4 Reasons Business Automation Will Be Crucial in 2023

As digital transformation spreads through the industry, intelligent processes give businesses leverage to achieve far more efficient performance. With the growing importance of remote work and becoming leaner, automation unlocks evermore revenue for companies embracing it.

Automation is essentially a force multiplier—it lets you do more with less. Automating a process lets it run on its own (faster and at a lower cost) instead of having a human do the same task.

IBM reports that three-quarters of executives expect to grow their revenue through automation. Increasingly they count on automation for all levels of work, not just simple administrative tasks. Indeed, according to the data, some of the most common approaches to automation are workflow management and robotic process automation (82% of organisations), machine learning (65%), and neural net “deep intelligence” (49%).

It’s not just a matter of saving time and money; there are many compelling reasons to automate. In addition to the raw efficiency gain, automation delivers composability: you can mix and match features to build new services faster, giving you reusable components that support innovation.

The technologies have changed over the years, but the fundamental idea of improving operations through efficient programmes hasn’t. Among the trends discussed in a recent MuleSoft report, business automation is emerging as a vital trend in everyday operations. Automation makes business faster and acts as a leveller, allowing you to outcompete other companies—even if they’re larger. Instead of ‘throwing more bodies’ at an intractable problem, automate it instead!

1. Better Business Automation: Do More With Less

In a challenging economy, when it’s difficult to find enough skilled labour, efficiency counts. This drives the pivot from piecemeal automation to a more embedded, holistic incorporation.

Automation optimally positions you to tackle nearly any business hurdle because you can redirect the allocation of effort in your business. By relegating repetitive tasks to automated tools, you free up human labour for more involved tasks that require specialised skills, thus accelerating both automated and manual workstreams. Artificial intelligence powers automation to the tune of $134 billion in labour value this year alone, signalling a growing market.

Process mining—replacing manual techniques with a more efficient and objective data-driven approach—can help nearly any industry find and fix costly problems. For example, you can employ automated solutions to deal with repeatable aspects of the HR process, like processing documents or conducting verification while onboarding.

Businesses are looking to streamline their automation efforts further. As much as 64% of professionals plan to build automation that improves workplace experience over the next two years.

As a more unconventional example, consider how Prolifics and IBM are using automation to help uphold the US Constitution, streamlining judicial system processes to enable all criminal defendants to receive access to free public defence.

Automation drastically cuts wait times, from over a month and a half to just over a week. With well over 100,000 claims per year, efficiency matters every step of the way.

While the surge of interest is sudden, modern automation continues a long-term trend. The industrial revolution involved automating many mechanical tasks that, until then, people did manually. Now we have the automation of digital-age tasks through low-code and no-code tools, robotic process automation, and other relevant technologies. A natural progression.

2. Composability Drives Innovation and Agility

There’s strength in numbers, so it often makes sense to use different resources together. This applies to software as well—where the concept is known as composability. You can combine or “compose” multiple pieces of functionality into an adaptable array of bespoke software solutions.

Even the largest projects can be tackled with a modular approach of breaking them down into manageable pieces. There are too many interfaces and functionalities for a single monolithic structure to address all situations. It’s sometimes more effective to work with small pieces that fit together.

With as many as 74% of companies accelerating their plans to move to the cloud by more than a year, companies are more likely to leave legacy technologies to simplify how they operate.

Companies using automation thus become more agile. In a highly-volatile business environment, this agility positions you to capitalise on sudden opportunities as they crop up—a quick composition of the right modules, and you have a purpose-built system to derive value.

But it’s not just about positioning for the future—it’s also about surviving the present. Considering the frequent innovations now occurring in the cloud, businesses need to stay agile and be ready to change on a dime. This idea of composability will also bleed out from just automation, eventually influencing your entire business architecture for the better.

3. Low- And No-Code Automation Will Accelerate Your Processes

No-code, as the term implies, refers to technologies that do not require any coding knowledge to automate. Low-code platforms, such as Cloud Pak for Automation, are similar but use a minimal amount of code. Both of these approaches simplify automation and make it accessible to more employees.

By spreading automation to a larger pool of staff, you can cover a lot more ground. This manoeuvre addresses the shortages of IT workers and the pressure to automate as soon as possible.

Because nearly anyone can use low-code tools, there’s no need for expensive niche coding skills to develop a small app. Experienced coders can focus their efforts on the more complex areas while people throughout the organisation ramp up productivity otherwise.

Prolifics works with established low-code platform vendors and can help you expedite development. For example, consider how one healthcare company saved 30% of automation time with a low-code solution by Prolifics.

They needed to test a system programmatically, yet lacked coding experience. Using a low-code tool, Prolifics helped the healthcare company handle the testing substantially faster than before and with less expense.

In 2023 it will become more common for non-technical people to contribute to technical processes; no- and low-code automation makes it simple for them—and yourself.

4. Automation Leads to Data-Driven Business Intelligence

Businesses need to answer pressing questions to thrive. What do customers want? Where do you invest? The data-driven way to deal with these issues is to analyse the available information using the best possible tools.

Tying in with composability, more interconnected data arrangements result in more actionable insights—and fewer failures to identify and exploit business opportunities.

Businesses have to deal with more and more data each year; we’re now at the stage where manual methods simply cannot manage the large amounts of data flowing through an organisation. This is where automation comes in: to tame the flood.

Automation processes data faster and cheaper than a human can, so it’s a key tool in enhancing business intelligence. Thus, many companies are applying automation tools to enhance their decision intelligence.

Automated reports help democratise your data. By giving more people access to more actionable data, you supply all departments with up-to-the-minute BI to base decisions on. Automation can also improve the quality of your data, the integration of data from multiple different systems, and the initiation of rule-consistent, logical actions.

Get Started With Business Automation—Don’t Get Left Behind!

Automation is already finding its way into leading-edge companies and growing in popularity daily. Soon it will become a necessity. Taking the right steps now will set your organisation up for success in the future.

To start your business on its business automation journey, it’s useful first to identify which tasks that take the most employee time. See if these tasks have repetition that can be better handled by technology—automating these will let workers focus on higher-value activities instead.

You can also look for tasks where automation may supplement, rather than fulfil, the duties. Then human workers will have technological assistance to make better choices.

Once you know what tasks to automate, it’s just a matter of setting the plan in action. Working with the business automation experts at Prolifics can simplify the process. With over 40 years’ experience in business automation—starting in 1978, with app development for Wall Street firms—the Prolifics team comes with the know-how to optimise your operations and ensure an easy transition.

From end-to-end implementation, we’ve got you—we’ll help identify which processes can benefit most from making the jump and help ensure they’re maintained, optimised, and managed long after. After a short discovery call with the team to figure out your business needs, you’re welcome to attend a free workshop that leads to a high-ROI quick-start pilot.

Start Your Business Automation Journey With Prolifics

Automating business processes has twofold benefits: it speeds up processes while also cutting the cost of business. It also boosts innovation by producing modular building blocks and widens employee accessibility with no- and low-code solutions.

The time to automate is now. Make your processes work for you and springboard into the digital future (and present) of business. Set up a discovery call with our team today to discover where you can streamline your business.