The automation advantage

Rani Bisal, executive head of business optimisation at DStv Media Sales

In a nutshell, automation is the use of technology to replace repetitive, menial, and error-prone tasks usually performed by humans.

Although data has been identified as the foundation of automation, I personally point back to people as the core. The quality of automation depends on the below factors:

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While basic automation benefits organisations by improving efficiencies through saving time and efforts, intelligent automation focuses more on organisations being more predictive, improving accuracy in insights and decision-making abilities.

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For me, however, the most striking benefit of automation is allowing employees to grow by developing cross-functional skills, allowing them to be future ready while enabling the organisation to become future-proof.

Being part of DStv Media Sales’s current business transformation journey has allowed me to experience these results first-hand through our three key initiatives:

PoC Pricing Automation - Programmatic Trading Portal - Unified Billing Management

We’re improving efficiencies, reducing errors and minimising costs, upskilling and cross-skilling our staff, all while offering our clients a superior and faster service.

In conclusion, automation is not intended to replace humans with technology, but rather to take away the parts of our jobs we don’t like and leave room for more meaningful work, freeing our brains to reach higher and perform better.

I believe that we can look forward to plenty of challenging work because of automation. Freed from daily drudgery, we’ll come through with new ideas, more exciting innovations, smarter ways of working. Our imagination will carry us forward as it always does.