So here’s the biggest issue facing enterprise operations in the next couple of years: what to do with staff impacted by automation. Our brand new 2018 State of Operations study, conducted with KPMG, over half the Global 2000 firms surveyed believe transactional roles will be significantly impacted by automation within just a two-year timeframe:
So we thought we’d poll the 120 buyers at the new York FORA summit this morning as we asked them what they intended to do with their impacted staff:
While a good portion are already thinking about “retraining” their impacted staff to take on analytics work (21%) and help manage new tech such as RPA and ML (16%), the vast majority (40%) are just honest and reveal they just don’t know.
Bottom-line: We have to plan for automation better
As automation fever takes over business operations (and we’ll reveal that data next), my one plea to industry is to plan this better. CFOs and CIOs investing $ millions in bot licenses and consultants to implement them will be expecting a return on their investment, and if operations leaders do not have a concerted plan to use the freed up man hours, you can be sure there will be intense pressure to reduce even more heads than may have been in the initial plan.
Posted in : Robotic Process Automation
as much as I believe there is no one size fits all solution here – to manage the newly freed up workforce due to automation, I believe there could be general pointers to the leadership on how to better utilize them. Apart from retraining and reskilling the ones with the aptitude and the attitude to learn more technical work, what do you think are the other options open?