Johannesburg, 19 Jun 2020
The COVID-19 crisis continues to have an impact on organisations worldwide, paralysing major business activities on a local and global scale. Though it may be difficult to navigate this new business environment, you should take this opportunity to kick-start digital transformation.
Why? Well, process automation initiatives help ensure long-term business continuity and resiliency. Implementing enterprise content management (ECM), process automation and integrating with your line-of-business system can enable a very effective digital infrastructure that optimises efficiency, which optimises costs as well.
This is especially relevant right now, where companies are required to be compliant with regulations in the workplace and still try to operate at a profit. Your company can benefit from immediate and long-term effects of initiating digital transformation, going beyond the scope of COVID-19.
Technology as a cure
Since the turn of the century, most viral infectious diseases have only represented a minor threat to daily operations for most organisations. While they did cause public health concerns on a regional level, SARS, H1N1, Ebola and the Zika virus did not disrupt the business and economic landscape in nearly the same way that COVID-19 has within just a few months in South Africa. The spread of coronavirus has immediately exposed major inefficiencies in systems central to business and institutional processes worldwide.
The World Economic Forum has identified 10 areas where the impact of COVID-19 is already showing major signs of digital acceleration. These include technologies that have previously gained popularity before the global pandemic, including digital health and online entertainment, but also areas that are more traditional and haven’t been disrupted in a similar capacity for decades. These include online education and distance learning systems, as well as telehealth platforms that may relate directly to the monitoring and treatment of COVID-19 patients.
The widespread effect of the virus highlights the necessity for businesses and other organisations to implement digital transformation plans immediately in order to ensure continuity during the crisis, as well as resiliency and even growth in the future.
In South Africa in particular, it could mean implementing a digital strategy to ensure business compliance with COVID-19 health regulations for the workplace, as a negative audit finding could mean disaster all over again for struggling businesses.
Business disruptions as a digital accelerator
When competing in a modern business environment, having a digital presence is considered a prerequisite for effective performance. Online and app-based companies have pushed organisations in a wide range of sectors to innovate and adopt new technologies in order to boost efficiency, as well as assess risks and develop goals using highly granular data, analytics and AI modelling.
In regards to digital disruptions, McKinsey positions technology as not only a disruptor, but also as a means of avoiding and mitigating trends and activities associated with the previous global financial crisis in 2008, as well as providing companies with the tools to further optimise profitability.
As organisations in South Africa face difficulties adapting to this crisis, it’s interesting to think that the primary driver for digital transformation in most organisations were not executives pushing for new technological initiatives, but a viral pathogen.
In the midst of another period of economic downturn and global financial crisis, business leaders should avoid operating in a business-as-usual mindset – investing in digital infrastructure and solutions now is an investment in your organisation’s future.
Document management and process automation – core components of the Laserfiche ECM suite – equip organisations with tools that can help overcome challenges and set goals, including remote working, project management, data analytics platforms and more. These solutions contribute to organisations’ financial recovery, as well as long-term resiliency and competitive growth.
Don’t wait for the next pandemic to hit, use Laserfiche to start transforming your business today.
With Laserfiche web forms, you keep your business running, whether you’re in the office or at home. Information and tasks can be submitted from any smartphone or computer and can be processed from wherever you are in the world, in real-time.
Since you are working with digitised processes in Laserfiche, you can now easily manage workloads and measure productivity. Reporting and analytics built into digital forms help optimise operations by identifying inefficiencies and hidden opportunities.
Digital forms and analytics make it easy to keep tabs on organisation-wide activities and processes, to identify who is doing what, what’s overdue and how long things are taking. This gives you the data to set metrics to have crucial conversations with your team and share information with your executive team and board in real-time.
Noscotek can help you navigate the transition to managing a remote workforce by assisting with communication, metrics and more. Along with business process automation, it can help business flow without manual intervention, so your employees can focus on activities that matter, such as complex decision-making, creative projects and, of course, customer service. Now more than ever, automated processes can enable you to shift to a work-from-home model.
Don’t wait for the next pandemic to hit, contact us to find out how you can use Laserfiche to start transforming your business today.
(011) 100 4678
Editor: Bianca Bornman
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