Author:Michael Slattery
April 6, 2022
5 Reasons to Employ A Digital Workforce
Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger
5 min read
"Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger"
Like the song by Daft Punk (and also apparently a New Zealand science-based reality television series), workforces are encouraged to become “bigger, better, faster, stronger” in how they operate in today’s marketplace. A team can achieve these goals in a multitude of ways, but without investing in technology it becomes difficult to accomplish all four in a meaningful way. For example, if you want a better and faster workforce, one idea could be to introduce better talent into your employee pool. In today’s market that better talent will usually come at a higher cost, not to mention the intrinsic cost of time/effort to onboard them. Ultimately, this initiative could weaken your PnL or lead to a smaller workforce, shrinking the amount of business you can take on. This approach is just one example of many where it becomes a balancing act for the management team.
So, let’s think about how investing those same resources into a Digital Workforce can lead to growth in all those areas by looking at five key areas it could improve a project:
-
Higher degree of accuracy - over time as a human does the same task over and over, there becomes two main barriers they face. One is exhaustion of doing the same task repeatedly, which leads to errors. The other is a limit to what they can see or look for verses their colleagues. By converting a lot of these manual tasks to digital workers, both issues are resolved. Where a person gets tired, the machine just continues to plug away. Where an individual is limited to learning based on what they see, a digital worker can share that information seamlessly across many nodes. Over time these two key distinctions can lead to better accuracy in both the data gathering and analytics spaces.
-
More optimized scheduling - during any sort of reviewing or entering of data the hours can get rough. Trying to balance both QC and data loading can become very taxing and leads to around the clock sprints to be able to balance both entering what has been submitted and checking along the way to ensure that information is correct. By employing digital workers, a lot of these tasks can be done around the clock with a report being generated on the fails that you may want to take a closer look at. Here there is no need to worry about what hours of the day the data is submitted, or who is available to help review, QC or load it--you can just have a team “on-call” ready to handle the loading and QC and kick out reports for review along the way.
-
Enhancing time to completion through scalability - for most projects you are limited to the number of available staff members with a small possibility of scaling up with some temp workers who are often more expensive and less productive. With a Digital Workforce you are able to scale just at cost of the machine, which allows you to shrink or expand the time to completion based off the project timelines.
-
Improved task training and onboarding – on many teams, people may move around from different projects or initiatives or even move on from the business itself. When these things happen it becomes very time intensive and costly to retrain a new person to backfill roles. Do you need to hire a new person? Do we need to shift someone on the team from another area? Was the documentation of the tasks sufficient to make the transition period easier? Given it was a long time since we did this process, what knowledge have we retained? All these sorts of questions fall to the wayside when using digital workers. Instead, there is a clear list of tasks they are trained to do, and can be turned on and off, or more can be added with a click of a button.
-
Reduction of costs with added capabilities – to most people this one should not be a big surprise. Over the last decade the cost of labor has steadily risen whereas the price of computing power has remained the same. But keeping those costs equal, let’s explore some areas where more value is added using the same hours of the day:
a. It is unreasonable to think an employee will have no downtime. People need to eat, sleep and other things over the course of the day. When employing digital workers that sort of downtime can be handled differently. For one, they could use their vCPU for another task or worker employed. For another, they could be scaled down to incur little to no cost.
b. Have you ever come out of a meeting and tried to consolidate notes with your team? With advancements in meeting technology many services offer transcribed notes from any given meeting. Now, marrying this with a digital worker who can not only automatically get those notes and share with the team, but also add a layer of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Sentiment Analysis to help understand how a person was actually conveying their points.
Whether it’s for one or for all of the five reasons I mention above, compliment your human workforce with a Digital Workforce to make it Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger.
The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the individual authors and do not represent the opinions of BRG or its other employees and affiliates. The information provided in this blog is not intended to and does not render legal, accounting, tax, or other professional advice or services, and no client relationship is established with BRG by making any information available in this publication, or from you transmitting an email or other message to us. None of the information contained herein should be used as a substitute for consultation with competent advisors.