Facilitating a Safe Workplace During COVID-19 with Cognitive Automation — Gleematic A.I

Facilitating a Safe Workplace During COVID-19 with Cognitive Automation

Welcome to the year 2021, where we embark the new beginning with hopes that this year could be a much better year than the previous — especially after what we have gone through in 2020. The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) arose in the beginning of 2020 and its presence has been affecting most of our life aspects in a disruptive manner, especially how it disrupts not just the overall business operations and opportunities, but as well as the working environment. This unprecedented pandemic leaves organizations stumbling with the biggest uncertainty of how their business will continue to grow — or whether it will ever grow again, while the fear of the virus spreads in an accelerated velocity compared to how the virus spreads itself.

Pandemic brings key activities, including business operations, to halt. Quarantine, isolation, lock-down, travel restrictions are giving deep impact on the economy of multiple industries — leaving them in a steeply slope of their business curve. But business must keep going.

From the quarter of 2020, organizations all over the world have been implementing remote working as well as assigning workplace management by splitting workers to work remotely and physically. This leads to a significant decrease of productivity and this drop may be caused by the workplace management system that is not effectively and properly designed. Looking at this issue, the new question arises: how to survive your business in this pandemic?

Welcoming New Normal, but How to Stay Alert of COVID-19 In Workplace?

In the nearing end of 2020, the COVID-19 case curve is sloping. This results in an immediate action to boost productivity back to the closest level as before COVID-19 struck. Business are starting to reopen, their daily activities and operations are slowly becoming more active each day. However, considering the resumption of work activities, there are also arising challenges and risks that require our smart handling to mitigate, in order to stay alert that COVID-19 is still airing without certainty of how it will ever end.

What are those challenges and risks?

• It is compulsory for businesses to comply with various regulations to be able to fully resume work activities in a physical manner.
• Stringent safety measures must be implemented to all the workers in workplace/worksite, to reduce or minimize the risk of the COVID-19 spread. This will mean to reduce the physical interaction of on-site workers across departments or teams.
• Project timelines have been disrupted and delayed, how to optimize planning in the new business condition is a highlight every companies must pay attention to if they want to chase from where they have left of. This will require an integrated system that allows scheduling plans management, even during new normal.
• Smart, accurate, and real-time management is necessary to monitor the health status of every workers to press the possibility of infections among workers. This include how to provide unexpected scenario plan if any workers’ health status is not supportive for them to be able to work on-site.

Tracing the challenges and risks, a question appears: how might we create a smart management to provide a safe workplace during COVID-19?

Utilizing Cognitive Automation to Facilitate a Safe Workplace Management During COVID-19

A solution should be able to answer the question, how to mitigate the addressed challenges and risks? The most important thing is, how to create a safe workplace during COVID-19?

What are the criteria?

The solution needs to deliver supportive capabilities:

• As a health-monitoring solution: Plays role in receiving, collecting, reporting data inputs relating to workers’ health status. As an example, swab test results.
• As a exposure-monitoring solution: Plays role in making prediction as preventive measurement on possible level of COVID-19 exposure risk based on the contact tracing systems that would be in line with data of health-status. The solution should be able to utilise, process, and analyse both existing and incoming data inputs.
• As a health-assessment solution: Plays role to merge and analyse multiple data sets to generate a risk assessment level that indicates whether a worker is qualified to work on-site.
• As a smart management of planning solution: Plays role in managing and monitoring the execution of scheduling plan, as well as assigning scheduling plan that is always changing in line with the dynamic condition of COVID-19. A solution should be able to make changes on existing scheduling plan if any condition is met, e.g. if a certain stipulated worker is not qualified to work or if any new COVID-19 regulation is to be respected.

Cognitive Automation, the solution we all need

Cognitive automation (automating business processes with artificial intelligence) is attracting worlds’ attention, especially during COVID-19 pandemic that forces restrictions on most of business activities. Empowered with A.I. with cognitive functions, cognitive automation is not only able to automate business operations, but also simplifies existing workflows. This will result as a robust and agile digital tool to overcome issues regarding manual and traditional work replacement.

Cognitive automation embeds powerful A.I. features to boost up its capabilities in making the work easy for human, such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Image/Object/Face Recognition and Detection. But in what area we can use them?

• Complex decision-making from large amounts of data
• Extraction of information from documents (data-extraction)
• Face/Object/Image detection and recognition
• Interpreting unstructured text (text-analytics)

With its wide cognitive features, cognitive automation becomes a solution that companies can implement to mitigate addressed challenges and risks arising during COVID-19’s new normal, in terms of facilitating a safe workplace for workers.

Overview of how cognitive automation can automate the overall workers’ health management workflow:

1. Digitizing incoming workers’ health examination results through intelligent document extraction. Intelligent document extraction plays role in extracting key data-points relating to workers’ health status, then generate an Excel/CSV file that compiles all the extracted health-status data of all workers.
2. Processing and integrating health-status data. This means making data integration possible with automation. From the document file generated from data extraction, data will be transferred into the company’s system that is used to monitor workers’ health status. Cognitive automation can enter and update data on the system, as well as collecting and merging data from system to be imported in a new document sheet or report.
3. Using the incoming and existing data inputs, cognitive automation can be used to predict the health-risk or level of COVID-19 exposure. This is predictive analysis capability that is possible through A.I. Machine Learning, where can be used as a preventive measurement of COVID-19 possible level rate of exposure.
4. By predictive analysis, workers can be divided by their readiness to work. Whether they are qualified for work on-site or not, cognitive automation can decide, with close to 100% accuracy.
5. Real-time management by processing the result of predictive analysis. This means sending notification or alerts if certain risk level is achieved, or to send updates to all workers regarding who is qualified for work on-site. Cognitive automation can also update the workforce management platform where scheduling plan is, to list workers that are qualified for work and who are not.
6. On-site monitoring. Generate a safety measurement level and monitors if a worker daily health-status reaches limit, then send alerts if any workers reach the risk level.
7. As a smart management of planning system, cognitive automation can generate weekly or monthly scheduling plan including who is the worker qualified for work based on their readiness of work. Cognitive automation can also get updates gradually of new COVID-19 regulation, then make changes on the existing scheduling plan accordingly. Intelligently, cognitive automation can handle unexpected occurrence e.g. if a worker is suddenly sick or unable to work, then make changes on the existing scheduling plan by assigning new qualified worker.
8. Generate overall report. Cognitive automation can generate report, either weekly or monthly, without human intervention in the process. Human-staff just needs to do fast verification and validation, of the repot that is generated automatically by cognitive automation.

In a summary, capabilities of cognitive automation that can facilitate a safe and smart management of workplace during COVID-19:

Do you have project to automate? Contact us now for a FREE 1 hour consultation in order to find out how our Gleematic can help you!

Written by: Kezia Nadira

Originally published at https://gleematic.com on January 17, 2021.