Since the first computers appeared the automation fires rushed the race between software creators & vendors, it’s like the blood for the creatures, carrying information between business stakeholders to get extra speed for performing processes and getting tasks done in a speed & safe way.

Digital transformation is the act of harmonizing business processes with current, automation-based technology to make your entire breadth of cross-enterprise workflows expedient, optimized, and less erroneous. In other words, it shifts tasks from being isolated, department-specific, and manually done to being streamlined, universally accessible, and strategically automated. With digital transformation technologies in place, employees spend less doing things “the old way.” Bolstered by automated technology and streamlined, cross-department software, they can now pivot attention onto higher-level, high-order work. The results? A fine-tuned enterprise workflow process that minimizes waste and maximizes resources, all from a single integrated software synchronizing the work of multiple people in multiple departments. 

To automate all the processes, you need to minimize the paperwork to the minimum, here arrive the enterprise content management solutions, that centralize all the enterprise content in repositories that is indexed and secured to allow all the employees to search for the required documents in a very easy way.

The outcomes of Automation may appear clearly by performance measurements using BI tools which represent the data in score balances cards, dashboards, and KPI’s.

Just consider the landscape of today’s common business inefficiencies that stand to see improvements from this kind of synchronization:

• Employees lose 20 to 40 percent of their workday manually looking for misplaced paperwork and documents or combing through poor filing systems — print and digital.
• It takes 18 minutes for a worker to find a needed document.
• Nearly 40 percent of employee productivity is lost due to unorganized task-switching..
• Manual invoicing, data entry and data management produce error rates between four and 10 percent.

What do we get from Automation?

• Reduce waste: Slow data entry, validation bottlenecks, document archiving and retrieving, contingent task assignments, and generating reports from disparate documents, spreadsheets, and logs — these are the culprits plaguing business processes. What do they all have in common? They’re manual departmental tasks, consuming valuable time and energy, and are prone to human error.

• Prioritizes people: The best way to prove how much you value your employees is by letting them perform valuable work. This is both intuitive and in everyone’s best interest.
• Saves money: Simply put, organizations cut operating costs and free cash flows when they implement automated digital tools. Businesses that commit to going paperless slash expenses dramatically. A full suite of enterprise workflow automation software across domains pays for itself in 6 to 18 months.
• Primes you for the future: With reduced steps to complete back-office tasks, departments, and employees empowered by multifunctional technology, you can accomplish more in less time. You’ve created a new, highly scalable productivity pipeline without any intensive capital investments, system downtimes, or overhaul.

Automation can be divided into two main types:

1. Vertical Automation

Vertical automation says that to improve workflows and systems, an organization needs to start from scratch. Employees are trained on brand-new software, new hardware, and new applications while the legacy ERP likely gets scrapped.

• Pros of Vertical Digital Transformation: Ideal for young or start-up companies or those with only a handful of employees all committed to making a complete process pivot for single-use or single-function problems.
• Cons of Vertical Digital Transformation: Higher system acquisition costs, tighter implementation timelines and increased likelihood of system blunders and downtimes during migration.

2. Horizontal Automation

Horizontal automation takes an integrative approach, finding ways to merge the new process-improvement software with the existing ERP. Companies seek out digital tools that are platform and application agnostic, meaning they don’t disrupt current systems, don’t require extensive employee re-training, and don’t need to migrate the tremendous amount of data and files stored on legacy systems across individual departments.

• Pros of Horizontal Digital Transformation: Low cost and low risk for the implementing business. Changes are gradual. Finalized business processes and workflows are maintained on familiar platforms and operating systems.
• Cons of Horizontal Digital Transformation: Might be too expansive for businesses looking only for single-function solutions for one part of a workflow.

Examples for quick win automation solutions:

• Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable
• Bank Account opening
• Field Services and Management
• Human Resources

Methods!

Automation provides several types to be done starting by manual keying to OCR, ICR, IDR, barcode recognition, and ending by Chatbot & robotics.

Technologies

Tech-Hub, as an automation services provider, has a huge number of experts on two giant technologies to fit any company's size and needs.

For large & mid-to-large enterprises we are handling automation projects using IBM cloud Pak for automation which consisted of:

1. Capture: to transform physical documents into electronic documents, documents recognition, extracts data, review extracted data and provide them into electronic formats.
2. Content: to manipulate digital assets and automated its’ cycle and usage smoothly.
3. Workflow: to automate digital assets transitions and steps between business stakeholders.
4. ODM: to create and implement organizational decision management between departments.
5. RPA: to create robots that replace all tedious and repeated human work with external robots that do not need any integration with the existing systems, and ready to be used after few days of taking the automation decision.
6. Analytics:  provide full insights regarding the business and all arounds’ aspects.

For medium & small size enterprises, we use Microsoft products for automation as follows:

1. Power Apps: saving time, money, and paper, and gives you to become more efficient.
2. Power Automate: Powerful workflow automation to automate apps, data, and processes.
3. Power Virtual Agents: creates Chatbot to handle customers’ requests & inquiries.
4. Power BI: works on representing the data in a nice & easy graphical way for users.