How Cloud Technology And Automation Is Key To Making Businesses More Productive

Published 10/05/2018 by Dean McGlone, V1

Every business wants to be productive. After all, the ability to deliver high quality work by the bucket load is what makes organisations more profitable and successful. Some organisations are better at being productive than others – and it’s not good news for businesses.

According to international comparisons on productivity by the Office for National Statistics, the UK ranks well below other major economies in Europe including Germany, France and Italy. This suggests there are some serious barriers to productivity, with technology and people most likely to blame. Businesses either don’t have the right technology in place to enable productivity or, if they do have the right technology, staff are too disengaged or lack confidence. Outside of the UK, companies must not be complacent either, technologies like AI and Process Robotics need to be considered in order for them to remain competitive in the future and avoid the “Kodak factor”.

The Workforce Institute recently surveyed 3,000 workers across the UK, France and Germany, and found that only 53% of workers noticed a positive impact on their productivity when new technologies were implemented at work. This figure is surprisingly low and could be much higher if the people operating the technology were engaged and motivated in the first place.

So, while every business wants to be productive, every employee needs to have the confidence to use the technology – and see it as an essential ally to their daily work too.

It’s no wonder, then, that enterprise software giant Sage majored on cloud technology and its link to productivity at its Sage Enterprise Management Partner Summit in Seville last week. The event really brought home the importance of simplifying key business processes with cloud connected technology through automation to help people win back time to spend on higher value activities. Its theme ‘Winning Tomorrow Together’ also reinforced the importance of collaborating if we, as a nation, are to make a real difference – and fast.

At V1, we are all too familiar with automation and the importance of supporting organisations’ journey to embrace the cloud to drive significant improvements in productivity. As a Rockstar partner of Sage, our suite of business automation software, which integrates with Sage Business Cloud Enterprise Management, helps organisations save time, money and space. Manual processes are automated to drive unprecedented productivity levels and deliver a wide range of other businesses benefits, for example reduced payment cycles, increased visibility and better data for reporting.

As a platinum sponsor of the Sage event and the vendor of choice for cloud connected invoice automation, V1 was invited to present on automation and how automating mundane tasks in finance departments offers both business partners and end users significant value and benefits when integrated with Sage Enterprise Management. We also ran a separate session on the benefits of the cloud and delivering our automation software in a cloud environment – a move that other Sage partners are taking as 90% of enterprises want to become cloud-first businesses by 2020. We have 20 months until 2020, so there’s a big job to be done helping businesses move to the cloud.

Our customers can now use our software in a cloud environment to deposit documents directly from their tablets and phones. The solution also features support for five new document types as well as faster and smarter searches, document links and annotations. It makes automated emailing simpler to install and faster to use too – all of which contribute to driving greater productivity.

But the key to making it all work, as mentioned earlier, is the people. And that’s where the channel comes in – by providing ongoing education and awareness to staff so they are engaged, confident and motivated to use technology in a cloud environment to help them work better. It is in a unique position to work as experts in their own right alongside organisations and their employees, demonstrating how automation and the cloud can together dramatically increase efficiencies. If vendors, distributors and resellers work as a collective, customers can benefit from a package that makes technology both user-friendly and worthwhile. Do that, experience their own sales and growth opportunities like never before.

So the message from us is loud and clear – move to the cloud, embrace automation and unlock the full potential of digital transformation to realise the unlimited opportunity to deliver efficiencies and drive productivity.