How Digital Transformation can empower the Workforce

Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog

Most organizations across the globe have started realizing the necessity of adapting to the modern demands of business amid fierce digital disruption. Investments in digital transformation are continuing to accelerate. International Data Corporation (IDC) expects that, by the end of 2020, 60% of all enterprises will be implementing fully articulated digital platform strategies and overall technology spending will top $2 trillion before 2021. Effective digital integration in enterprises can drive better-informed decision making and facilitate enhanced operational efficiencies.

Digital Transformation is revolutionizing how companies do business and with unprecedented opportunities to access modern computing capabilities, employees can now leverage advanced operational models.

Engendering a culture of digitally empowered Employees

Ever-changing needs of businesses are encouraging enterprises to drive faster innovation, enabling modern progressive employee engagement models for delivering better customer-centric experiences. Enabling access to key data and analytics, employees can help accelerate delivery, enhance quality, and improve customer satisfaction in the process.

Implementing effective digital transformation not only helps business grow, but it also enables employees to attain their optimum potential. Companies can leverage emerging Digital Transformation technologies like Intelligent Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics to automate data and reports, streamline processes and support employees to reduce administrative tasks. When employees spend less time on manual processes, they are freed up for more strategic, creative, and innovative initiatives. This also increases team collaboration and speeding decision making. People are at their best when they can think, create, and strike up human connections and technology can make it possible even better.

Fundamental roles of Digital Transformation in Businesses

1. Digital Transformation as an Enabler

Most companies adopt digital transformation to increase process efficiencies, eliminate non-value-added process steps, and most importantly empower employees to perform more meaningful and challenging activities. Let’s take an example of a 10xDS Use Case showing how deploying a digital transformation solution helped streamline a key process and improve employee satisfaction levels for a client.

The client, a leading in-flight catering service, faced several challenges in their invoice reconciliation process. The process was extremely manual and time-consuming, involving highly error-prone, repetitive, rule-based tasks to be performed daily. The processing and resolution time was significantly long due to a huge backlog, other business priorities, and a huge volume of invoices to be processed. The situation became so critical that it escalated into a high priority strategic issue that had to be solved to enhance productivity and stabilize cash flow. The most challenging problem the company faced was the fact that employees experienced low morale due to the high-pressure work environment and the monotonous nature of the tasks.

Assessing the needs of the company, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was chosen to be the best solution for the invoice reconciliation process transformation to increase efficiency and eliminate non-value-added process steps. 10xDS leveraged its state-of-the-art Intelligent Automation COE and deployment methodology to develop and deploy automation solution to streamline their invoice reconciliation process. Efficient process designing enabled the bots to handle large data volume of invoices with a 32% reduction in Average Handling Time. The Digital Workforce made the entire process error-free, efficient, and accurate. Eliminating the laborious repetitive tasks, the company employees are now able to devote their quality time for more meaningful value-added activities.

2. Digital Transformation to Support Continuity

Amid the pandemic crisis, many companies are forced to disrupt services due to staff unavailability and various other issues. This is where Digital Transformation solutions such as Intelligent Automation (IA), RPA and AI can help. Automation of tedious, repetitive processes can help significantly reduce the burden on the staff handling these activities. Since RPA and AI are non-invasive technologies, businesses need not break the bank to change the existing enterprise IT landscape.

Leveraging conversational AI technologies, companies can deploy virtual agents to provide necessary support to work-at-home agents by transferring automated self-service calls. Moreover, virtual agents can automate IT helpdesk tasks to help resolve issues and support employees. Virtual agents are highly useful in improving productivity since they can handle repetitive high-volume requests, and the IT support teams can focus their attention on technical tasks requiring greater functional expertise.

3. Digital Transformation to optimize Workspace

The concept of a formal workplace setting is changing, becoming more digital in various sectors. Especially during this crisis, companies are focusing more on providing services remotely. Maybe, this dynamic is only going to intensify in the coming years. Digital Transformation can enable a unified and consistent experience for people to access systems, services, data, and applications from anywhere, creating a digital workspace. A digital workspace improves employee journey and experiences, empowers them, and automates operations to improve efficiencies. For instance, automating the onboarding process can enable faster onboarding of a new employee, giving him or her access to apps and devices without tickets, help-desk calls, or any human intervention. A well optimized digital workspace is a boon for businesses, as digitally empowered employees have greater potential to better serve customers.

4. Digital Transformation to help in Robust Decision Making

Digital Transformation leveraging Advanced Analytics offers organizations the ability to perform advanced statistical models and streamline various aspects of their operations. These solutions are driving businesses, improving profitability, compliance, competitiveness, and shaping business decisions. With descriptive analytics companies gain the ability to identify patterns and trends. Predictive Analytics offers key insights into what is likely to happen. Advanced Analytics helps in optimizing marketing campaigns to determine possible customer responses, identifying cross-selling possibilities and more. Fraud detection is another area where multiple analytics methods can help sectors such as Banking, Finance, and Insurance to improve pattern detection, prevent attacks, spot abnormalities identify potential fraud and persistent threats. These insights help top leadership in informed and technology-assisted decision making which would not only help the organization but also the employees in being informed about the strategic direction in which the organization is treading.

5. Digital Transformation to help in Enhanced Profitability

Growing revenue in a more profitable way is undoubtedly the elusive holy grail of any business. Digital Transformation with its multitude of technologies and models can help companies achieve this goal in a much-streamlined manner. To start with, this is the time when emerging technologies like Intelligent Automation (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Analytics can be leveraged to automate time-consuming and error-prone tasks reducing operating costs. These technologies enable quick ROI, outweighing the lower initial investment for setting up. Digital Transformation thus enables efficient processes and streamlined systems, reducing cost, and increasing revenue. When profits increase, companies will have more potential to offer better remuneration to their employees and world-class learning opportunities thereby increasing employee satisfaction levels.

Conclusion

This is an interesting time in our history, amid the pandemic and uncertainties, where enterprises should look to adopt digital transformations to enable truly digital workspaces. This can effectively empower employees with self-service, automate key processes, deliver a superior experience, and enhance productivity.

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