Africa’s ripe digital revolution is helping it to be among the top leaders today.
The focus, for instance, is on automation. It’s what will help power businesses ahead and make them competitive.
Maximizing Potential with automation
Automation will definitely have to maximize the potential of your business. Automation will offer a cost-effective and more efficient alternative to human intervention. Time-consuming and tedious tasks like analysis of legal documents can be made quickly and efficiently with the help of automation technology. So complex financial compliances and HR issues can be solved easily using automation.
While there is some apprehension about automation because of its prospect of cutting down human jobs, the value and nature of worth the technology brings are often misunderstood. Automation best suits for rule-based, time consuming, manual, and repetitive tasks. It cannot replace experienced and skilled human labor. That’s why Africa doesn’t have to worry about it’s abundance workforce, as there will be newer jobs created with new opportunities.
So what automation is not a simple plug and plays alternative to the human employer. It is important to remove such misconceptions and implementation of automation to solve business problems need a fundamental shift in the strategic thinking process.
Missed opportunities
Automation is still a long way away from replacing human intervention completely. But at the same time of the businesses are failing to capitalize the maximum potential of automation.
It’s what the digital revolution in Africa is trying to address.
What does research say?
Recently, Infosys Consulting has contacted research on various intelligent automation solutions. The research outcome revealed that full potential of automation solutions is utilized by only 10% of the organizations.
Only these organizations getting the full capabilities and benefits of automation. Having no clear strategic vision is one of the primary reason for companies not fully utilizing the potential of automation. Lack of effective implementation of automation is primarily due to poor understanding of their requirements.
The following things are needed to be kept in mind to reap the rewards of automation:
- Do not go for like for like replacement
Automation is about 3 times more efficient than its human counterparts in certain processes. Organisations of intent believe that one automation system can replace several employees. However, an automation technology cannot do the same lateral thinking or have the problem-solving ability and intuition of a human being.
So there cannot be like for like replacement and the organization has to carefully think about strategies to replace human employees with Artificial Intelligence and automation technology. It is better to use a combination of both human employees and automation technology to maximize the potential of the latter.
- Security challenges and business continuity risks
Automation also calls for additional security challenges. Moreover, surrendering too much responsibility of the organization to automation may backfire in time of crisis or disaster. Human employees are more adapted to handle such situation and can be subjected to two-factor as well as biometric authentication.
It is still early days for automation and organizations should act accordingly to utilize the maximum potential of it to drive their business. For Africa, it does offer a great many possibilities.
