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Top 5 ERP System Trends in 2020 to help plan for 2021
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Top 5 Trends Shaping the Future of ERP Systems
Top 5 Trends Shaping the Future of ERP Systems 700 500 Xcelpros Team

At a Glance

  • 2020 has been a rollercoaster ride for organizations. Companies are figuring out systems to handle remote work, disrupted supply chains, sudden changes in raw material prices, an onslaught of data, and labor shortage significant challenges globally. Many of these companies got their tasks streamlined and optimized in these times with ERP systems.
  • Going forward, ERP in 2021 will be a gateway towards more flexible and agile systems which will enable companies to aim for zero downtime, improved resource functionality, and overall better process optimization.
  • Innovation is the key to ERP’s growth, and the current trends are pointing towards organizations’ keenness for out-of-the-box ERP applications.

Organizations worldwide integrate ERP into their IT infrastructure for operational efficiency, data management, finance and accounting, and process automation. The digitization of an enterprise through newer ERP solutions raises an organization’s performance and dexterity.

ERP has come such a long way from its early inception days that the older versions are quickly becoming obsolete. Companies are moving from legacy to newer ERP platforms to gain traction in the digital ecosystem.

According to the Panorama Consulting Solutions’ 2018 ERP Report, 49% of companies (USA, EU and Asia) reported improved business after ERP implementation.

With such a tremendous success rate, it is no wonder that majority of companies have either implemented or are looking to implement ERP. However, like any other technology, it is essential to keep on top of ERP systems’ features and solutions. Here’s a look at the top 5 ERP technology trends that companies need to watch out for:

1.Integration with AI and its positive impact: Gone are the days companies would look at artificial intelligence (AI) and ERP systems separately. The upcoming ERP comes integrated with AI and offers smooth functionalities in various functions such as efficient accounting, report generation, warehouse/ inventory management, customer service betterment, and more. Another positive impact of ERP systems integrated with AI is that it helps process automation and can save manual labor efforts and cost. This can serve as a boon for companies struggling with workforce shortage due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

2.Cloud Acceleration: Another upcoming ERP trend is the much-talked-about cloud acceleration feature, wherein organizations (or individuals) will be able to expedite data delivery to respective nodes with the help of a smart ERP system. A cloud ERP system also enables organizations to seamlessly go along the digital transformation journey with real-time data feeds and verifications.

3.Agile ERP to Support an Agile Organization: Most companies are asked today if they are agile? To be agile and get away from the conventional waterfall method (where one function would complete the task before moving to the next), companies will delve into agile ERP. An agile ERP will support co-existence and concurrent working of multiple functions with a centrally accessible database. This will help companies reduce and expedite iterations, preempt and avoid operational glitches, and better manage their processes.

4.Customer-focused ERP: The business landscape is changing with digitization. Companies can now reach their customers directly and get honest reviews about their services/ products, thanks to various online platforms. Thus, in the year 2021, ERP will play an essential role in strengthening this connection and taking it in the right direction by generating alerts, reducing response time, and improving overall customer satisfaction for a company.

5.ERP aiding persona Marketing: Organizations worldwide are trying to make the most of their digital marketing spend by optimizing R&D about a customer/ prospect demographic. Cloud-based ERP systems can prove vital in that facet by serving as the data-gatherer and insight generator systems for a better, faster, and more accurate understanding of the customer’s preferences. Not many enterprises know the immense value that the current sales/ customer data provides to cross-sell/upsell/sell new products to existing customers or prospective customers within the same demographic. ERP systems can effectively streamline backend data and provide trends to aid digital marketing.

Figure 1: The Future of ERP: Comparing Features

The Future of ERP: Comparing Features

The past year has seen numerous benefits of ERP in different business processes. A trusted ERP system such as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations will be instrumental in helping companies manage operations efficiently. This ERP software is designed for today and the future, and it encompasses cutting-edge features that help fulfill your organization’s digital transformation quest.

New-age ERPs release updates to stay current in the market, and it is essential to upgrade by assessing the latest feature sets in the latest versions. Getting ERP consultants and experts on board can also help you in continuously improving your ERP system to adapt to the latest trends.

Key Takeaways

  • To stay ahead in the digital era, organizations need to keep up with the trends of cutting-edge software like the ERP.
  • The current and coming years will see further integration of various digital technologies into ERP to provide a comprehensive system that benefits both companies and customers.
  • The future and growth of ERP lies in digitization, agility, and enhanced process optimization features. Companies from various industries will need to upgrade their ERP systems to reap these features’ full benefits in the coming times.

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Predictive analytics in the pharmaceutical industry key use cases banner
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Predictive Analytics in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Key Use Cases
Predictive Analytics in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Key Use Cases 700 500 Xcelpros Team

At a Glance

  • The digital era has given companies various tools and techniques to help pharmaceutical manufacturers optimize and streamline their operations, and predictive analysis is one such highly advanced method.
  • There are different ways with which predictive analytics can integrate with existing software setup and forecast plausible technical glitches and predict future trends, thus helping in enhancing operational efficiency.
  • Predictive analysis can help planning to execution, aftermarket services level to develop better products/ services, improve their response time, and stay ahead of the curve for delivering better customer experience.

The Role of Robust Infrastructure

Database management has become one of the topmost priorities for companies across the globe. This database is used to fabricate trends and patterns for a particular time-frame or a process or a product. Data historians have been around for quite some time now, but manufacturers have recently started to look at them as more than software that stores and retrieves data. Application of predictive analytics is turning out to be a game-changer in terms of predicting the future with maximum accuracy and helping manufacturers make the right calls across various functions- purchase, operations, consumer demands, marketing, and more.

Any business operates with the ultimate motive – to enhance productivity and profits. Optimizing operations thus becomes a must for manufacturers. Companies are riding the digital wave with cutting-edge technologies and tools such as Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, and Digital Analytics. By making the most of this digital disruption and using predictive analysis to their advantage, companies can achieve better operational efficiency and higher productivity.

Increased and better predictability for both structured and unstructured data helps companies in planning their operations accordingly for enhanced productivity and a faster pace of work.

Predictive Analytics in Pharmaceutical Operations

Predictive analytics is creating a buzz in the Pharma industry for quite some time now. Different pharmaceutical manufacturing companies are looking to model their business processes by gauging the future requirements. The predictive analysis makes use of data historians to accurately make predictions about future trends, possible glitches, and diversions along the road. While technology has come a long way when it comes to predictive analysis, at an enterprise level, there are many things you can do to make the most of this technique.

93%

of healthcare executives stated that predictive analytics is important to their business’ future.

Source: CIO.com

As major companies are competing to stay ahead, product sales and consumer acceptance of a specific drug are a few contributing factors that help decide on advancing to Predictive analytics.

Here are a few ways that predictive analytics helps Pharmaceutical operations become more streamlined and agile:

01.Predictive analytics assets help in understanding patient needs ahead of time

For years Pharma companies have invested heavily in market research and insight experts to understand various geographies and patient domains. This included research to understand and forecast patient needs and medicine usage compliance to help both R&D and manufacturing teams prepare them ahead, thus catering to the requirements of the patient base. Predictive analysis plays a vital role in this domain by taking historian data and mining it to populate trends and patterns that can be used by Pharma companies to decide upon the demand for their product. Advanced digital analytics is also capable of generating models based on consumption density for a particular geography, demographic, and health index of the patient base. A pharmaceutical company, thus, would automatically be empowered by knowing its end customer base better and learn the composition of drugs and approximate quantities to produce. You can, therefore, produce the medicines as per the forecast and restructure your supply chain as per the demand. All this will optimize your operations by streamlining both the production department and your supply chain. This will result in enhanced productivity and reduced risks of stock-outs or inventory influxes.

02.Digital analytics plays an imperative role in predicting plausible manufacturing equipment glitches

Anyone working on a production line can vouch for the fact that faulty equipment can cost fortunes by becoming the reason for slowed down or altogether stopped production for days. What predictive analysis does is that it uses the stored equipment data and runs the algorithms to understand the working patterns of any equipment. This, in turn, helps in generating reports for plausible scenarios of equipment malfunction. The production team can get forewarned and can work on the said equipment beforehand to prevent any glitches. Apart from helping in enhancing the operational efficacy, this can also help in preventing loss due to stalled production.

One can take the predictive analysis a step further and use the trends generated to get into a proactive maintenance mode, rather than a more cumbersome and costlier reactive maintenance option.

9%

uptime improvement can be achieved by ensuring predictive maintenance in factories.

Source: A Report by PWC

03.Predictive analytics enhances operational efficiency by enabling risk assessment

Predicting the actions and production outcome of a batch record has become integral to measuring the performance of a Pharma product line. Predictive analytics helps in this assessment with maximum accuracy. It also helps in proactively foretelling issues risks related to product line performance, which allows Production Managers to mitigate these risks to raise product quality standards, and hence become a key driver in increasing product performance in the market. This could apply to both software and hardware in a production line. The cumulative phenomenon results in better risk assessment. This helps the operations team to proactively plan the course of their actions for a better outcome. The advanced predictive analytics tools integrate with different software used by the manufacturers to recognize patterns, share information with other machines and apply the principles of machine learning to automatically gauge risks and alert the users on a timely basis. For optimized operations, risk aversion plays an important role.

Figure 1Use Cases of Predictive Analytics in Pharma

01

Deriving 360 degree patient journey insightsDeriving 360 degree patient journey insights

02

Influencing patient adherenceInfluencing patient adherence

03

Capturing genomics data to accelerate discovery of precision medicineCapturing genomics data to accelerate discovery of precision medicine

04

Speeding up drug discovery and developmentSpeeding up drug discovery and development

05

Improving the efficiency in clinical trialsImproving the efficiency in clinical trials

06

Identifying gaps in compliance to streamline regulationsIdentifying gaps in compliance to streamline regulations

07

Reducing cost and speeding up time-to-marketReducing cost and speeding up time-to-market

08

Improving safety and risk managementImproving safety and risk management

09

Managing operations and employee trainingManaging operations and employee training

10

Taking effective sales and marketing initiativesTaking effective sales and marketing initiatives

04.Advanced analytics is essential in accelerating operations

The ways mentioned above with which advanced predictive analysis helps in operational efficiency have all resulted in more agility in the overall operations. Rapidly delivering medicines to the end customer, is becoming a primary responsibility for Pharma companies within the Pharma Value Chain. Companies see a rapid generation of patterns, demands met with more ease, lower risks in manufacturing processes – advancing production lines, and related functions to be more agile.

Business Scenario

Meridian Medical Technologies, a Pfizer company, continues to experience manufacturing challenges in the production of EpiPen® (epinephrine injection, USP) 0.3 mg and EpiPen Jr® (epinephrine injection, USP) 0.15 mg Auto-Injectors, and the authorized generic versions of these strengths. These challenges are expected to result in tighter supplies and greater variability in pharmacy-level access at this time.

Added to the shortage of EpiPens due to tighter supplies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration provided additional information on lots that are about to expire creating further risk in Epipen availability for the patient base.

A good model of predictive analytics in the Pharma supply chain that provides a gauge of stock requirements based on patient demand, in-store inventory, and expiration dates would have mitigated this risk of Epipen outage before it is too late. Time to market is an essential factor in deciding the success of a product. Accelerating pharma manufacturing processes will thus help companies stay ahead in the competition.

Key Takeaways

  • Predictive analytics is highly effective in risk assessment, equipment analysis, trend forecasting, and data mining.
  • Every industry has their specific criterion to make use of predictive analysis to boost sales and with better use of such tools, enterprises will be better prepared to serve their customer base.
  • Manufacturers can benefit highly from this advanced digital technology by optimizing their operations and enhancing the speed of production.
  • Speeding up the medicine to the market process by predicting demand based on patient demographic enables Pharma companies to be prepared for the increase in end-customer demand and manage stock outages without compromising patient needs.

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Maintaining an Integrated Supply Chain Key Solutions
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Maintaining an Integrated Supply Chain: Key Solutions
Maintaining an Integrated Supply Chain: Key Solutions 700 500 Xcelpros Team

At a Glance

  • Many organizations that fail to recognize supply chain as a strategic business function, tend to not move to a digital supply chain and lose out on the benefits that come with the transformation.
  • Traditionally, manufacturing companies have treated supply chain as a transactional function, a bargaining chip to reduce price and secure on-time delivery of raw materials. The modern supply chain is viewed as a strategic asset to the organization, integrated deeply with other business functions, aimed to increase customer satisfaction.
  • Companies unable to track hidden costs across the supply chain lose track of actual costs, damaging their bottom line. Proper supply chain monitoring can save anywhere from 20-30% of distribution costs.

The Supply Chain Challenge

Supply chain management is one of the most critical elements of success for any business in today’s global market. However, its application is undermined by many companies as business leaders face challenges to control the cost of a supply chain without compromising on its efficiency. Since COVID-19 we have witnessed drastic changes in methods and methodologies for streamlining supply chain operations. It, however, doesn’t take away some key fundamentals required for healthy functioning of a company’s supply chain and inventory management.

According to the Logistics Bureau, for companies running global operations, their supply chain cost could rise as high as 90% of their total expenditure.

The Supply Chain Slowdown

The problem lies in poor strategic management. Supply chain managers are focusing on cost minimization, most of them without having detailed field knowledge of how the system works, and the result is it is impacting other areas of the process such as inventory optimization, ‘on-time delivery in full (OTDIF)’ and customer satisfaction. Trying to improve one KPI is resulting in a cost spike in other areas of operations, which can have a long-term impact on revenue.

FIGURE 1 Where Business Leaders are Falling Short

Where Business Leaders are Falling Short

A robust supply chain needs strategic alignment and planning in line with the overall business functioning. For example, in order to control cost, you need to first understand the key drivers of cost in the supply chain and most importantly how to measure the supply chain cost. While the strategy is important, establishing an integrated supply chain requires a synchronized approach to planning, execution, and application of technologies in order to create an end-to-end unified system across the entire organization.

FIGURE 2 Key Elements of an Integrated Supply Chain

Key Elements of an Integrated Supply Chain

In this article, we will touch upon some interesting facts that make an appealing case as to why the Supply Chain strategy needs to be digitally enhanced and properly integrated with other parts of the business.

Switching from Traditional to Next-Gen Digital Supply Chain

The rapidly evolving business landscape is disrupting the way companies function. Moreover, the advent of the latest technologies and growing competitive markets are driving companies to push their limits and redefine supply chain operations.

Is your business ready to embrace a digital supply chain as a key distinguishing factor for its competitive advantage?

Most SMBs are holding back the transformation due to the fear of possible risks that could surface. Per our industry experience, it’s due to the age-old perspective in which company leadership is analyzing their supply chain. In most of the cases, we found that they are way behind the entire purview and don’t realize the true potential of a well-integrated, technologically advanced supply chain.

Traditionally, business leaders focused on pricing and product quality, but priorities today have completely shifted. Major Objectives and Key results of organizations are geared towards optimized supply chain and operations to boost businesses forward. With Industry 4.0, advanced analytics, and robotic process automation rising, companies are realizing the need for an integrated supply chain. This has become even more true as the Covid-19 crisis continues. Demand planning and fulfillment, supplier-customer relationship, customer retention, on-time delivery are some of the major expenses of a company. An efficient supply chain not only helps with cost reduction in these segments but also ensures growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Top Reasons to Upgrade Your Operations with a Next-Gen Digital Supply Chain:

Shifting from a plant-level production planning to a demand-driven focus with customer-centric mindset but not compromising with the product quality

Getting rid of outdated processes and technology to match the transforming global business landscape

Reducing cost to formulate a more efficient value chain to remain cost-competitive in the market

Ability to outsource parts of your supply chain process in order to reap economic benefits and superior supply chain network design

Achieving more efficient product lifecycle management

Collaboration with stakeholders to integrate business processes for increasing visibility throughout the value chain

The Impact of Supply Chains

An integrated supply chain influences the overall functioning and improves profitability of the business. Going digital and increasing interoperability across these functions sets a business up to accelerated growth. Let us discuss a couple of key areas that are impacted by a well designed supply chain.

FIGURE 3 Upgrading the supply chain will improve your bottom line

Upgrading the supply chain will improve your bottom line

01. Supply Chain and its Impact on Customer-Centricity

When business leaders discuss improving their supply chain, their main focus is usually related to accelerating growth by cutting down costs, achieving better lead time, and ensuring on-time delivery; as all these factors contribute towards business development. What slips from their mind is what customers really care about. It all starts and ends with customer satisfaction. Delivering the right product at the right time improves your organization’s brand value and credibility to customers.

What the customer cares about is receiving quality products on the promised delivery date without having to spend too much time or effort. This can be seen in Amazon’s announcement of one-day delivery. Late and inaccurate deliveries bear a significant impact on customer loyalty.

70%

of industry professionals predict that their supply chain is going to be a key driver of improved customer satisfaction by the end of the year.

Source: Accenture

Your procurement division must understand the importance of cost-saving, but they need to be in line with the expectations of the customers and procure quality raw material for manufacturing the items. If expectations on raw material quality is not set, you could save money purchasing raw materials upfront, but end up spending more in the long run.

Let’s take a look at Kimberly-Clark’s journey to understand this better:

Kimberly-Clark is a manufacturing-focused organization that up to a few years ago did not have a supply chain division. Sandra MacQuillan, their first Supply Chain Officer, built a solid team to ensure the supply chain was focused on customer satisfaction. In the process, she integrated various functions such as procurement, quality (know more on quality management by clicking here), logistics, manufacturing, safety, etc. that are interconnected and delivered for one common goal – that is customer satisfaction.

Kimberly-Clark was able to achieve 25-30% cost savings by interconnecting various aspects of the Supply Chain, focused on better customer service, resulting in improved efficiency.

If you connect with the issues faced by Kimberly-Clark, or your supply chain is functioning in silos, it could be the best time to make a change. You can take this opportunity to update and integrate your supply chain with overall business functions and work towards a common goal like customer Satisfaction. A strongly integrated application will have the ability to incorporate holistic business functions including analytics, collaboration with notification, secure information sharing, control-based decision making using Artificial Intelligence, and more.

FIGURE 4 KPIs that are critical for supply chain monitoring

KPIs that are critical for supply chain monitoring

02. The Role of supply chain in sustaining business long term

According to the Logistics Bureau, nearly 50% of companies shut down within the first five years of operation. One critical factor contributing to these failures is an inefficient and poorly conceived supply chain. Supply chains in most organizations have evolved as a practice, rather than a well-designed process.

79%

of companies with robust and high-performing supply chains are able to outperform their average peers in terms of higher revenue growth. This fact signifies the positive implication of a connected supply chain for a business.

Source: Deloitte

5 Steps to Integrate your Supply Chain

Break down organizational silos

For an effective, integrated approach to Supply Chain Management (SCM) the organization must operate end-to-end as a unified entity.

01

Define organizational objectives

Move beyond basic business and functional unit design and metrics. Look at the organization holistically and define the objectives as a complete entity.

02

Align business processes

Take a cross-functional approach to business process design. Start at a high level and map out the supply-chain flow with the goal of creating an end-to-end mapping of the business process.

03

Design the IT architecture to support an integrated approach

Leverage a cross-functional approach to IT systems design. As much as possible, standardize the organization in terms of the applications that are used. Seek to eliminate as many disparate applications as possible in favor of a common set of applications across the business.

04

Reshape leadership and culture

For most organizations, the major roadblock in delivering an integrated approach to supply-chain management is culture change. Change of this magnitude must be driven by solid leadership. There should be strong collaboration to drive the effort to deliver an integrated supply-chain organization.

05

Final Thoughts

There is no way the importance of an integrated Supply Chain should be overstated or undermined. If you or your organization have not prioritized your supply chain efforts, it’s never too late to take the first step.

An intelligent ERP software comes with a holistic supply chain module along with advanced analytics to support the following functionality.

  • A manufacturing execution system
  • Financial and cost accounting
  • Inventory and warehouse management
  • Purchasing and planning of materials
  • Product information management
  • Sales and marketing of the products
  • Transportation and logistics management

In order to push a company forward especially post-COVID-19, a sound digital supply chain strategy would be needed.

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ENTERPRISE PROCESS AUTOMATION TRENDS
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Upcoming Process Automation Trends That Will Transform Your Enterprise
Upcoming Process Automation Trends That Will Transform Your Enterprise 700 500 Xcelpros Team

Introduction

The ultimate goal of any enterprise is that of speeding up processes, reducing errors, and increasing business output for better revenue generation. With the onset of the digitization era, companies have upgraded their technological prowess to adapt to process automation. It is important to understand that in the rapidly transforming world, process automation is not just a technological ability to speed up processes but a strategic movement towards better use of software to streamline workforce, introduce better work practices and mitigate cost inflations. Since COVID-19, process automation has turned into a need of the hour to improve operations that are built with adherence to process compliance and yield better outputs with a limited workforce. This means process automation will transform enterprises at a larger scale to increase agility and reduce dependency on manual work.

Manual Vs Automation

Is your business still operating through manual handoffs, excel macros, and cumbersome reporting? As businesses are integrating automation in more rapidly in different facets right from HR to Marketing, Production, Sales, and Information Technology; there is a considerable reduction in human intervention for mundane and simpler tasks. A component of efficiency will be introduced with the implementation of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in process automation. According to a leadership piece by Sogeti (1), enterprises will look into integrating robotics process automation (RPA) with AI to extract more business value. Read on to know why an enterprise should consider intelligent process automation for complete transformation and the latest trends that will help businesses along the path of said transformation.

Why Embracing the Latest Process Automation Trends and Techniques is a Necessity for an Enterprise?

As an enterprise, you need to ask yourself a key question: Where should the business’ attention be?

While at face-value this question may seem trivial, the entire enterprise architecture revolves around this key aspect. The more attention your skill base gives towards the latest trends like the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Cloud, Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and automated-integrated workflows, the better streamlined and agile your workforce would be. Hence it is highly significant for enterprises to explore deep into the latest process automation trends and make their employees acquainted with these trends for a competitive edge.

There is no doubt about the fact that legacy systems need upgrades and modernization to encompass latest trends of digitization, modern technologies and to become aligned with the fast-paced, changing business demands. Process automation plays a key role here. If not for process automation, the IT systems would face the brunt of not being able to keep up with business process improvements (carried out usually at a large-scale), leading to lesser productivity and overall loss of revenue. Automation helps you form ‘bundles’ of data and migrate them to platforms for systematic records management. Process automation can help your enterprise reduce the error rate, and increase productivity at a lower cost. But one point to remember is that the process automation described above would only make sense if your company has already transformed into a modern ERP system.

Figure 1 8 Reasons to Automate Your Business Processes

Reasons to Automate Your Business Processes

1.Handling the Unstructured Data Challenge: While data on systems has been very much taken care of by current process automation tools, enterprises and their related facets still struggle with unstructured forms of data such as hand-written notes, bills, invoices, images, etc. With the introduction of machine learning and artificial intelligence, businesses are digging up automation solutions that will not only recognize this type of data (with the help of Robotics), but also assimilate and use it in processes similar to structured data.

2.Low-Code Solutions for Faster Results: Robotic process automation when integrated with low code solutions forms a golden bridge of zero human intervention and faster application development. These low code solutions enhance efficiency as well as help in transforming core processes like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

3.Integration of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Business Process Automation (BPA): Interdependent workflows have always been a part of large enterprises and the IT skill set in an organization has mostly been at the helm of managing these interconnecting processes in a complex workflow system. The latest automation tools will help in integrating RPA with BPA resulting in the formation of intricate workflows and implementation of all the related processes.

4.Real-Time Automated Decision Making: Enterprises will see more and more management of big data with the help of artificial intelligence and this will facilitate the way for flexible tools for IT operations that will preempt glitches and provide real-time solutions. This will help in better resource-allocation, lesser communication gaps, and fewer outages.

5.A Chance Towards Skill Set Upgrade: When computers were introduced as a tool to reduce human effort, they were met with a lot of apprehensions. In fact, many considered them as machines that would make a human contribution to technology obsolete. Similar apprehension and even cynicism can be seen in the case of process automation tools and software. After all, process automation eliminates the need for human intervention, making many technical jobs outworn.

However, enterprises are now looking up to this advancement in process automation as a chance to upgrade the skill set of their current employee base and make them adept in the latest technologies and tools. This will not only help the IT personnel move from labor-intensive, monotonous jobs to skill-based, dynamic ones, but it will also create a learning curve in the industry resulting in more innovations. When put in perspective, automation is not the cause for losing jobs, it is instead an opportunity for companies to fill the skill set gap and enhance the expertise of their IT personnel for innovation and better strategic output.

By 2023, AI-enabled automation in data management will reduce the need for IT specialists by 20%Source: Gartner report

The Changing Landscape

An enterprise cannot deny the fact that adapting to the need of the hour with the latest process automation trends is going to work in favor of its core business value. Numerous users across organizations will gain access to data, automated workflows that will be systematically prepared, and actionable insight that will aid towards building an agile enterprise. In the current market being agile as a company will be your strong suit. As they say, the cards are laid on the table; it is up to the businesses now to play their hand wisely!

Remote work is becoming more prevalent post-COVID-19. Companies are looking for more ways to streamline operations, engage the workforce, and yet meet the needs of customers. Process automation plays a major role in volatile market conditions during COVID-19. A combination of Microsoft’s Power Platform, AI – ML, Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 ERP, integrated with Teams allows users to streamline their processes and build needed visibility for management to effectively view the progress of operations remotely.

In fact, a successful use case off-late within various companies is to integrate Dynamics 365 with flow, teams, planner, and SharePoint to enhance compliance of process, coordination with team members remotely, track processes that are running in each department and provide task execution clarity for each employee within a department. More companies are adopting this suite of tools to improve productivity and simplify workforce engagement. All major functions of a company – be it Procurement, Sales, Manufacturing, Quality, Finance or HR, when unified together help a business stay afloat during challenging market conditions and support the over well-being of a business.

Key Takeaways

  • Introduction of Automated workflows, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Advanced Electronics has changed the face of process automation for better and faster results.
  • Enterprises will need to invest more in advanced process automation tools to stay ahead in the competition and to gain critical business value.
  • Evaluate low-cost solutions for process automation that is easily customizable for your business and build enhanced visibility of how your company is performing in a challenging market.

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