The Pros and Cons of incorporating Automation in your Business
Automation is becoming advanced day by day and businesses are incorporating it to for smooth operations and better outcomes. Implementing automation across departments has a snowball affect on the overall health of the organization; from production to customer satisfaction, automation has an effect throughout.
Benefits of using automation for your business:
Increased Productivity
Tasks which have to be repeated often become too monotonous for human resources which increases the likelihood of them making mistakes and taking time to complete them. This is where the benefit of automation comes in; doing such tasks with far more efficiency. This allows employees to give their time to tasks which need their concentration more. This leads to better productivity.
Reduced Costs
Automation can help reduce labor costs, as machines can work for longer hours and don’t require breaks or benefits. Additionally, automation can help reduce material waste, energy usage, and other expenses, leading to cost savings for your business.
Better Accuracy
Automation eliminates the chances of human mistakes when tasks are being done. When the process has less errors, it speeds up and results into a greater output, better quality of services/products and in turn higher customer satisfaction; something all organizations are striving for.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Automation has played a huge role in customer care sector. This sector has been greatly dependent on automation and it has taken customer experience notch higher. Automation attends to many queries at a time which reduces the response time for each individual. Also, the information that goes out is more on point. Eventually customer satisfaction leads to consumer loyalty.
Despite being extremely beneficial for most of the businesses, organization which implement automation are faced with their fair share of challenges. Some of the most common ones are mentioned below:
Investment
To enjoy the benefits of automation, companies need to cover a hefty cost of the equipment and technology used to install the system. While it may not be a big problem for the well-established brands, small scale organization may not be able to afford automation immediately.
Complex to Integrate
Automating the current system maybe be a difficult task. A company which is starting from scratch may not find it very difficult to start of with automation. However, an existing organization may find it difficult to incorporate new technology with the running system and update it with previous data.
Refusal to accept Change
Incorporation of automation may be the reason of some of the employees becoming insecure about their jobs as they may think that automation will replace them. This feeling would lead them to oppose automation and cause difficulty in its implementation process.
Updating and Maintaining
In order for the automation to perform well and efficiently, the system requires regular maintenance checks and needs to be updated after some time. This task requires a team of professionals and can’t be carried out by the regular employees of the organization; spiking an increase in the cost of automation.
While automation has many benefits, its drawbacks may cause some serious hinderance towards it implementation. The only way to go around it is to carefully plan the finances and keep in view rest of the factors before going ahead with its installation. A feasibility report is suggested to gauge if automating your business would give enough returns and if it’s the correct move for your specific business.
