In a super enthusiastic digital world and a globe excited about starting over after a mind-numbing pandemic, automation is the enhanced norm. Businesses big and small, all over the world are fast incorporating automation in their workspaces and it is giving technologies a good push and significantly improving the outcome of businesses overall. Automation can help in many ways in all industries big and small. The initial capital deployment cost of automation is generally high so it is viable mostly in big industries.
Automation improves operations by leaps and bounds and not just by making everything efficient, but also by reducing costs, upskilling manpower and creating larger scope to do more. Automation essentially does de-skilling of the job. If any job calls for high skill, then to get such manpower is difficult or very costly. Also, that operation becomes bottleneck and highly dependent for completion of that entire process. In such case automation can either completely automate it or de-skill it to a larger extent. But it does not necessarily take away jobs. It boosts productivity, minimises errors and makes processes accurate and error-free, at best! Low value jobs where giving higher salaries is not viable generally see lot of attritions or shortfall of manpower. Such places every time new employee for the job means continuous training; lower productivity and increased errors. By automating such process these problems can be solved.
Many jobs are very fatigue oriented like welding; working near furnaces; working with hazardous material or lifting heavy items etc. Monotonous jobs can become a reason of error and sometimes attrition and in cases such as these, automation is a must-have. The jobs which call for high rate of production; repeatedly doing same monotonous jobs are also best suited for automation.
Most of the commodities have cyclic load. In festive seasons the demand increases while other time it is reduced. Such un-even demand can also be met by automation as hiring surplus manpower during peak and then reducing manpower in non- peak season can be easily handled by automation.
With industry 4.0 doing maintenance remotely is possible. This can reduce the trained manpower requirement at site at multiple location can be reduced drastically. Flexible manufacturing systems also helps in catering to larger variety of model in same capex. Automation boosts the bottom-line, optimises processes, reduces delays and minimises errors. It also frees up the human mind to better equip itself to do better work. Automation is agile, it is scalable, it can handle market fluctuations, can manage overloads and helps you release employees to better explore their true potential. In a day and time when humans are nervous of meeting each other, or grouping back like the old days, automation has literally helped the world not come to a standstill because of automation. Large warehouses, factories, supply chains and logistics all took place and continued because of it.
Be it compliance, customer satisfaction, facilitating customer support, consistently managing a wholesome customer experience, enhancing partner relationships, improved scope to collaborate, minimising workforces or managing remotely, automation is the future and the only sure way to survive and thrive, in a highly digitised world.
