7 Proven Ways To Increase Work Efficiency With Automation

In our blog, we talk a lot about the benefits of AI-powered intelligent automation. It can save employees countless hours, improve efficiency, reduce error rates, boost productivity, strengthen employee satisfaction, provide more pleasant patient or customer experiences, and ultimately — through all of these mechanisms — widen a company’s margins by saving money or increasing revenue.

But if you’re thinking about automating processes within your business, chances are you’re already familiar with this list of benefits. You just need to figure out how to increase work efficiency with automation in your own business and realize the advantages for yourself. It’s easy to say you’d like to save time and money, but it takes some careful planning and strategizing to actually get from point A to point B.

If you’re still conceptualizing how intelligent automation might look in your own company, the below list of use cases (and the simple automation ideas listed here) should give you some great ideas to start with.

How To Improve Efficiency In The Workplace: 7 Proven Use Cases For Automation

Many of these examples come directly from our experience working with clients to solve major problems within their companies. If a particular scenario sounds similar to something you’re dealing with, you might want to read some of our case studies for your industry to see the tangible results Nividous has helped our clients achieve.

Healthcare

1. Document Management

Hospitals do their best to provide high quality patient care while struggling under the weight of administrative burdens. One such burden is the vast amount of paperwork attached to every patient who comes through the doors. In some cases, one single patient may have hundreds or even thousands of pages of narrative history, medication changes, previous procedures, allergies, insurance claims and denials, and other relevant information. Hospital staff must stay on top of the constantly changing influx of information, changing central patient records and sending updated records to physicians quickly.

Using intelligent document processing (IDP), healthcare organizations can automate the processes of downloading, reading, classifying, updating, and filing each document. Instead of spending hours sorting through pages of text, they can simply open a patient’s file and see the updated data that’s been checked and validated by the system.

See this case study as an example of what document automation can accomplish.

2. Insurance Claims

Every insurance claim submission requires a specific combination of medical code and modifiers that depends on the patient’s illness or injury and the exact treatment required. There are well over a hundred medical codes regarding knee surgeries, for example, and each applies to a unique situation.

If a fatigued or inexperienced hospital worker submits a claim using the wrong code, the claim will be denied. The hospital will then have to pay the employee for the wasted time submitting an incorrect claim and for the time it takes to correct the problem. Additionally, denied claims come with their own costs, which can add up when mistakes happen frequently.

Worse still, the patient may have to wait for treatment until the issue is sorted out; this can mean delaying important surgeries or spending extra days or weeks in pain before receiving a necessary treatment.

Intelligent automation can solve all these problems with a combination of technologies. Using natural language processing (NLP) and IDP, the hospital can automate the process of reading and extracting relevant data from patient files, while AI handles the task of matching this contextual information with the correct medical codes. From there, RPA bots can submit the claims in a standardized format most likely to be approved. If at any point during the process the system isn’t confident in its chosen course of action, it can ask for human verification and then use machine learning (ML) to “learn” what to do next time.

Banking And Finance

3. Disclosure Notifications

When mortgage companies receive a disclosure package from a client, they must download the documents, read them, and update the central loan processing system fairly quickly. If the deadline is missed, it can lead to a clogged pipeline of to-do tasks and wasted idle resources.

Automation can fix this problem by scheduling an hourly scan to check for new disclosure packages. If a new one is detected, the program can download it, validate the information, extract the relevant data, and update the loan system automatically.

4. Risk Compliance

Many banks employ teams whose primary goal is to run risk assessments and provide asset classifications and risk exposure reports to the bank. Often, however, the processes required to do this job correctly are cumbersome and time-consuming.

For example, one Nividous client used a system that required members of the risk assessment team to manually upload thousands of documents one at a time. In less than a week, we devised an automated solution that uploads each document automatically and emails individual and consolidated reports to the relevant parties.

In less than a week, we devised an automated solution that uploads each document automatically and emails individual and consolidated reports to the relevant parties.

Are you ready to transform financial services with AI and automation?

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IT

5. Help Desk Queries

IT departments — and especially large IT companies — are frequently inundated with requests for help. From highly technical questions to simple bug reports, IT employees must sort these requests and respond to them quickly to make sure no high-priority cases go unnoticed. In some companies, this means IT staff must work around the clock just to stay on top of incoming tickets.

With intelligent automation, the system will continuously monitor for new service requests, sort them into categories based on topic and priority level, and even handle some of the solutions by itself. Complex cases the system is unsure of can easily be passed to human employees with all relevant information attached to accelerate the process.

Additionally, to let customers know their tickets have been received, automated messages over email, WhatsApp, or any other program can provide details of the status of their requests in real time.

Check this case study as an example of what an automated customer service department can achieve.

Manufacturing

6. Predictive Maintenance

When your factory’s machines aren’t running at peak efficiency — or worse, if they’ve broken down or been taken offline for unplanned maintenance — you’re actively losing money. One of the ways automation is revolutionizing manufacturing is by opening the doors for new and creative ways to predict when machines need maintenance before it becomes an issue.

For instance, IoT sensors can measure temperature increases, vibrations, fluid levels, and other key factors, and AI can make complex calculations to determine the exact right point to provide maintenance to save the most downtime and cost. Manufacturers can’t eliminate the need for maintenance altogether, but they can certainly use automation to optimize the maintenance process, fine-tune their production efficiency, and extend the lifespans of their machinery.

Logistics

7. Shipment Tracking

Using IoT sensors, it’s easier than ever for shipping companies to not only track the location of their shipments, but also the condition of each package. Food service companies could receive assurances that their products aren’t sitting in a hot truck for twelve hours on a summer day, for example, and manufacturers of sensitive equipment can keep an eye on temperature fluctuations, dust, vibrations, or any other conditions that might affect the product upon delivery.

Additionally, these two case studies illustrate how automation of sales orders and shipping documents can have far-reaching benefits for logistics companies.

A comprehensive list of ways to improve efficiency with automation could fill an entire book.

Instead, let our experts at Nividous review your unique situation and help you come up with a customized solution to increase your efficiency with automation. With our Quick-Start Guarantee Program, we could even have you up and running with a fully functional automation solution within a month.

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