The race to get ahead in automation has already begun. According to a 2020 Blue Prism global survey, 93% of decision makers plan to extend the use of automation throughout their organizations, with roughly the same figure perceiving automation as a vital part of a successful digital transformation.
Nevertheless, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to automation. If your team doesn’t have the time or technology to build the necessary tools themselves, you’ll need to look elsewhere, and while desktop automation packages can cut some corners, they’re not the answer. Instead, look for enterprise-grade solutions that suit your specific business needs with speed and agility.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms provide this flexibility. They’re easy to deploy and remove the burden of managing infrastructure and resourcing complexities, whether you’re just starting out on your automation journey or scaling up existing efforts. Let’s take a look at some of the many benefits of SaaS-based automation in more detail, so you can make the right choice to help fast-track your automation journey.
Ramp up without the overhead
Buying, building and configuring servers for automation projects inevitably takes a huge amount of time and requires a level of infrastructure or expertise. For many enterprises, there isn’t scope to do this internally, with IT teams already managing complex, time-consuming infrastructures.
For that reason, it’s wise to consider partnering with a SaaS provider. This eliminates the logistical complexities of set-up, reducing upfront costs and ancillary maintenance fees. The best SaaS automation companies also offer economies of scale for cloud hosting, which means you’ll only pay for what you need.
What this means is an enterprise-ready automation solution that costs less and is ready to go in a fraction of the time. The lower overheads involved offer potential for maximized ROI and the faster speed-to-deployment means you won’t be lagging behind the competition when it comes to automating internal processes and external services.
Available wherever you are
If your business is a global one, or one with several locations, it’s not easy to make your automation platform available wherever your workers are. This challenge has only been enhanced by the rise of remote working.
Intelligent automation delivered as a service comes primed and ready to deploy wherever you’re based, with guaranteed availability service-level agreements from anywhere in the world. This makes employing digital workers to any destination a breeze and eradicates barriers that could limit how far intelligent automation can take you.
Simple software updates and licensing
Offering intelligent automation across regions presents its own challenges. The technology used is constantly evolving, and so are licensing and regulation requirements. Once you begin to update your automation capabilities and add AI into the mix, the process can quickly become complicated.
SaaS platforms, however, include regular updates, and provide licensing for a whole range of different technologies. Having this taken care of in the background leaves you free to focus on getting the most from your automation project, without the administrative headaches that come from owning the platform yourself.
Three waves of value
All this boils down to a simple conclusion: an expert SaaS provider can save you time and money, which is a hard proposition to argue with. By reducing overhead costs and easing the burden on your IT teams, SaaS automation can deliver value in many different areas of your business, which can be roughly broken down into three waves:
Efficiency and productivity
Rapid implementation and process discovery optimizes existing models and enables easy wins, while also establishing a framework for long-term return on investment.
Improving business performance metrics
Intelligent automation capabilities allow business leaders to address KPIs and identify areas for optimization on a continual basis, allowing marginal or incremental gains.
Delivering wholesale business transformation
An intelligent workforce can scale at speed and deliver wholesale business transformation. This opens avenues to implement new business models or collaboration opportunities for your employees and stakeholders, completely transforming the way you work through inbuilt AI and intelligent automation.
An opportunity for enterprises
As you work toward your automation goals, there will be obstacles to overcome. Whether that’s lack of visibility of your workforce or difficulty maximizing the utilization rates of a large digital workforce, every scaling story has its challenges. Luckily, there are expert SaaS providers out there with a mix of tools to take care of digital workforce management and deliver scalability through governance, data intelligence and IT agility.
The best SaaS platforms act as a kind of control room, a central point around which digital workers gather to check in, allowing for comprehensive monitoring and easier setup for new processes.
As the world begins to emerge from the pandemic, any tool or solution that reduces costs and increases the agility and resilience of your organization should not be ignored in favor of outdated legacy systems. Building intelligent automation into your organization will empower your teams to seize the opportunities that lie ahead in the new business landscape.
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