AI, NLG, and Machine Learning

How Bots Can Take the “Busy-ness” Out of Your Business

By leveraging AI technology, bots can introduce automation and take over much of your "grunt work" to save time and money.

How much of your time and your team’s day is spent making spreadsheets, generating reports, and adjusting marketing campaigns?

Do you find yourself wishing that you had more time to focus on the creative aspects of your business rather than wasting time on boring, procedural work that should ideally be handled by other entities?

That’s exactly where bots (or, more specifically, automation/software bots) come in!

By leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning, bots take the grunt work (or the “busy-ness”) out of your work.

Bots can provide instant benefit to your business.

The beauty of these so-called automation/software bots—and the reason why more and more companies are implementing them into their core business processes—is that they enable organizations to bring a level of automation to traditional processes without having to rip and replace the dated and deprecated systems.

The following are just a few major processes and sub-processes that every organization—whether small, mid-sized, or enterprise-level—can (and should) get automated:

Processes and sub-processes

Human resources (HR) services

Due to the huge amount of repetitive and often manual administrative tasks, like filings; data capturing, updating, and disseminating; and processing a large number of requests, HR is a gold mine of opportunities for automation.

Bots can help with data entry for payroll processing, compliance reporting, and even the Joiners, Movers, and Leavers process.

Generally, HR administration benefits greatly from bot automation, which can also assist with recruitment and with time and attendance management.

Supply chain management (SCM)

Supply chain problems cost companies between 9 and 20 percent of their value over a period of six months.

There are many SCM processes that are typically prone to automation, including inventory management, supply and demand planning, and returns processing.

Invoice, contract, work order, and freight management also represent typical areas of supply chain operations that can be improved by bot automation.

Finance and accounting (F&A)

Automation can have a significant positive impact on cost savings by improving efficiency and streamlining F&A processes, including Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, and Record-to-Report.

Bots can also assist with vendor management, collections, incentive claims, and sales orders.

Information technology (IT) services

With an estimated 30 percent of time spent on low-level tasks, IT is compelled to embrace automation as a way to shift focus from time-consuming organization tasks to initiatives that require innovative thinking.

Bots are often used by IT departments to develop software, monitor servers and apps, and process or distribute emails.

IT departments also don’t have to worry about helping with password resets or unlocking accounts, conducting routine maintenance reports, or initiating software backups when they have bots to do it for them.

Bots are highly effective in lessening IT’s workload, especially due to their batch processing capabilities.

Implementing bots

Automation platforms like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism are industry leaders that can provide you with all the tool sets and the knowledge you need to be able to build and deploy such bots for making your automation journey easier, faster, and simpler.

From a financial perspective, bot automation just makes sense.

Creating a bot that can assist with such a large variety and quantity of tasks is both efficient and cost effective.

Although a bot isn’t free, it most certainly does not require the salary, health insurance, paid time off, or even the sleep that humans do.

Bots can perform laborious tasks easily.

Bots can work 24/7, with no need to take a lunch break or get home to put the kids to bed.

Thus, bots are an extremely wise financial investment for any business.

Humans are naturally wired to be adept at creative processes, but that innate creativity comes at a price.

It’s the price of redundancy-infused boredom, the price of getting exhausted with laborious work, and last but certainly not least, the price of slower speeds and precision levels as compared to bots.

Implementing more and more of these intelligent and powerful bots at your workplace enables humans to better invest themselves in their work and realize their full potential.