Every day, companies and employees spend a great amount of their working hours on manual, repetitive, and sometimes mundane tasks. We often see this as a natural by-product of our core responsibilities and seldom tend to question the existence of these monotonous activities. However, there is a fairly simple recipe to reinvent the way you execute your daily work and get rid of the manual tasks: automation.
AutoMate—identifying 100 000 hours of manual work across Visma
To emphasise the importance of automation and it being part of our strategic focus going forward, a new group-wide initiative for 2021 has been launched: AutoMate.
AutoMate has the ultimate goal of identifying 100 000 hours that can be freed up through automation, leaving our employees and customers with more time to spend on their core business.
The focus is not only to gain efficiency by freeing up time, but by introducing robots we are reducing the dependency on certain employees, eliminating human errors and increasing the quality of our services. So far, we have reached the goal by 40%, receiving 36 reported processes that sum up to 39 500 hours of manual work.
Driven employees are the core of the project
In the AutoMate project, employees from all Visma’s locations are encouraged to spot and report automation ideas. The manual processes that are identified can often be found in several departments and products, making AutoMate a collaborative platform that enables transparency and synergy effects.
Apart from letting everyone report ideas, a new community has also been established where employees eager to find new innovative ways to execute existing processes can sign up.
The so called ‘Automation Challengers’ come together once a month to share automation ideas and experiences as well as participate in different automation trainings.
Get a peek into working with automation with Automation Talks
As part of the AutoMate project a new video series has also been launched: Automation Talks.Throughout the year you will get short glimpses of the exciting world of automation through our inspiring guests who are eager to share their knowledge and experience in this important area.
In the first episode, you will meet Leif Arne Brandsaeter who is the Managing Director of Visma Enterprise Norway. Leif Arne reflects on different topics related to automation such as how it has changed the workspace, and what he thinks automation will look like in the future.
“By using a robot or an automation tool, you basically get a much higher degree of quality in all of the manual tasks that you have […] it also makes work a bit more fun.
In addition, many of our customers have also seen the possibility to reduce staffing in certain areas. Not necessarily that they are leaving their job, but that they are being transferred to more important or value-based tasks.”
— Leif Arne Brandsaeter, MD Visma Enterprise AS.
Why we believe in the power of automation
It is safe to say that automation has been a great game changer for companies. In Visma, we are passionate about bringing technology closer to our customers and employees and see process automation as a valuable tool to help people thrive and businesses to stay competitive. We believe that robots should enhance, and not replace, human interactions.
Do you have a suggestion of a process that should be automated in a Visma product you are currently working with or using? Do not hesitate to report your idea through this form.
Interested in learning more about how we work with automation, robotics and artificial intelligence?
