Digital solutions are taking care of previously manual tasks in all areas of business. It is estimated that for 60 per cent of occupations, at least one-third of their constituent activities could be automated. This raises the significant question of how to best deploy your talent, as technical innovation frees up time.
Rather than scaling back on people resource altogether, it is worth noting that, currently, digital solutions work best under the guiding hand of human experts. Distribution and logistics is also a sector where continuous improvement is vital to securing a competitive edge, and it may be that your newly available team is the key to further growth and breakthroughs.
Leaders should not forget that the ingenuity of their people remains a precious commodity. Redirect free time towards proactivity and planning, driving supply chain excellence.
In this blog we discuss how, to optimise the brain power at your fingertips, you must have the right tools in place.
Mapping the new landscape
As digital transformation shifts and reconstructs job roles, a software solution that provides full visibility of how staff are spending their working days is vital. This allows managers to assess where IT solutions are reducing the time spent on tasks, and conversely, where they are creating new time drains.
Physical timesheets will no longer cut it. Instead, keep track of changing work patterns, using a time and attendance software solution that offers detailed analytics and reporting. Not only should managers be able to view a digital timesheet on any device, at their leisure, but the right solution will include intuitive visualisation – literally creating a picture of when and where their team is working, and what on. As automation necessitates changes to the work environment, the right software will allow leaders to accurately assess how their staff are adapting. They can then make speedy, informed decisions about how to best deploy their people resources in this brave new world.
Time for insight and innovation
With time and attendance software, leaders can assess which employees have excess capacity due to the efficiencies of new digital solutions. The question then presented is: how best to use this human potential?
In distribution and logistics, teams likely to be affected are those involved in data collection and processing, such as procurement. By choosing software to deal with manual processes like inputting supplier contracts or copying over data from PDFs, you free up your people to think about strategic business issues. Software should automate daily transactional work, leaving humans able to do what they do best; think creatively, and apply their expertise. This could look like increased data analysis, translating the numbers into actionable next steps, or examining policy, or assessing if there are any opportunities to add value to customers that are currently being missed.
Rather than firefighting and grappling with the day to day, automation and software solutions free up time for going above and beyond.
Invest in your people
However, there is no point creating time for innovation if your employees are not incentivised to think big. Workforce recalibration should be implemented concurrently with a strong performance review solution, allowing leaders to set new goals related to creative thinking and improvement. Team members will need clear direction and guidance as their roles change in line with the company’s new digital capabilities. A strong performance and talent solution allows managers to set clear and agile goals, or workers to decide their own goals for review. By mapping these out, tracking them and feeding back in real-time, leaders can guide team members to redirect their efforts towards innovation.
Brain drain? Retrain
As workplace priorities shift, there has been a 15 per cent increase in organisations investing in upskilling and reskilling, with 41 per cent prioritising training their workers for new tech-focused supply chain jobs. Digitisation brings with it a host of new skills required, from data science for predicative analysis to proficiency in database coding languages like SQL; network optimisation to robotics maintenance. Rather than filling this gap by outsourcing or creating costly new job roles, it is worth thinking about whether your staff have time released from manual tasks which could now be spent on an upskilling program. Use the overview offered by strong time and attendance software to see if your new digital-skills ready workforce is already right under your nose...
The new phase of digitisation, far from removing the need for workers, instead calls for a reassessment of where human qualities are the most valuable and how they can be best utilised. Whether this will continue into a future of era of artificial general intelligence (AGI) - where software has human intelligence - remains to be seen, but in the meantime, reallocate human skills to where they are most needed: to drive progress and innovation.