowering the chances of a business scaling operations without adding to staff. This can mean more expenses in terms of labor costs.

Employees and businesses are not the only ones that suffer. Customers are often at the receiving end of some poor operations and sloppy management of mission-critical tasks. Take the case of medical claims processing. One wrong claims data entry can lead to some unexpected outcomes where you end up either denying reimbursement or under-compensating the claimant. This can lower the claimant’s confidence in your company, and might be a decisive factor in them choosing your competitor over you, the next time. The good news though is that all these jobs can be automated!

Automation, and intelligent automation of repetitive jobs can help companies not just free up their staff to focus on more growth-oriented initiatives but also accelerate the pace with which mission-critical work gets done.

More advanced intelligent automation solutions in the market are packed with other digital transformation technologies like intelligent data capture and recognition software like OCR/ICR/OMR. This increases the capabilities of the technology to perform complex unstructured and semi-structured document processing tasks that are repetitive but also require some degree of decision-making. Many of the repetitive processes are also highly document-based, and so, streamlining these with the help of intelligent process automation can help dramatically lower all the disadvantages of manual work. Let’s see some of the mission-critical jobs that are best suited for intelligent automation:

Claims Processing: claims handling is a critical process that must be done right to ensure timely reimbursements. Accurate claims handling is also necessary to avoid approval of fraudulent claims, overcompensation, or claims reprocessing, which could cost companies in the millions. One of the factors for claims mismanagement is data entry. To ensure accurate data entry and claims document processing, companies can employ a digital transformation solution like claims processing software with intelligent automation capabilities. Intelligent data capture, a critical component of intelligent automation, helps capture, extract, validate, and verify claims data from any number of diverse unstructured and semi-structured claims forms. Once verified for authenticity, the claims data is automatically exported to a claims management system, much like manual data entry to a business application or ERP system, but without the inefficiencies and costs of manual paperwork. Accurate claims data eliminates reimbursement delays, fraudulent claims processing, and mismanagement of funds.

Payroll: one of the marks of good corporate governance is administering timely compensation to employees. But managing payroll is a monthly or bi-weekly chore that can become very tedious. Payroll management must be done accurately to avoid payment inconsistencies and reprocessing costs. Employee engagement and morale can also take a hit if they are not paid their dues on time. Intelligent automation can be suitably employed to manage this regular, repetitive job.

Customer Service: how well you respond to a customer’s needs determines whether the customer will come back for repeat business. But customer service is a routine that can be automated — a series of probing questions to determine the customer grievance or issue at hand, and plausible answers, technical assistance, or help tutorials can all be automated and administered online using intelligent automation bots.

Finance and Accounting: accounts payable and invoice processing jobs are essential to determine a company’s cash inflows and outflows, but are nevertheless a chore you don’t want to undertake every month. Invoice processing software, with embedded intelligent automation and data capture, automates data entry and AP documents processing. Continuous data entry work, diligent cross-checking of invoice details for accuracy, coordination with management to get approvals, and then re-entering approved data into a business application — this is a continuous, repetitive job that can be programmed into an intelligent automation workflow for better efficiency and results.

Order Processing: reaching the customer first is no longer an art that only a few are capable of achieving; with digitalization, multi-channel customer engagement has become possible. Marketing and sales automation, website optimization and SEO, market research and focus group marketing, online survey platforms, etc. are some of the ways to engage customers. But customer engagement could also be achieved by delivering orders efficiently and on time. Any customer appreciates smooth and timely fulfillment of orders. Order processing is a critical step in the order fulfillment chain. This process is document-intensive and usually entails a lot of manual, repetitive tasks. An order processing software with intelligent automation capabilities streamlines and accelerates the processing and delivery of customer sales orders. Because sales orders are captured at the source and uploaded to the intelligent automation workflows for processing, there are zero instances of missing or misplaced orders. The customer order is captured; validated by performing inventory lookup and other validation checks; and finally, verified and approved for order fulfillment and delivery. These are repetitive steps that can now be aligned into a single intelligent automation workflow. With intelligent automation, you can accelerate the pace with which you fulfill customer orders, and motivate the customers to do repeat business with you.

Testing and Quality Assurance: we are in a highly competitive market environment where many companies are vying for the attention of the same consumer segment or base. One of the ways to beat the competition is by ensuring the consistent delivery of quality products. High quality software is a must if you want to not just survive but thrive in the competition. Also, any customer, first and foremost, appreciates a quality product; just ask Apple Inc. The challenge for many businesses though is that quality control and testing is still manually driven and highly repetitive. This is inefficient and lengthy. A good way to reverse this is by deploying test automation software, embedded with intelligent automation. The advantage with this is that you have an intelligent automation platform powered by AI that can be programmed to implement a diverse range of repetitive testing and scaled to extend application coverage to cover the whole gamut of testing, end-to-end. Intelligent automation provides rapid testing, fuelling efficiency, quality control, and accelerated software delivery without compromising on quality.

Intelligent automation streamlines repetitive jobs into a single, smart workflow and supports business acceleration. The clarity and flow in task implementation, visibility, efficiency, cost control, and ease of product and service delivery achieved justifies the long-term investment in this technology.

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