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As defined by Gartner, a citizen developer is a persona for an employee who creates application capabilities to be used by themselves or others – for example, forms, automations, connections to other systems.  The increase in citizen development is part of the trend towards the democratisation of IT – people who don’t sit in the IT department being able to access sophisticated technical capabilities without technical or development training. These people are working within individual business units and are using no-code tools to rapidly develop applications. They simply don’t need advanced technical training. They need an analytical mindset and an understanding of their subject matter, but they don’t need to be developers. And they are on the rise – with an ever increasing younger, more tech savvy workforce wanting to develop their own applications. Gartner further showed in 2021 that 41% of organisations already used a platform for citizen development, while another 27% expected to use one within the next 12 months.

What are the implications of this for legal? Who are the new citizen developers in law? We’ve heard from a number of them in this white paper. In a GC’s office, they are the legal ops specialists who sit in the legal innovations department and their role is, with input from the legal experts, to assess the challenges the department faces and begin to develop these applications. In law firms, it’s not the front-line lawyers developing these applications (although as we’ve shown in this paper, they will have a massive contribution to make) but rather the Legal Tech teams. 

We are witnessing the rise of multi-functional teams to develop solutions. Lawyers or people with legal expertise plus IT departments who arrange and secure the correct platforms for delivery, join with citizen developers or legal technologists. The latter of these, take the expertise of their lawyers, assess the solution that needs creating and then are developing them on no-code platforms. And no-code is a massive growth area – Gartner predicted a 23 percent expansion within business Worldwide during 2021.  

The implication for cost reduction by moving this functionality out of pure IT development and into legal is massive. Automation is now in the hands of the citizen developer making it possible to automate areas that previously could not as the gains in time simply did not justify the investment.

There is no doubt that the shipping and logistics industry is facing a challenging yet opportune time. Spiralling fuel costs, labour shortages, sustainability, new government regulations and, of course, the small matter of a global pandemic, have contributed to unpredictable, highly disruptive waters.  But, as The Economist neatly put it recently, “the era of predictable unpredictability is not going away” – with challenges come opportunities. The pandemic has seen shipping volumes explode as consumer demand continues on an unprecedented level. The industry has invested heavily in response to this – we’ve seen the rise of robotic technology to automate processes from picking to packing, inspecting to container stacking. However, what of the fundamental digital processes and documentation that sit behind the physical movement of goods? The instructions to partners, the insurance documentation, the verification of processes, the letters of credit, the accounts payable invoicing? Are these time and energy intensive processes keeping up with today’s volumes?  Will ‘the way you’ve always done it’ be enough to keep pace with growth now and in the future? Could you improve operational efficiency and save money by automating these processes? 

Still not sure? Consider this example.  Research from Drewry Shipping Consultants estimates the container liner industry carries 60% of the goods (by value) moved internationally by sea, deploying 5,100 container ships worldwide on approximately 400 scheduled liner services, most of which sail weekly. This generates a global transport revenue of some $166 billion a year in transport revenues. But it also creates 1.26 billion freight invoices.  Each of these has to be issued, verified, paid and reconciled.  Astonishingly, the majority of these are still handled manually, making it a costly and onerous process, rife with errors.  The level of automation of invoice reconciliation and settlement is very low, particularly among small and medium size players. Drewry states the cost of these process inefficiencies represent $34.4 billion a year.  

Imagine an easy-to-create and run system that could massively simplify this.  A process that makes it faster, more accurate and less resource heavy. Technology is available today to easily create a workflow to reconcile bookings, invoices and payments automatically, linking all stakeholders, ensuring digital records are kept for verification. All stakeholders can see it, track it and have the digital evidence.  

But this is just one example. The reality of a modern-day supply chain is that every element of the process still generates a huge volume of documents. In fact, it’s estimated that every year, 12 billion documents are processed in ocean forwarding alone. Business leaders in the shipping and logistics sector should be looking at digital automation as a chance to change, to scale up and future proof their business.  

Typically, the generation of shipping documentation has been handled by people because the cost of digital automation was simply too high and too complicated to create. However, today the use of cloud-based low-code and no-code automation platforms means that companies in shipping and logistics can build, operate and support an automated system with non-technical staff and budgets from a few thousand pounds  a year. It has opened intelligent automation up to companies that could not previously afford this kind of tech. Platforms such as AUTTO have a lot of flexibility and yet also allow control, audit trail and monitoring and allocating tasks to your team. These systems will automate document production, calculations, task allocation, approvals, data transformation, integrations and update records. Potentially packing lists, bills of lading, certificates of origin, invoices and letters of credit can all be automated. 

As software completes tasks within seconds instead of hours it cues staff or another automation to begin the next task – the overall pace at which your business responds increases. This means not only time spent doing a task is reduced but the ‘time elapsed’ between when a job was requested, and when it is completed drops rapidly. As your customers (both internal and external) are becoming more used to an ‘Amazon Prime’ business culture of immediate fulfilment, then the ability to deliver quickly is a competitive edge. 

As an industry run increasingly by robotic process automation, leaders of shipping and logistics businesses should also be looking internally to ascertain which operational processes could benefit most from digital automation.  We at AUTTO help businesses  make operations leaner – improving customer satisfaction whilst using as few resources as possible – by helping you to create your own digital automation workflows. A few simple changes can really transform your business.  With the challenges and opportunities currently facing the shipping and logistics industry, now is the perfect time to start to reap the benefits of adopting this leaner approach to operations using digital automation.  We’d love the opportunity to talk to you more about how your business can benefit and provide you with a free trial of AUTTO. https://www.autto.io/free-trial/ 

If you’d like to understand more about our approach to lean operations using digital automation you can download our white paper here: https://www.autto.io/three-step-guide-to-lean-operations/ 

1 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/12/18/the-new-normal-is-already-here-get-used-to-it?frsc=dg%7Ce

2 https://www.solent.ac.uk/research-innovation-enterprise/documents/china-centre/global-maritime-weekly-digest-08-05-2018.pdf

3 According to in a Billentis report last year, of all the invoices issued worldwide, a jaw-dropping 90% of them are still processed manually

This week sees the big return to work after the Christmas break.  But after the last of the celebrations are over is the real hangover your lack of enthusiasm for work?  Has time off made you reflect and realise certain parts of your role are over repetitive, uninspiring and just taking up too much time?  Are you considering quitting your current role and finding a job where you feel more engaged, more valued and one where you feel more excited to turn up every day? You are not alone. Globally business is witnessing what has been termed “the big quit” – in the UK alone the number of open jobs rose to a record high of 1.1 million in the three months to August 2021¹. Employee burnout is also on the increase – research shows a 15% global rise this year increasing to a jaw dropping 81% in “non-thriving” company cultures.² 

The good news is that the effects of an almost two-year global pandemic have thrust digital transformation on employers and a recognition of the need to use this digital investment to keep their valuable staff.  Leading employers are becoming increasingly genuine about putting the employee at the centre of the business.  They want to keep them engaged, create space for critical thinking and problem solving and use their time and talents to develop the business.  Some are embracing automation as a way to take away those ‘time-rich, imagination-poor’ yet critical tasks from employees.  

‘Business automation is getting software to do some work so that humans don’t have to.’

Automation software loves the work that people hate. It is good at speed, repetition and accuracy. “No-code” platforms like AUTTO make automating key business processes and documents easy.  Automating these tedious but nonetheless important daily tasks of every company will free up your time – our customers tell us about 75%.  Investing in a technology that can replace the hours you spend, for example, laboriously cutting and pasting into a spreadsheet or sending out endless emails, proves an employer is invested in you and wants you to feel more valued and empowered to make decisions for the good of the business. Routine documents such as order processing, contracts, invoices, sales activity reports, quote generations, T&Cs, licenses and more can all be replaced with automation. If technology can take care of the mundane, repetitive tasks, that frees up your time to focus on more challenging, creative projects. 

Platforms like AUTTO are so easy to use that non-IT staff with no programming skills are being given the automations to identify and create – after all you are at the coal face of your business and know which processes need changing.  With AUTTO anyone can automate in a few hours with our simple no-code platform.  No technical expertise is required. You can take any of your unique business processes, easily learn the system and, like Lego building blocks, automate them.  

Automation is driving huge change in the employee experience of work. Perhaps as you return to work this year you should be asking your employer what investment they are making in automation – after all, it is in effect, an investment in you.

References:

¹Office of National Statistics 2021
²O.C.Tanner Europe Global Culture Report 2021

So as another pretty challenging year draws to a close, we see those businesses that have taken practical steps to strengthen operationally are those that have responded best to the market’s prolonged volatility.  Continuing to build this resilience into 2022 will be crucial. With last year’s accelerated trends of remote working, e-commerce and digitisation now firmly considered the norm, smart businesses have realised they must now introduce a leaner operational platform to weather future storms to maximise customer service and reduce waste.  As businesses learn to live with the “new way” of doing things the scalability digital automation provides to help meet this end goal will be pivotal. 

A lean operational approach should be at the top of every CEO’s Christmas list. This approach – where the central business goal is to focus on providing greater customer satisfaction whilst using as few resources as possible – requires leaner processes and procedures.  By digitising these processes, many successful businesses in 2021 have already been able to track, monitor and efficiently manage their growth. Critically, by automating routine tasks as much as possible, they have left themselves breathing space to scale-up, and if necessary, easily scale down as market demands change.  

The cost of automation has previously been too high or too unique to a particular business. But the low-code automation solutions now available democratise technology making automation more accessible to the everyday business user.  The use of cloud-based low-code (simple scripting) and no-code (drag and drop) automation platforms, means that companies can build, operate and support an automated system with non-technical staff on a budget typically of just a few thousand pounds a year. Given the challenges of constricted budgets and fewer IT resources to support internal processes (as IT is simply still too busy digitising the whole business!) line-of-business teams should be looking at self-service by turning to low-code solutions to automate business operations, documents and knowledge quickly and easily. 

Similarly, one of the critical benefits of digitisation is the ability to scale up or down quickly and seamlessly.  Cloud-based software gives organisations the option to increase or decrease capacity with the click of a few buttons of a website. 

One of the advantages of digitisation that perhaps we had not appreciated so much until this year is that modern cloud-hosted digital services do not care where you are in the world.  They don’t care if you are at home or in the office as long as you can log in. Not every employee in every business can work from home, but there is no doubt that the more digitised savvy companies found this transition much more straightforward.  

 Lean automation can deliver time savings of 75-99% on routine work, and perhaps more significantly, increase accuracy.  While it is overstating the case to say most businesses can be completely automated ( these kinds of gains can dramatically increase a team’s capacity.  That means when your company finds itself back on the now familiar rollercoaster ride of recent months over 2022, your teams will have the time and ability to navigate and successfully manage the ups and downs.