No more doubts: Survey reveals how digitalisation makes it easier for businesses to work

The aim of the survey, which took place during March, was to analyze the main benefits of digitization and automation in Czech companies. Companies consider the acceleration and simplification of work (49%) to be the greatest benefit. Easier communication with suppliers is mentioned by 27% of respondents and there is also a significant shift in the overview of documents. Managers of 485 Czech companies thus confirm the decrease in routine activities, especially in accounting or administration.

"For example, when processing invoices in a non-digital company, the invoicer must physically pass the documents to their supervisor, or scan them, send them by e-mail, and then take them to the post office and send them to the accounting office. This is time consuming and, in addition, employees expose themselves to contact with many people. Digitization is breaking this down. We now know from some companies that they can no longer imagine manual work with paper documents during the pandemic and when working home office," says Marketing Director Zuzana Lazarová from GRiT, a company that develops software for automating the flow of documents.

Companies appreciate simplifying work the most

The benefit that the addressed companies appreciate the most after deploying tools for digitization or automation is the acceleration and simplification of work. In GRiT's survey of 485 Czech companies, 49% of respondents consider this to be the greatest benefit.

"One of the typical 'victims' of digitization and automation in companies is the processing of received invoices. In a regular business, invoicers must take each invoice in their hand, check it, have it approved and rewritten into the corporate system. In a digitized company, most of these tasks are taken over by a robot, the person at the desk just checks his work briefly," explains Zuzana Lazarová.

Automation in companies has been a trend in recent years, mainly due to the improvement of technologies. Today, for example, they can read or so-called extract invoices completely automatically, people just check that everything is correct. According to GRiT's experience, it took his clients an average of 15 minutes to process one invoice manually. After you deploy the automatic invoice processing tool, the same activity takes about 5 minutes.

Digitization also simplifies communication with suppliers

More than a quarter (27%) research respondents report that digitalisation also simplifies and accelerates communication with customers and suppliers. Thanks to digitization, they are said to have a greater overview of the status of their orders or delivery dates.

"Thanks to ORiON EDI,we are getting rid of routine activities and reducing time to handle business cases," says Luboš Haspekl, IT manager at GECO, one of the survey participants.

A better overview is also important

Another almost a fifth (18%) respondents consider greater overview of work to be the greatest benefit of digitalisation and automation. In a digital business, most of the work takes place in cloud-based tools that authorized users can sign in to from anywhere, and the data is updated in real-time.

It is not the case that people accidentally work with different versions of the same document, or that important information is lost in the company. Today, advanced enterprise, customer, and warehouse systems are running in the cloud.