The Digital Workforce

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

The best of both worlds! YES!

Imagine if you could combine your best staff with software robots that work alongside them to increase workload capabilities and accuracy?! What if there were tools to do this? Would you try them?

A digital workforce could be defined as a collection of bots working side by side with humans to achieve organizational goals. These bots can read invoices, scrape websites, collate content from social media, get information from your MIS systems, restart servers, call your dog walker and even order a pizza!

Software Robot + Human Worker = Digital Workforce.

In the past few years, the advancement in AI technologies, chatbots, and desktop automation (RPA – Robotic Process Automation) has created opportunities to deploy a digital workforce to perform monotonous, repetitive, or rule-based tasks throughout the organization. Bots are now trained to detect patterns and behaviors and react accordingly to human interactions as well as systematic activities.

Office workers are ready to welcome automation of repetitive digital tasks, as on average employees spend more than three hours a day on mundane computer tasks which are not part of their primary job and are ripe for human error, a survey said on Tuesday.

Many organizations around the world are experimenting with the effectiveness of using bots and automation to gain a competitive advantage. This could be either by way of improving quality, creating standardization, or by just increasing the throughput. That said, the challenge for most small and medium-sized businesses is they often do not have a roadmap to transition from a standard workflow to digitization of their workforce.

Here are a couple of points that can help guide your organization to take some incremental steps:

1. Ask your team to list their repetitive tasks
2. Research technology available for these tasks (DASH AP Robot™)
3. Find a plug-and-play solution that doesn’t disrupt the current workflow
4. Treat the joined RPA and AI technologies like digital workers (i.e., treat the technology as another persona in the workspace so the employee is empowered to do more in less time)
5. With your team, strategize and goal-set what you can accomplish with your extra time

Teams across the organization can create a list of processes and workflows that they could automate. What if 50% or more of these tasks could be automated to free up the teams? Software utilizing AI, machine learning, robotic process automation, and analytics can do just that.

Your workforce can enhance and increase productivity by working with digital software. Automating business functions across the organization such as:

• Accounting (invoices, POs, receipts)
• Customer Service (surveys, emails)
• Human Resources (applications, documents, resumes)
• Others?

Technological advancements in the workplace have led to the rise of the ‘Digital Workforce’. Our human employees no longer need to be responsible for highly tedious and cost-intensive processes. Instead, new technology can enhance the quality and productivity of your workers and give them time to focus on value-adding strategic activities like innovation.

Today, we spend about 10% to 20% of our time on mundane, repetitive tasks that can be easily automated. With robotic process automation (RPA), you can offload these cumbersome tasks to a digital workforce, giving human workers more time to be productive and work on creative projects.

If your team is looking into digital transformation strategies to take your business to the next level, it involves a scalable team of robotic and automated solutions that combine artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA). Implementing digital workers can improve the employee experience because time-consuming, monotonous, and repetitive tasks are assigned to a robot.

Businesses that begin utilizing a digital workforce can see huge benefits:

1. Retain great employees (increased role responsibilities with human-touch tasks and strategies)
2. Recruit new employees (attracted to up-and-coming businesses with new technologies and approaches)
3. Increased accuracy across the organization
4. Increased productivity
5. Reduced costs

The digital workforce is critical in freeing up time that can be spent on projects that require human intelligence and create value.

Our goal at DASH is to create software tools that work alongside your human staff to undertake manual processes (the not-so-fun stuff!) and allow them to focus on value-adding tasks. This gives your team a leg up on the competition to scale your business up and down fluidly. The automation of the software with AI takes the heavy lifting off your staff – all you do is set up some basic tolerance rules for the software ahead of time.

About the Author:

Stephanie is the marketing guru at DASH. For over 20 years, DASH has been authoring, delivering, and supporting DASH DDX™ and DASH AP Robot™, its ERP-integrated software to small and mid-sized manufacturing and distribution companies throughout the USA and beyond.

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