Why is Automation More Critical than Ever During the Pandemic?

In the last few months, the pandemic has pushed companies to automate their process and reap its benefits. The healthcare industry saw a steep rise in the number of patients, and it became difficult to manage the inquiries, to handle such a scenario, many healthcare institutes took the help of artificial intelligence to handle the influx of patients and achieved satisfactory results.

The pandemic has acted as a catalyst to the process of automation, and the post-pandemic era will see a world that will have more machines and robots taking over the humans for even mundane works. In this article we will shed light on some prominent industries that have seen a sudden rise in the use of robots during the pandemic. The rise of automation was inevitable and the current situation has only catalyzed the process. It is expected that AI and machine learning will take over several mundane tasks that are currently performed by humans.

Insurance

The insurance industry is greatly affected by the pandemic and is pacing up to automate some of the processes to reduce the reliance on human resources. With more and more people ensuring against the risk of a COVID-19 infection, the industry is overwhelmed with increasing requests along with a shortage of workforce. As the industry is heavily reliant on the physical documentation, there are more chances of errors and reworks. Moreover, with continuous social distancing and lockdowns it’s not feasible to ensure collection of documents in person.

By using Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), it is possible to reduce the workload and increase the efficiency of the system. Deep learning tools like KlearStack can extract the data from the unstructured documents and can also help in creating actionable insights. Adopting these small practices can majorly help the industry in boosting its performance and reducing the turnaround time.

Healthcare 

The pandemic situation has shown a lot of inefficiencies in the healthcare industry and the future depends on optimizing healthcare to have a better service mechanism and response to the demand. The major concern that needs to be worked upon is giving time to the healthcare professionals as nurses spend a lot of time on managing the paperwork.

As the number of patients increases, it becomes critical for the staff to focus more on the caretaking of patients rather than administrative activities. The facilities that used EMR and EHR records have greatly reduced the burden on the staff and gave more time to focus on the patients. Using telerobots to answer the general queries of the people via calls and emails will be an added advantage and save time for nurses. In the coming years, the industry will have to invest heavily in automation for better operations management and to manage the excessive manual paperwork being handled every day.

Using advanced platforms like KlearStack, organizations can easily convert the physical paperwork like invoices and payment orders to digital text and can directly feed it to the ERP for reconciliation. The platform saves the time and effort of the departments and helps them to focus on other important tasks.

Manufacturing and Production

In the current gloomy scenario, the production units which have faced a major layoff and reduction in the demand are sustaining with the help of automation to reduce the exposure of workers to infection and to continue production for small batches. Even though the global demand has fallen sharply, the companies are preparing for the post-pandemic situation by using artificial intelligence and robotics to reduce the human workforce. The inventory and resource management is another sub-segment in manufacturing that is investing heavily in automation. The implementation of technology like Artificial Intelligence on assembly lines of the industries has been marginal but the pandemic has changed the course, and industries are working to automate the tasks and train the staff to utilize the effectiveness of the RPA.

A report by McKinsey & company has suggested that the Indian automobile industry will face the shortage of labor for the production lines and assembly units. The migration of labor and concerns regarding health and safety has led many industrial units to be shut and follow the new government norms, these sectors have to automate the industrial processes and go digital on the shop-floor.