The world has changed potentially forever. Leaders are challenged to rapidly manage changes in health mandates, maintain adequate supplies of key items, and ensure worker safety to sustain the business through the pandemic. Time is of the essence, and automation can rise to meet the need to maintain business continuity. Here are four ways pre-built intelligent automation can help:

Maintain communication

Some employees are working from home, but others are needed at the plant, in the shop, or on the floor. Automation is being used to communicate with team members and periodically check on employees to ensure they feel well enough to staff their shift. The goal is to minimize any further outbreaks and enable employee health.

By gathering and sharing information from the most reliable resources, employers can keep their staff up to date with the latest developments from official health organizations around the globe. For example, in India, they are tracking COVID-19 information from the Ministry of Health, and in Macao, a web page was created to monitor the current state of the pandemic.

Within the health care community, matching patients to their medical history is a challenge and can lead to misdiagnosis or worse. With changing names, healthcare providers, and health information systems, patient matching becomes a must. Fuzzy logic bots help to improve patient matching by using varying distance methods to devise a percentage match score.

Supply shortage mitigation

The pandemic has highlighted just how vulnerable our supply chain is. From obtaining materials to staffing manufacturing lines and delivering goods, few processes are impervious to massive disruption. Maintaining resilience requires quick reaction to real-time inventory changes. Bots can help.

Supply chain management is specifically important for providing key drugs, medical supplies, and COVID-19 test kits. Automation Anywhere and consulting partners are working with several companies to increase real-time tracking and reporting to assure continuity of supply.

Companies are using intelligent automation for a variety of time-consuming processes such as onboarding new suppliers, scheduling deliveries, and creating quotes. This allows organizations to create a more agile supply chain plan. By freeing supply chain managers from manual work, they can redeploy that energy into risk assessment, response strategies, and operational improvements to further combat disruption.

Supporting the workforce

Some industries are experiencing a surge in demand for a workforce. Scaling can be made more efficient by using automation. Digital Workers can help HR teams quickly create requisitions, coordinate interviews, and ensure onboarding is properly executed.

Employees working from home has caused CIOs to rethink their technology strategies. System administrators need to help people work effectively from home while maintaining security and policy compliance. Bots help them provision new work-from-home technologies and maintain proper access to a wide variety of systems remotely.

Cloud engineers can use Digital Workers to spin up or down virtual machine instances and send periodic utilization reports for real-time operational insights into Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure cloud service usage.

Customer relations and engagement

As organizations change how they do business with customers — from product delivery and curbside pickup to phone support — the wait times have been stretched to customers' limits. Automation can help ease the burden and maintain customer satisfaction. Pre-built bots can gather information in disparate systems quickly for agents to significantly reduce call handling time. Automation can also be used to manage schedule changes or bulk update tickets in ServiceNow, Zendesk, and BMC Remedy.

Properly analyzing customer sentiment can be difficult. Natural language processing (NLP) can help understand how positive or negative sentiment is in text or call recordings. Using NLP systems such as Microsoft LUIS and Amazon Comprehend in automation flows allows strategy analysts to monitor sentiment in near real-time, providing the ability to surface and fix issues in customer service.

Quick reaction solutions for business continuity

With more than 900 bots in Bot Store, there are many ways to leverage pre-built automations to maintain business continuity. And for customers with unique needs, there is also the Business Continuity Automation program. Automation Anywhere customers are invited to a free one-hour session with the Quick Reaction Team to identify a business continuity intelligent automation use case, and for selected use cases, work with the team to create a bot to resolve the business issue.

These are just a few ways customers are using intelligent automation to quickly react to today’s rapidly changing environment — and so can you. Maintain agility, optimize capacity, and improve worker efficiency and safety with secure, pre-built intelligent automation.