5 Advanced Technologies Inevitable For Your Business Today

The strategic significance of advanced technologies as a critical business component is recognized by enterprises like never before. Besides business modernization and cost reduction, advanced technologies allow you to compensate for labor shortages, improve brand value and competency, and expedite research and innovation processes. However, several companies jump onto the bandwagon without properly understanding the practical applications and benefits of advanced technologies. The World Economic Forum indicates that only 23% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) worldwide can invest in and grow with new digital tools. This data proves why businesses should crucially analyze advanced technologies before adopting digital tools.

To streamline things, here’s a quick rundown of five advanced technologies we believe will help you cope with the new business and economic environment.

• Simplifying Workflows With Cloud
• Low-code Applications
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Document Data Extraction
• AI Assistants

As these technologies become more affordable and handy, businesses are ardently pursuing them to automate customer service, streamline workflows, differentiate products and services, and reach new markets. Depending on your budget, implementation timeline, priorities, and unique business requirements, our team at Fingent helps you build the roadmap for technology adoption.

Read more: How to gain maximum value from your technology investments?

Let’s take a closer look at the five inevitable technologies for business transformation today:

1. Simplifying Workflows with Cloud

Workflow management is a highly overlooked enterprise strategy that directly impacts productivity. Managing different stakeholders, heaps of confidential data, and a series of preset and conditional tasks manually can lead to several errors, such as employees missing key steps, policy violations, compliance issues, and monetary losses. By taking your workflows online, cloud-based workflow management applications increase your productivity.

Cloud-powered workflows or workflow management tools:

• Are scalable, centralized, customizable to your needs, easy to integrate, secure, reliable, and hassle-free.
• Offer a seamless and unified collaboration interface by preventing users from toggling between different messaging apps or communication channels.
• Reduce your dependency on the in-house IT team by passing on the software maintenance responsibilities to the third-party software vendor.
• Can be accessed via any authorized network (with approved access credentials), on any device, from anywhere, 24/7. This has been a huge game-changer for several companies that switched to remote operations during the pandemic.

Example of a Cloud-based Workflow Tool

Finding a cloud workflow management tool that can be customized to your company’s requirements is daunting. The platform should integrate well with your organizational processes without disrupting your workflow. This is where digital workplace applications like InfinCE make the difference.

With InfinCE Digital Workplace, Fingent has improved its productivity by 20% through real-time, effective, and easy collaboration. Data-powered dashboards, dedicated servers, collaboration apps, productivity tools, virtual desktops, private mobile apps, and a host of exceptional business management features enabled us to achieve a significant operational breakthrough in streamlining workflows.

Read the full case study here.

2. Low-code Applications

Gartner estimates that by 2025, 70% of enterprise applications will use low-code or no-code technologies. Digital business transformation requires pushing custom software solutions to the market at lightning speed. This demand has given rise to low-code applications that will break the technological and organizational silos of application development, automation, integration, and governance. Low-code development enables business users to bring innovative ideas to life by dragging and dropping low-code elements through a graphical user interface.

Simply put, low-code development enables “citizen” developers or non-tech users (such as business analysts or marketers) to build dashboards and survey or contact forms faster. On the other hand, professional developers can leverage low-code techniques to perform more efficient tasks, such as legacy application modernization or back-end integrations, with improved agility and velocity.

Use Cases for Low-code Applications

• Customer engagement applications and portals
• Mission-critical applications such as ERP software, payments manager, etc.
• Data analysis applications, BI dashboards, and data management software
• Mobile apps for customer engagement
• Order processing, inventory, order fulfillment, supply chain, and accounting apps

Salesforce Lightning, Microsoft Power Apps, and Zoho Creator are some of the leading low-code applications today. SAP users can leverage the unified low-code/no-code (LCNC) solutions on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) to rapidly build and extend applications and automate tasks and processes.

Read more: Low Code/No Code Development with SAP BTP: How It Is Turning the Future of Enterprise Resilience

3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), often called software robotics, is an easy-to-use software technology that allows anyone to automate digital tasks within their business processes. RPA allows users to create software robots or “bots” to learn, emulate, and execute rules-based business processes. According to Forrester Research, RPA software revenue is expected to reach $6.5 billion by 2025, while RPA-related services revenue could hit $16 billion in the same year.

Potential Use Cases for RPA 

We offer free proof of concepts to help you understand how RPA can improve your business efficiency and customer experience. Some of our top use cases include:

• Automating discharge protocols and data management to increase HR productivity in healthcare.
• Daily retail processes automation, such as order processing, inventory and warehouse management, etc., to save time and resources.
• Reducing customer wait times through RPA-enabled chatbots that answer customer queries in real time.
• Error-free, automated billing and invoices to keep your financial systems and reports up-to-date.
• HR teams can automate personnel data and records maintenance, streamline onboarding, and seamlessly manage payroll.

4. Document Data Extraction

Extracting quality data from unstructured or poorly structured data sources and documents for further processing, migration, and storing has been the biggest obstacle in automating back-office operations. If you enter structured invoices into a robust ERP tool like SAP, your payments can be automated, and system records can be generated automatically. Due to the high costs of data extraction, several businesses extract only critical information fields, for example, the payment field within an invoice. Businesses are compelled to manually extract data from other important fields, such as validating the invoice’s compliance with VAT.

AI-integrated OCR Software for Document Extraction

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an affordable, game-changing technology that automatically extracts data from the digital images (photos) of large files, scanned documents, and sub-titles or captions superimposed on an image. It reduces the time spent in manual data entry and extraction by automatically converting typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-readable text. AI-powered automated data extraction tools like DocuSign, Docsumo, Kofax Capture, and Amazon Textract leverage OCR technology to reduce the chaos involved in document data extraction and enable businesses to create an efficient workplace.

Our team helps customize document data extraction software that can save you time and money by eliminating transcription and transposing mistakes.

5. AI Assistants

One of the most common examples of small business automation today is using AI-powered virtual assistants. They can save your employees’ productivity by automating the most repeatable customer interactions, such as technical support, appointment scheduling, lead qualification, and order management. AI virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa can understand and act according to your voice commands and customize responses to your queries. Understanding customer intent through natural language processing and recognition allows AI assistants to maintain a human-like conversation.

Chatbots are a popular category of AI assistants designed specifically for text-based channels like SMS, email, and live chat. Recent years have witnessed a rise in chatbot adoption among several business verticals, product and service lines, websites, mobile apps, customer portals, etc. Data shows that 58% of B2B companies and 42% of B2C websites use chatbots to make their websites and mobile apps more interactive. More than 56% of businesses believe chatbots to be driving digital disruption in their industry.

Case Study: AI Virtual Assistant for HR     

Fingent’s HR team was pressed to transform their service delivery model as routine, transactional tasks affected their performance and efficiency. To solve their struggle, Fingent developed MUSA, an AI-powered virtual assistant (a chatbot), and integrated it with Fingent Hub, Fingent’s internal employee management system. MUSA is short for Multi Utility Assistant. Employees can ask MUSA any queries related to HR and IT DevOps processes at Fingent, and they’ll get answered instantly. MUSA has improved our HR team’s response time by minimizing their workload and allowing them to focus on areas requiring more attention.

Business and Technology Are Inseparable!

Gartner writes that businesses with technology employ advanced tech to boost customer experience and revenue growth, clearly understand their priorities, goals, and strategies, and invest in solutions tailored to their needs. Technology allows businesses to lower the walls within and between their organizations, customers, providers, suppliers, etc. Organizations perceiving technology as a key business consideration will be able to match the pace of business change and stay relevant and competitive.

How can your business embrace growth in a new era of transformation and technology trends?

If you’re getting caught in the technology maze, take a quick break to contact us. Our consultants can simplify your technology adoption strategy based on your priorities, customer needs, financial resources, and technical requirements.