According to Bain's recent survey, automation of business processes is rapidly scaling up, with the fallout from the coronavirus likely accelerating adoption. Thanks to automation, companies revealed cost savings of roughly 20% on average over the past two years.

The report projects that automation could spread through US companies 2-3 times more rapidly than in previous transformations in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction.

That being said, more than 7.5 trillion dollars of business-to-business sales orders are still manually processed in North America alone, and on average, customer service representatives spend a third of their day keying in purchase orders.

Manufacturers and distributors understand this problem better than most, as they're drowning in customer inquiries at a time when staff are working from home without their typical tools. Automation can reduce costs, create resource efficiencies, scale to thousands of trading partners, and improve the customer experience.

Sandy Shen, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said it best: "This is a wake-up call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments on digital platforms will mitigate the outbreak's impact and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term."

Conexiom, a cloud-based sales order automation solution that companies like Grainger, Genpak, Diversey, Prysmian, Compugen, and many others use to eliminate manual order processing, is validating Bain's findings with unprecedented year-over-year company growth of more than 70%.

Ricardo Craft talks about accelerating automation for business resiliency, as companies aim to re-emerge from the COVID-19 fallout with modernized processes tied directly to measurable business value.