Establish a budget by finding out how much it will cost to produce a fitness app and other associated expenses. Then, get prepared to unveil the fitness app sector’s next big thing.

How Much Does It Cost To Build A Fitness App – Overview

Did you know that in 2022 Paired, a health and fitness app, earned $2.3 million on the Google Play Store? Health and fitness applications are transforming how people track their health and maintain an active lifestyle. Nowadays, many people use fitness applications in their daily lives.

Since fitness apps promote healthy lifestyles by tracking dietary intake, exercise regimens and training plans, every smartphone owner in the 68.7 million-strong United States utilise at least one fitness app.

As a result, both the number of users and downloads of fitness apps have substantially increased. By 2030, the market for fitness apps, which is expected to grow in popularity, will be worth USD 30.63 billion. Based just on market valuation, there is without a doubt a lot of money in this industry.

Fitness app investing is a lucrative industry, according to venture capitalists and IT companies. So, if you’re a business or investor looking to invest in Paired or similar software, now is the time to study the market.

Let’s explore the requirements for developing a fitness app, including the costs, functionality, maintenance, and support requirements.

Cost of Building a Fitness App

Unfortunately, there isn’t a single right answer. Fitness app development costs vary depending on a variety of variables, such as the complexity of the design, the location of the development team, UX/UI design, quality assurance, and more.

There are various kinds of fitness apps. Developers integrate pertinent features based on the type you select, which also affects how much it costs to produce. Costs increase as features increase.

However, before spending further money on the idea, it is usual to develop an MVP of the software and solicit customer feedback. A programme that meets the needs of the user only has the features that are absolutely necessary.

After releasing an MVP, you can gradually add more complex features and attract more customers.

So how can you figure out the cost of developing a fitness app?

Start by calculating the time required for each stage of development, including project management, back-end, UX/UI design, iOS or Android programming, and so on. Then multiply the amount of time by the development team’s hourly fee.

The following is a breakdown of the costs and hours needed to create a fitness application. To more accurately determine the cost, we must be aware of all the project requirements.

Additional Costs associated with developing a Fitness App

The features you include will determine how much it costs to design a fitness app. There are distinct sets of functionality for different kinds of apps. Let’s check out a few key types.

What Kind of Features will Your Fitness App have?

To give you a hint, here are some basic features any fitness app needs to have:

• Registration and Login: Adding different login options makes it easy and quick for users to sign in. You can integrate simple options like signing up via Google or Facebook to get more users to register.
• User Profiles: Users can customize their accounts by entering information such as their height, weight, and fitness objectives. Users can post pictures to their profiles and change their passwords.
• Workout: Your app needs to include a menu of exercises that users may select from. The exercises could include yoga, warm-up exercises, cross-training, and more. You can also include a list of exercises, tips for watching videos while working out, the length of the programmes, and the number of calories burned.
• Nutrition: Meal plans should be available in fitness apps. Users can manage a healthy diet as a result. Users also require the ability to enter data like carbohydrates, proteins, and fats and add their own meals.

Marketing

Your app is getting set to launch after spending countless hours and resources on its development. There are a few practical and easy strategies to promote your software and get it seen.

A promotional campaign should ideally be started during the development phase. However, many marketing strategies will still be effective even if your application is already out.

Here are some of the key marketing strategies:

• Social media – Social networking is the perfect tool for getting the word out about your application.
• Influencer marketing – Using influencer marketing, speciality markets and a larger user base may be targeted.
• Content marketing – Curate helpful information for content marketing that explains the features and potential uses of your software. Create it, then publish it on several websites.
• Blog – A blog is a further resource for promoting your app with fitness-related material. Owning a blog allows you to attract readers via search engines. However, attracting people to your blog takes a long time.
• Ads- Ads, make it easy to locate consumers through advertising. Setting a budget is required for this.
• Online videos – Create films that describe what your programme performs and upload them to the internet, preferably to YouTube.
• Getting listed – getting your app listed on the Play Store or App Store is certainly half the battle won.
• Collaborate with a fitness blog- Work with a fitness blog to spread the word about your app. Look for reputable blogs in your niche and work with them. Certainly, people pay attention to reliable sources.

How Much Money Do You Need to Spend on Marketing?

There are many more ways to advertise the software, including trade exhibitions, PR, web marketing, etc. Through press releases or newsletters, promotional services can push your app and make it more visible to users.

You can make use of social media and other free methods to promote the software. However, you almost always need to set aside money for app marketing. Running advertisements on Google, YouTube, and Facebook are some methods of financial advertising.

Take your app to some trade exhibitions as an alternative. Think large picture when promoting your app at trade events. Develop a marketing campaign to hammer it home and attend some significant trade fairs.

Maintenance & Support

Your development team will be in charge of repairing any bugs that appear after your fitness software is put into use. The team can even give you a way to respond to consumer questions or support requests over the phone, through email, on social media, or in person.

Miscellaneous Costs

The cost of creating a medical app is intricate. App developers can make money in a number of ways. Other minor costs associated with creating and launching a fitness app include accounting and legal fees, software licences, hosting costs, and fees for payment processing. If you don’t budget for these costs, they may add up very rapidly.

The post How Much Does it Cost To Develop a Fitness App? appeared first on AI and IoT application development company.

As IoT makes it possible for machinery and things to interact with one another without requiring human intervention, the full value of data may be gathered through better and quicker decision-making, predictive analytics, and automation.

As billions of items, services, and systems become connected, the proliferation of more accessible and affordable sensors that convert physical data into digital content is anticipated to fuel the Internet of Things industry’s constant expansion.

There will be 11.3 billion networked devices in 2021. It is anticipated that the number will increase to almost 30 billion by 2030.

Current Top Trends in IoT : Benefits and Challenges

The IoT is continuing to develop as a result of the rising number of connected devices, adding new layers to the data that is already shared and processed and giving rise to complex algorithms that lead to higher levels of automation.

As a result, several titans of tech quickly adopted IoT and reaped the benefits. Because they recognize how crucial it is for driving digital transformation and maximizing operational effectiveness, startups and small businesses are progressively riding on the IoT bandwagon. 

So, If you are a budding entrepreneur with a startup here are the top reasons why you should embrace IoT in 2023.

Startups want to make their mark in the competition. Every startup looks to accelerate its growth in different technologies.

There are numerous reasons for startups to embrace IoT. To help you better, we have listed out the top reasons:

High customer engagement

The one word that alters the future of many startups is “customer experience.” Better user experience is currently the number one concern for consumers when supporting brands. When a customer visits your e-commerce website to purchase a car item, you cannot, for instance, display a sneaker advertisement.

You may effortlessly customize the client experience more than ever before with the aid of IoT. IoT and AI-powered chatbot integration will significantly improve the consumer experience. Customer service is made more efficient when AI and IoT are combined.

IoT will also give startups data to help them handle clients better. By spotting trends in a large amount of data, we can analyze problems with products or services early on and fix them. The startup will experience upscale growth as client involvement and experience pick-up speed. IoT adoption in startups is therefore driven mostly by the need to increase consumer interaction.

Boosts marketing efforts

Your marketing campaigns will be more successful if you comprehend the interests and behaviors of your target market. When you use the IoT, you can identify various trends in how clients use the product and determine the precise moment at which to run an advertisement.

IoT makes it much simpler to do target marketing. You can identify your precise target market and choose the ideal timing to introduce a new good or service. Your marketing will be more specialized, targeted, and exact thanks to the utilization of IoT. By doing this, you can reach more potential clients.

Increase in sales

When there are many dissatisfied customers, it can be difficult for businesses to maintain their brand value.

Embracing By examining a large amount of data from other customers where the product fails, IoT can identify patterns of product or service failure. It can act as a preventative step, resulting in a superior customer experience and preventing failure. IoT may also identify customer usage trends, allowing businesses to send targeted emails encouraging repeat purchases or service subscriptions.

Improved communication between the organization and the customers

The evaluations and data from CRM can be thoroughly evaluated in an IoT ecosystem to identify the precise customer pain spots. Instead of altering unneeded things like marketing strategies, you can go straight to the production team with a list of features that need to be enhanced or added and have your product ready for users.

Additionally, by offering priority criteria in development phases and a modulus, the IoT ecosystem will benefit the software development team’s development efficiency.

Omnichannel support

Omnichannel assistance boosts sales for any business today. The IoT-enabled ecosystem will collect a lot of data by combining multiple channels at once.

Omnichannel capabilities can be enhanced with IoT. Using the improved IoT-enabled omnichannel support, e-commerce websites can locate the purchasing area and the endless stock channel. 

IoT is often utilized in warehouses to pinpoint the precise stock status. IoT’s omnichannel assistance will enable you to save a significant amount of time and money.

Optimize productivity and efficiency

IoT implementation at the employee level benefits startups in a variety of ways. Startups may determine how much time is needed to perform a task in addition to enhancing sales, CX, and marketing.

It will be more advantageous when staff members work remotely because you can collect a lot of data on time tracking, productivity, and efficiency.

As a result, it is simpler to effectively prepare for the subsequent project or iteration. With IoT, you can effectively manage your staff from anywhere in the world.

Asset management

IoT adoption by startups enhances regulatory maintenance, risk reduction, and asset monitoring on any device from anywhere. As a result, scalability will be accomplished with appropriate resource management.

Benefits of IoT

There are numerous benefits that demonstrate why IoT is essential for startups.

Here are some key benefits of embracing IoT in startups:

• Data-driven business insights
• Instantaneous knowledge
• Low operations costs
• Enhanced workplace safety
• Deep analysis of customer behavior
• Enhanced business strategies and models
• Edge over competitors
• Real-time analysis
• Increase in business opportunities

In conclusion, IoT offers startups enormous freedom. Users are familiar with IoT and anticipate that startups will use it. Before implementing IoT, you must be aware of the necessary safety precautions. Additionally, when they lack a suitable strategy to accept IoT, many new firms struggle to incorporate it.

You have two options: hire an IoT specialist or do what the majority do and hire outside product development firms to integrate IoT. Startups must adapt to the quick speed of change in the digital industry if they are to prosper in the long run.

IoT-driven efficiency is rising dramatically as a result of advancements in artificial intelligence, networked devices, and real-time communication.

The post Top 7 Reasons to Embrace IOT for Startups in 2023 appeared first on AI and IoT application development company.

Irrespective of the development project you choose, you must be ready for a significant increase in demand and assume the system can manage it.

By collaborating with an established mobile app development company, you may achieve your goals. It increases system flexibility and forces you to take scalability into account before you start developing the mobile application.

Scalability in mobile app development is simply your program’s ability to support an increasing number of users interacting with it.

Therefore, a scalable mobile app is one that can handle traffic variations without affecting its performance and function equally effectively with one user as it can with a thousand.

These are the various scaling methodologies used in app redesign:

• Horizontal scaling enables your server to support more machines.

• Through vertical scaling, you can boost your device’s power.

• Diagonal scaling allows the combining of the two scalability methods stated above.

Scaling mobile applications is a difficult task, and in order for your mobile app to thrive, you must constantly work on increasing your business. Here are the best methods for scaling your mobile app.

Optimize Your App Store Visibility

After you’ve launched your mobile app, next you should focus on expanding your consumer base. Users are unlikely to find your app through app stores alone. You’ll need to work hard on your creatives and maximize your app store visibility with millions of mobile apps available on the App Store and Google Play.

You must prioritize your app’s screenshots and feature descriptions. Make the most of those photos and descriptions because this is what users will see first before deciding whether or not to download your app.

Boost the Organic Reach

One of the best strategies for success on a large scale is organic visibility. You should begin placing yourself before the process of developing the mobile app is complete because this technique takes time. To achieve the best results, focus on developing a sizable base of SEO-optimized content.

You might also try to write guest pieces for respected websites related to your mobile app. Although it will take some time for this to start working, in the long run, organic traffic is often the highest-quality traffic that generates significant growth.

Prioritize Your Product

Even the most expensive marketing campaigns cannot compensate for a subpar product. The reason for this is the requirement to concentrate on mobile app development and create user-friendly goods. If your mobile app has issues, bugs, poor functioning, or poor customer support, your chances of success are minimal.

Because people demand them, creating top-notch mobile apps should be your main priority. Use a variety of techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of your product, carry out ongoing research, and gather and apply client feedback.

All this will make your product better, and in turn, more desirable on the market. Besides the design and usability of your app, you also should focus on its performance.

This means excellent mobile back end and front end. Hiring expert app developers is crucial for your mobile app success.

When introducing new features you can’t push them out hastily. This leads to issues and a decrease in quality. Your tech infrastructure should be made for scaling and be ready for increased demand.

Use Social media Influencers 

The next incredible thing you can do to expand the reach of your mobile app is to make use of influencers, one of the best tools at your disposal. You must first identify the specific influencers that are relevant to your business.

Find companies that are active in a relevant area if you want to reach your target market.

It’s crucial to build relationships with such influencers before offering your goods to them. Before you start working with them, they must have faith in the caliber of your offering and have firsthand experience with it.

Next, ask them to promote your product on the platform they are currently using (eg. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube).

Influencer marketing, according to many businesses, has demonstrated to be a very successful growth technique that may potentially drive a large number of new users to your mobile app.

Get Feedback & Support

The best feature suggestions occasionally emerge right from the users. Utilize the users of your mobile app and ask them for suggestions on how you and your developers can make it better.

One of the best methods to improve your app is to use their comments. Consider your customers as a potent instrument that will help you develop a better product. 

Making sure that your mobile app has the right support resources and services available so that users can get assistance is equally important during the development process.

The quality of your user experience and the customer assistance you offer on your platform can occasionally set you apart from other apps on the market.

How Much Does Mobile App Development Cost in India?

The mobile app development market in India is one of the fastest-growing markets around the world. Android mobile app platform holds over 90% share of the Indian market because it supports a huge variety of mobile devices, cheaper and convenient handsets.

User Experience

When it comes to user experience, customers frequently recall their initial impressions of your mobile app. Therefore, if you’re looking for growth and want to scale up your mobile application, you should focus heavily on developing a superior user experience.

It’s crucial to customize the experience for the user’s preferred platform. To create a seamless experience, you must model your app after the design frameworks of various platforms.

For instance, if you want to scale your Android and iOS apps separately, those two must be different. Android apps have distinctive button designs and navigational frameworks. For a specific platform, your engineers will also need to change components like the layout.

If you’re using a cross-platform framework to create your app, only a small number of code changes will be required. If you want to code your software in a native language, it will take your developers longer to complete the project.

In Conclusion

Scaling Mobile Apps requires time and effort. Any new application, especially those provided by significant corporations, will take some time to become well-known and widely used.

However, you might be able to advertise your app successfully if you make use of the right tools and ensure that your business plan is sound.

The post How to Redesign an App for Scaling | The Complete Guide appeared first on AI and IoT application development company.

In this review, we focus on how AI is being used in a variety of pharmaceutical industry fields, such as drug discovery and development, drug repurposing, increasing pharmaceutical productivity, and clinical trials, among others.

This use of AI lessens the workload of human workers while also achieving goals quickly. We also talk about how various AI tools and methodologies interact, current problems and solutions, and the potential applications of AI in the pharmaceutical sector.

The Fundamentals of AI in Drug Development

AI encompasses a number of approach fields, including machine learning as its core paradigm as well as reasoning, knowledge representation, and solution search (ML). In machine learning (ML), algorithms are used to find patterns in a set of data that has been further categorized.

Deep learning (DL), is a branch of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks (ANNs). These are a group of intricately connected computing components called “perceptons” that resemble biological human neurons in their ability to transmit electrical impulses.

ANNs are made up of a collection of nodes that each process a distinct input before combining them into outputs that may be used singularly or in a network to solve issues. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks are a few examples of the several types of ANNs that are used in either supervised or unsupervised training procedures.

The MLP network can be used for a variety of purposes, such as pattern recognition, optimization aids, process identification, and controls. It is often taught using supervised training processes that operate in a single direction only.

RNNs, which include Hopfield networks and Boltzmann constants, are closed-loop networks with the ability to memorize and store information. CNNs are a group of dynamic systems with local connections that are distinguished by their topology and are used for a variety of tasks, including the processing of images and videos, the modeling of biological systems, the analysis of complex brain functions, pattern recognition, and sophisticated signal processing.

Among the more complicated types are ADALINE networks, RBF networks, LVQ networks, Kohonen networks, and LVQ networks.

Given that AI can help with rational drug design, support decision-making, identify the best course of treatment for a patient, including personalized medicines, manage the clinical data generated, and use it for future drug development, it is reasonable to assume that it will play a role in the development of pharmaceutical products from the bench to the bedside.

Marketing executives can allocate resources for maximum market share gain, reverse poor sales, and anticipate where to make investments with the aid of AI platforms that use ML algorithms and an intuitive user interface to create analytical roadmaps based on competitors, key stakeholders, and currently held market share.

molecules make up the enormous chemical space, which encourages the creation of many different pharmacological compounds. However, the drug development process is constrained by a lack of cutting-edge technologies, making it a time-consuming and expensive endeavor that can be resolved by applying AI.

It can distinguish between hit and lead compounds, validate the drug target more quickly, and optimize the design of the medicine.

The research and drug development process can take over a decade and cost an average of US$2.8 billion. Even then, nine out of ten pharmaceutical compounds are not able to complete Phase II clinical trials and receive regulatory approval. Algorithms like Nearest-Neighbor classifiers (RF), extreme learning machines (SVMs), and deep neural networks (DNNs) are used for VS and may also predict in vivo activity and toxicity based on synthesis feasibility.

In collaboration with IT companies, a number of biopharmaceutical companies, including Bayer, Roche, and Pfizer, have developed a platform for the identification of medicines for ailments like immuno-oncology and cardiovascular ailments.

Several AI-based techniques can be used to predict physicochemical properties. For instance, machine learning (ML) trains the software utilizing enormous data sets produced during earlier compound optimization.

Drug design algorithms use molecular descriptors to create viable molecules using DNN and then predict their properties. These molecular descriptors include SMILES strings, potential energy measurements, electron density around the molecule, and coordinates of atoms in 3D.

AI drug development companies are currently finding over 150 small-molecule medications, and more than 15 of these are already in clinical trials. It would be unable to accomplish this great achievement in the absence of intelligent systems.

As part of artificial intelligence (AI) in the drug development process, automation is employed in the research and development of innovative medications. It involves using technology to foresee how new treatments will behave in the body and to understand how they work. This speeds up the creation of new medications and improves forecast accuracy.

Data processing capabilities also assist organizations using data science and AI in making such waves in the pharmaceutical industry. Machine learning algorithms are capable of quickly learning from enormous amounts of data and making extremely accurate predictions.

It means that computers are now able to uncover promising therapeutic possibilities by sifting through an endless stream of data.

Benefits of AI drug development

The pharmaceutical sector has faced difficulties as a result of a data overabundance. The industry is unavoidably facing challenges as it progressively transitions to digital. Data processing, inspection, and analysis are important but difficult activities for drug researchers.

The following is a list of the main benefits of artificial intelligence for healthcare in general, with a focus on drug development.

Speed of Analysis time

A brand-new anticancer drug is currently undergoing a clinical trial, which was launched by the German biotechnology company Evotec in 2021. The candidate discovery procedure took 8 months, despite the fact that it seemed routine. Systems with artificial intelligence were directly responsible for these previously unheard-of speeds.

The many characteristics of millions of possible tiny molecules may be automatically compared thanks to advanced technologies. The development and analysis timeframes are shortened since it appears that a significant piece of the analysis process is managed by AI.

Savings

$2.168 billion is the average cost per medicine during the R&D process. The drug discovery phase is where the biggest portion of this money is going. Up to $26 billion in annual resources could be saved on medication screening and synthesizing thanks to AI-based drug development.

Avant-garde algorithms for drug discovery

In order to incorporate the most recent technology into the algorithms, machine learning solution suppliers typically keep on the cutting edge of innovation. AI for drug development offers a distinctive combination of health data and technology when combined with powerful computing capacity. The benefits described above are further enhanced by this combinations

Improved Success Rate

90% of medication candidates drop out of clinical trials during the first phase, according to statistics. This percentage will appear even more intimidating if the failure rate during the preclinical stages is taken into account. By evaluating biomarkers that indicate the efficacy of the treatment, intelligent algorithms can reverse the figures.

Big data for healthcare and artificial intelligence also create a single data layer. Advanced machine-learning algorithms can evaluate a wide range of insights, which helps to classify diseases, with the use of vast volumes of medical data.

When all the information is combined, researchers will have a clearer understanding of the condition and viable therapeutic possibilities for each unique situation.

Summary

The process of developing new drugs is challenging. A medicine must undergo extensive development before it is ready for commercialization, which typically takes a further eight years after FDA approval.

However, AI has the potential to significantly shorten this period while lowering costs and increasing the precision of drug discovery.

Additionally, researchers can avoid developing medications that are harmful or have unintended consequences on people by using AI tools to forecast how molecules will interact.

Despite current challenges, AI-developed drugs are gradually entering the pharmaceutical market. The untapped potential of AI will probably start to take off in the next years as a result of the explosion in data.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of networked smart devices, environmental sensors, and other technologies that track assets in several locations.

Without IoT, asset management solutions are prone to data-gathering inaccuracies and delays. Maintenance, underutilization, and reporting may also be a hindrance.

This is due to a lack of data, ineffective asset management, theft, and a miscalculation of real-time consumer expectations. This enables the consumption of targeted material while also forecasting general media and entertainment usage.

The role of IoT in Media and Entertainment

The Media and Entertainment Industry is now better positioned to make informed decisions due to the investigation of many aspects of consumer data. Age, gender, location, time of day, and concurrent consumption activities are among the statistics.

They can then construct more complete client profiles, allowing them to target adverts and personalize content to ensure higher satisfaction levels. The Internet of Things (IoT) in entertainment and media connects the digital and physical worlds. 

Internet of Things (IoT) applications in entertainment and media

The media industry has a huge opportunity due to the rapid proliferation of linked devices. Customers can select what they want to watch and when they want to watch it. Content suppliers gain valuable insights into their customers’ tastes.

These are just a few examples of how IoT has significantly impacted the industry and asset management in general.

• Immersive content
• Personalized content
• Targeted advertising
• Asset Management

Immersive entertainment is now a reality.

Many major corporations are building an entire ecosystem around AR, VR, and IoT entertainment. Among the various alternatives are Facebook’s AR Glasses and Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing device for the Xbox 360.

Amazon also has an AR player. AR Emojis from Snapchat, Disney, and other sources can be made using a smartphone’s camera.

Media giant, Disney has created a tracking and IoT/AR system that will tell visitors of delays and give them important information. They can also provide information about the entertainer by letting visitors know where to find them in the park.

Disney might create smart devices in the future that enable augmented reality gaming in the parks.

The mainstream TV industry is reintroducing smart TVs. The way people consume material has changed from watching it only once to binge-watching a full series or watching it on a certain day thanks to OTT providers and platforms.

Another feature that enables uninterrupted streaming from any device, including your phone and TV, is Chrome casting. Large portions of the population will be able to have new experiences through immersive live events that use IoT devices, VR headsets, and AR glasses.

Personalized content using viewer and user personas

With the proliferation of smart gadgets, content has mainly gone digital. You may go for a stroll, go bicycling with pals, go for a workout, or just drive home.

The music you listen to may give you party, lively, or peaceful music depending on where you are. Your family’s preferences, needs, friend network, and other details can all be seen in the data from social media, smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology.

Netflix currently offers a variety of user profiles that enable interaction with groups of people, not simply single people. Based on your viewing patterns, ratings, and other information, they can use AI to predict what material you’ll want in the future and which content category you fall under. Using viewing data and profiles, content is tailored to the reading level of each person.

They developed a social streaming service called Telepathy that uses the Facebook gaming network to connect users and stream movies. Users can talk by logging in with their Facebook accounts. This was a big success because group activities were impossible during the pandemic.

High-quality, exclusive streaming options

Let’s take a look at the entertainment market in the game industry. Mobile phones, tablets, and portable gaming consoles are examples of IoT devices that enable augmented reality.

As a result, immersive entertainment is made possible. AR overlays the virtual world on the real world by fusing real-life and virtual features. Pokemon GO is a prime illustration of an early IoT/AR power show. Pokemon GO is a game that incorporates the real world, maps, mobile devices along with fictional characters. Therefore, it has been a hit among all ages worldwide who enjoyed finding Pokemon characters. 

Targeted advertising campaigns

In the past, televisions would broadcast commercials to anyone, regardless of whether or not they would be seen by their intended audience. It was impossible to exclude individuals who had no interest from receiving it.

The ability to track consumers across all platforms has become possible for media and entertainment organizations thanks to digitally accessible content and OTT media.

By consuming content on gadgets like smartphones, tablets, and wearables, more information can be attained. These include where they are, what time of day it is, and whether or not they are moving or exercising. From the connected gadgets in a home, we may also create a picture that enables us to target advertisements based on particular requirements.

We may now obtain metrics such as the number of individuals who saw an advertisement and how many of them converted using the data gathered by wearables or other smart devices. The creation of highly focused ads and provision of high-impact income generation are both possible using these user data.

In conclusion

IoT provides reams of data to the media and entertainment sector. It aids businesses in comprehending consumer behavior and providing appealing offerings. The technology also offers powerful capabilities that gather and examine a large number of inputs. New technologies like augmented and virtual reality are here to assist established businesses and burgeoning startups surpass customer expectations.

The post IoT in Media and Entertainment: Real-World Examples appeared first on AI and IoT application development company.

More than 15.5 billion deliveries were reported to be completed worldwide in 2020, and the estimates are expected to climb in the following years. More than 65% of global users choose door-to-door deliveries over traditional shopping.

So, if you’re considering pick-and-drop app creation, you’re on the right track, and this blog will serve as a valuable source of knowledge that you should consider before beginning your app development process.

The Best approach toward development

Extensive study and planning are required at the outset of each company project. As a result, you should concentrate on the following key factors.

Knowing Your Customers

No matter how good your idea is or how advanced the technology you employed in your Drop & Pick app development process is, you need more time and money to understand your client’s needs.

Your app must meet the requirements for a pick-and-drop app. Look for their convenience, adaptability, and other vital elements that will make consumers entirely reliant on your app.

• Market research and competitor analysis: Conduct extensive market research on pickup and drop-off services in your neighborhood, city, or country and develop a strategy appropriately. Remember to assess your competitors. If any pick-and-drop apps are already functional, search for their features and try to figure out their problems. This will assist you in creating a more personalized pick-and-drop app for your target audience.

Pick & Drop App Development Features:

The features of any mobile app are the driving force behind its success. Request that your Android app development company create three panels: admin, delivery, and customers.

All these panels must have distinctive and engaging features that will be the driving force behind your pick-and-drop app.

Customer Panel features

• User Registration
• Social Media Integration
• Select Services
• Schedule pick up date and time
• Schedule Delivery
• Picking Drop location
• Map Integration
• Comment section
• Notifications
• Payment gateway Integration

Delivery Panel features

• Login (Details)
• View Request (Details)
• Accept/Reject Requests
• View Customer details
• Payment History
• GPS-assisted Route Navigation
• Push Notifications

Admin Panel Features

• Sign-up
• Dashboard
• Manage Customers
• Manage Services
• Manage Agents
• Order management (OM)
• Manage Notifications
• Reports & Analytics

With these fundamental features and functionalities, you can undoubtedly develop an efficient and convenient pick-and-drop app that will benefit your clients and you. You might always select some additional features as your specialty.

Cost of Developing a Pick-and-Drop App

If you want to create from scratch, the entire cost of development will be determined by several key aspects, including

• Type of App: Hybrid, web-based, cross-platform, or native app

• Platform type: Android or iOS

• Type of App Development Company 

• Required Number of Features

• Usage of Advanced Technologies

However, because establishing a pick-and-drop app does not involve significant complications, you can have a pick-and-drop app produced by a reputable app development company for between $20000 and $26000.

This will entail everything from creating an MVP to designing, developing, testing, analyzing the quality, and providing post-launch technical support. If you opt to include certain highly advanced features, the cost of your pick-and-drop app development could reach $ 40000.

Selecting the Best App Development Company

Your decision to hire an app development business should be based on extensive research. After all, the app development business will put your ideas into action. As a result, don’t be afraid to hire the best in the field.

Visit several top-rated companies and their profiles, looking for completed projects and client feedback. A better option is to check for these businesses on reputable rating agency websites.

You’ll get a complete look at that company’s development process and all the vital information about its approach and performance.

How to Make Money from a Pick & Drop App

A well-planned approach to this notion will keep you calm and confident regarding money generation. Pick-and-drop applications make a lot of money from the delivery fee, but there are additional methods to make a lot more money. 

Here are some standard methods for monetizing your pick-and-drop app.

Charge for Delivery: The fee you will charge your customers for the delivery service. Maintain a reasonable and competitive price. The delivery boy will also receive a fixed percentage of this sum, leaving you a profit.

In-app features: You can include certain extra features on a subscription basis in your pick-and-drop app development and provide consumers access to these tailored features for a set fee.

In-app Ads: The more extensive your app’s user base, the more possibilities you’ll have from various businesses to exhibit their adverts on your app’s UI.

Considering all of these factors in a well-planned manner will undoubtedly be lucrative, and you will see some unexpected outcomes within a few months of publishing your pick-and-drop app on app stores.

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This is where MVPs come in: Businesses can test their idea with real users while raising funds to fund additional MVP development by creating and producing an MVP.

MVP is a novel approach to testing a potential product before introducing it into the market. Many organizations today have used MVP apps to test their ideas before launching an actual product.

Creating an MVP is an excellent way to test your business idea without investing much money.

In this blog post, let’s examine how to create an MVP and its benefits for investors. We’ll also talk about how to get money from investors. So, without further ado, let us begin!

So, what exactly is an MVP?

MVP is an abbreviation for Minimum Viable Product. It is an early version of a product with basic functionality that can satisfy early consumers and help you gain early data feedback. This early data confirms your user’s response.

Creating an MVP allows your company to test your app and business idea at a low cost. MVP focuses on the most important features for future product development.

Why should you consider developing MVP for your business?

MVP development is the process of building a new product with the fewest number of features possible. It analyzes the system’s overall viability and conducts audience response testing.

The purp is to develop a product with the fewest features possible to get consumer feedback as quickly as possible. Furthermore, the product idea should be validated early in the product development life cycle.

• Creating a basic model that serves as a jumping-off point for discussions and provides clear visual points of reference

• The approval process includes implementing the key principle, sharing the model with prospects, and testing it with real users. This aids in understanding any issues that may develop with the product.

• Finally, starting the real development process after months of expanding and refining the software idea is a significant and inspiring step toward creating a fully-fledged solution.

When creating a mobile app, you must understand that the entire concept of creating an MVP is divided into two parts:

Business and Marketing: An MVP allows a corporation to survey customers to discover the best marketing methods and advertising platforms for the product’s advancement.

Proof of concept: By developing an MVP, the organization will gain critical technical insights from required programming and build a minimum feature set that will assist them in differentiating their product.

How can an MVP help grow your business, and what are the several benefits of MVP development for fundraising?

Consider the following scenario, you spend months, if not years, developing a dedicated business app and never test it in the market before releasing it.

The outcomes may be devastating and unsatisfactory, as the whole approach may have been incorrect. App developers have been working with MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products, in recent years, utilizing the productive efforts of business firms.

Maximum leverage with a minimal investment

You take too much risk when you invest in full-fledged app development. Most of your funding has been spent on developing your product, and you need to know if it’s market-ready or functionally accurate.

And by discovering flaws in the latter stages, you need more time to improve. However, with an MVP, you may get an alpha version of your app produced for a bit of cost and gain maximum advantage.

Early testing of your concepts

One of the primary benefits of creating an MVP is that it will reveal if there is a market for your app idea. It would demonstrate how crowded your niche market is, how your competitors are performing, and what you need to do to stand out.

You also know where you went wrong with your software and its parts. When you test your concepts, you can produce a far more optimized final app.

Initial feedback

Most businesses skip this phase, yet early input is critical. You must know if your app is on the right track in development before it’s too late to pull the plug. With early feedback, you can quickly pivot, close gaps, address concerns, and make your app more secure.

What’s the Big Difference Between B2B & B2C Mobile Apps?

Organizations share a unique bonding with mobile devices. Doesn’t matter which industry they belong to. The rapid growth, the ubiquity of mobile phones is unparalleled and is recognized as a major contributor to the cycle of digital transformation at a global platter.

How do you get investors when you’ve developed an MVP?

When faced with adversity, an entrepreneur’s first and foremost concern is how to raise funds. So, if you’ve produced a minimum viable product and are looking for potential investors, here’s what you need to do.

Identify potential investors

Even if you have a brilliant idea, collecting funds for new products, mobile apps, or services in today’s economy can take time and effort. One method to improve your chances of success is properly investigating possible investors. This includes studying their MVP investment history, ambitions, and objectives.

Think about the future

When marketing your idea to potential investors, keep the future in mind rather than the past. This entails emphasizing your product’s potential and ability to expand in the future.

Make a pitch that will appeal to potential investors.

Once you’ve found possible investors, you’ll need to create a pitch that will appeal to them. This entails concentrating on the parts of your product that are most likely to pique the interest of investors and emphasizing the potential return on MVP investment.

Strengthen your capital base.

Finally, optimize your cash position before offering your concept to potential investors. This entails analyzing your burn rate and ensuring that you have adequate cash to sustain your firm if you cannot raise funds.

In conclusion

Creating an MVP is an important step in the fundraising process for your mobile app. You can build a product that will appeal to investors and help you secure the cash you need to launch your app if you follow my advice.

Furthermore, successful companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and WhatsApp began as MVPs and have since become the most successful.

So, don’t let minor details prevent you from attracting investors for your minimum viable product.

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This is a lack of foresight, which refers more generally to how computers can’t make predictions about their inputs based on data that hasn’t happened yet (i.e., there’s no such thing as proactivity).

Fortunately for us humans who crave such things from technology in this fast-paced digital age, researchers at Google Brain came up with an ingenious solution: self-supervised learning.

What is Self Supervised Learning?

Self-supervised learning is a machine learning method in which unlabeled data (data without labels) is used to learn the classifier. It is a form of unsupervised learning requiring less labeled data than traditional unsupervised learning methods.

Self-supervised learning can also be considered semi-supervised because it uses both labeled and unlabeled data to train the classifier, though how exactly this happens varies from model to model.

In self-supervised learning, an AI model is given a large amount of unlabeled data and asked to make predictions about the data. The model learns to make predictions by using the unlabeled data.

A common application of self-supervised learning is in natural language processing (NLP) tasks like machine translation and text summarization. In these NLP tasks, the goal is usually to train an AI model so that it can predict the next word in a sentence given some words from previous sentences.

For this task to be successful, however, we need a lot of examples that contain both unknown words and known words together for the AI model to learn how those two types of words interact with each other during prediction time.

What is the difference between self-supervised and unsupervised learning?

Computer algorithms are designed to learn from data, but there are two fundamental ways in which this can happen. In unsupervised learning, the algorithm generates some representation of the data for itself (e.g., clustering), whereas in self-supervised learning it uses existing labels as part of its training data.

The key distinction between unsupervised and supervised learning is that you do not tell your algorithm what to look for in unsupervised learning. instead, you just offer a dataset with no labels (or only one label if there is only one class). The machine can then find groups by itself:

Clustering: An algorithm will group similar items. For example, if we are given a dataset of users’ faces (but no information about who is male or female), clustering would put all females together and all males together.

This can be useful when trying to group products into similar categories based on their characteristics (such as price range) or grouping users by age range. Hence, you know how many people within each category need certain types of ads shown to them on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram.

Classification: Classification is when an algorithm separates objects into two or more classes according to shared features — these could include colors or shapes.

In short, self-supervised learning is the type of data available to the algorithm. Where unsupervised learning starts from unlabeled data, self-supervised learning starts from a labeled dataset and uses the labels to create an additional dataset that is then used for training.

Also Read :

Why do we need self-directed learning?

• Self Supervised Learning arose as a result of the following concerns that persisted in other learning procedures:
• High cost: Most learning approaches necessitate labeled data. In terms of time and money, the expense of high-quality labeled data is too expensive.
• Long lifespan: The data preparation lifecycle is a time-consuming procedure in the development of ML models. Cleaning, filtering, annotating, reviewing, and reorganizing are all required per the training framework.
• Generic AI: The self-supervised learning framework is one step closer to incorporating human cognition into machines.

Self-supervised learning works by feeding the AI model unlabeled data and then later asking it to make predictions about this data.

Self-supervised learning is a type of machine learning that uses unlabeled data to train the model. The model is given a set of unlabeled data and is then asked to make predictions about this data.

Later, when the model is given the correct labels for this data, it can compare its predictions with those labels and learn how to improve those predictions in future iterations.

Self-supervised learning is a method of training an AI model using unlabeled data.

Self-supervised learning is a method of training an AI model using unlabeled data. This means that no humans classified the data; instead, the machine is responsible for recognizing patterns in the data alone.

Unlabeled data is any set of information that hasn’t been tagged or categorized by people. An example would be imaged on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter—they have no caption attached to them, so they’re effectively uncategorized when you look at them as a whole (unless it’s labeled).

Therefore, these images can be used in self-supervised learning because there’s no human involved in labeling them (you just look at what’s there).

Conclusion

Self-supervised learning comes in handy when dealing with data-related problems. It can range from insufficient dataset preparation resources to time-consuming annotation issues.

It’s also helpful for Downstream Tasks, such as Transfer Learning. Models can be pre-trained on unlabeled datasets in a self-supervised way, and then fine-tuned for specific use-cases.

As a result of the first two considerations, it is clear that self-supervised learning is the preferred method for developing a scalable ML model. At the same time, one must be cognizant of the risks associated with utilizing this strategy.

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From the touring CEO to an engineer working in the field, mobility solutions have drastically changed the way people work. On the other hand, mobile technologies too have matured in terms of their capabilities which are approaching personal computer-like features such as supporting email, web access, etc.

Today mobility moves far beyond the communication, the technological advancements in microchips and sensor technologies that are used to track vehicles, objects, and humans, like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC), and the Global Positioning System (GPS) serve a wide range of purposes for business.

Enterprises are grappling with ways enterprise mobility has to offer.

What exactly is Enterprise Mobility?

Enterprise Mobility is the new channel that disseminates information, facilitates communication, and allows the workforce to do their jobs from a variety of mobile devices like smartphones, HHDs, tablets, personal digital assistants, laptops, etc.

Such mobile devices can perform, support, accomplish, coordinate and manage the work activities and organizational tasks to enable the right information at right time to enhance transactions and collaboration outside workplaces & times.

Evolution of Enterprise Mobility(EM)- Unfolding Advancement

Even though the mobile phone was first introduced by AT&T in 1946, the enterprise mobility segment actually started in 1991, when ‘Hermes’– a system management server (SMS) was released by Microsoft.

With the proliferation of personal computers, a unified solution to manage these devices became essential. A big change happened when the digital Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) was introduced for voice telephony.

The use cases of mobile devices changed dramatically with the introduction of GSM.

During the 90s and the last decade, Desktop management solutions witnessed an increased adoption. Also, with the workforce bringing personal digital assistants and mobile phones to the workplace, they wanted to have the flexibility to access emails, calendars, contacting, and the other work.

This change presented varying degrees of security and created a nightmare for the IT staff to manage. This emphasized the need for Mobile Device Management (MDM) to ensure the functionalities are optimized and the devices are safe and at the same time assuring that the corporate network is protected.

The first version of Exchange Active Sync (EAS), a part of Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002, was developed to manage emails and contacts that required a power-on password to access corporate e-mail.

Later several versions of the protocol were developed to introduce new policies. Since then EAS was the most common mobile device management and protocol control solution used commercially.

Later the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend was born. Employers soon started adopting BYOD policies and took their enterprise mobility initiatives a step forward. Soon in 2016, IT professionals listed down the top benefit of enterprise mobility as productivity.

As a result, several other trends like Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) and Corporate Owner Personally Enabled (COPE) evolved.

Why Enterprise Mobility Solutions?

There are multi-fold reasons why enterprise mobility should be embraced by organizations. The recent pandemic has well highlighted the importance of enterprise mobility and how it helped to survive the business world during an unseen crisis.

Not just sales or field support applications, but it supports value-added service (VAS) and cross-functional activities that help organizations to respond speedily to customer delight.

Enterprise mobility is the graceful use of technology that helps to increase the work-life balance & retain young employees.

Some of the reasons to proactively adopt enterprise mobility at your organization are:

• Employee Productivity: Enterprise mobility empowers employees with the tools & data that are readily available on their mobiles. This reduces the turn-around time and improves the productivity of the employees. A Forrester study reveals that 75% of companies reported an increase in worker productivity post-deployment of mobile apps.
• Reduce Costs & Time: EM facilitates communication between various stakeholders. Usually, with administrative support this can be made seamless; however, it incurs a huge cost and time. EM with its self-service capabilities allows these remote users to manage performance, communicate, etc which slashes administrative costs & time and increase employee job satisfaction.
• Communication: In organizational siloes, frequent friction is seen between various processes. Enterprise mobility by establishing real-time communication between workflow management systems and mobile devices can remove this friction and facilitate seamless communication that results in reduced delays in task execution, approval, review, or action.
• Accountability: EM along with real-time communication allows real-time monitoring that coerces organizations to focus on best practices. It enables a greater insight & visibility into an organization’s resources and assets, to create an instrumented enterprise that has accountability at all levels. Mobility solutions infused with wireless sensor technologies & RFIDs can rapidly detect or pre-empt failures much before they occur.
• Scalability: Enterprise mobility solutions allow to integrate the legacy systems to cloud platforms. This not only enhances the value of business models but also improves their independence and scalability. Cloud platforms ensure that future business needs are accommodated and the resources or data are accessible on the go at any time anyplace.
• Data Collection: Mobility solutions offer multiple touch points, the data collected at such touch points can offer valuable & meaningful insights to the business. Business intelligence is crucial for organizations to analyze and adapt to changing user needs. Mobility solutions can facilitate data collection seamlessly and provide organizations with much-needed insights.
• Competitive Advantage: Strategic implementation of enterprise mobility can lead to a competitive advantage for the organization. It can revamp the core competencies that can change organizational business models and strategies. It’s noteworthy that the mere adoption of enterprise mobility solutions does not guarantee a business value. There needs to be a charted strategy to implement mobility in the right functions and processes and is made available to the right set of users to drive the greatest value.
• Business Value: Business value is often considered when making any investment decision. The ability to access the network and resources anytime and anywhere is clearly the reason why enterprise mobility is essential to adopt. By replacing expensive computing equipment with tiny, portable, and inexpensive handheld devices the employees can immediately connect with all resources, and reduce errors to drive business efficiency of employees, processes, and resources.

The convenience, efficiency, decision speed, productivity, and process improvement it supports are cited as near-term reasons to adopt enterprise mobility.

In the long-term, EM can fundamentally transform business, create new competitive advantages and redefine the core competencies to influence entire business models, strategies, markets, and industries.

Its overarching benefits in terms of strategy, transaction information, enterprise transformation & business value answer the question of why enterprise mobility.

EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management)- What’s Under the Hood?

The increasing array of mobile devices & services in a business context necessitates the need for efficient mobility management. Enterprise mobility management (EMM) is the set of tools, people, processes, policies, and technologies to manage and support the broad mobile device use in an organization.

Such systems are termed Enterprise Mobility Management Systems (EMMS). EMMS is an end-point-independent mobile solution that enables an organization to support & manage service levels irrespective of the devices they use.

Key components of Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)- Mobility at Work

The EMM is composed of three main components:

• Mobile Device Management (MDM)– Control the devices
• Mobile Application Management (MAM)– Control the access
• Mobile Content Management (MCM)/Mobile Information Management (MIM)- Limited access to data

Mobile Device Management (MDM): MDM operates on a device level wherein monitoring, controlling, and ensuring the security of the application registered on various mobile platforms in an insecure network is administered by an admin.

Despite additional costs, it is crucial to ensure data security and accountability. With the rising BYOD culture, the vulnerability to security threats increases, and MDM ensures device security with its robust architecture and four main components- MDM Server, Management Console, Relay Server, and Mobile Agent.

Mobile Application Management (MAM): MAM is responsible for distributing and publishing mobile apps and services to various devices within an organization. It controls the access by monitoring which user can download which app. It enforces the policies on how to access particular internal apps and services.

MAM consists of two main components- Publisher and App Store. Publisher ensures which console or mobile apps are uploaded & published on the enterprise app store, whereas, from the app store the apps can be accessed and installed by specific users.

Mobile Information management (MIM): MIM/MCM allows approved apps or devices only to access the organization’s sensitive data and resources by filtering the users.

It ensures device-agnostic security that keeps crucial data in an isolated container that is encrypted and only authenticated users can access and transmit it.

Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) at Work

Traditionally, mobility solutions were simple trans-coded applications of existing corporate data that used mobile devices; however, the concept of mobility evolved over time. Today, it takes contexts like users, tasks, devices, and uses into consideration.

The Top EMM Applications in an Organization are:

Device and information management

EMM enables mobile devices to access key corporate assets with ensuring compliance, it can enforce advanced security settings. Based on the user, device, & OS, it can provide policy options and restrictions.

Mobilization of e-mail, personal information management (PIM) tools like calendars, contacts, schedule management, and enterprise portals is one of the fastest-growing enterprise mobility applications. EMM enforces policies and advanced rules for access control based on groups, device compliance, and device attributes.

App Protection & Distribution

Now-a days enterprise apps are often containerized using technologies that do not require source code changes, EMM can add a security layer & policy management around an app without changing source code or embedding SDK.

With EMM, app developers do not need to worry about app security, app protection policies like secure app connectivity, user authentication, access, data encryption, document sharing, copy/paste, etc can ensure app security and prevent them from going to unauthorized sites.

The EMM suite also ensures easy distribution of apps by allowing only authorized users to access with corporate security & data protection. Whenever an employee leaves or a device is no longer in use, it revokes apps and data securely.

Authentication

EMM can enforce robust authentication methods and support requirements on email, VPN, Wi-Fi, Symantec Managed PKI Service integration, and Microsoft Certificate Authorities. No matter if it is a third party, cloud, or an in-house enterprise app, EMM can provide single sign-on functionalities by using highly responsive authentication methods like LDAP, SiteMinder, and SAML.

Threat Protection

Malicious threats and unauthorized access to sensitive organizational data are difficult to protect. EMM utilizes modern protection tools like web browser protection & antimalware to protect the devices and meet compliance requirements.

EMM can also protect the device with anti-theft protection wherein administrators can locate, lock, and wipe the device data as required. It can further ensure protection against a threat with the capabilities to blacklist and whitelist the users.

Content Distribution

In another application, EMM can help corporates in distributing content to end-users. Admins can distribute documents and multimedia content, that have different file formats securely. It can apply appropriate corporate security policies at a per-file level. The EMM suite can support content update and revocation seamlessly.

Things To Know Before Choosing an EMM Service Partner

The leading EMM vendors are Microsoft, Jamf Pro, VMware, Blackberry, etc that provides a suite of services like mobile security, device management, application management, content management, email management, information and expense management, web browser security, BYOD, & multi-user management.

Other emerging enterprise mobility management solution providers like Fusion Informatics Limited are offering innovative solutions that provide the full suite of required features and functionality that can be deployed, managed, and maintained either on-premise or cloud.

Each EMM product has its own functionality and set of features; however, not all features are supported by your mobile platforms, a smaller product with specific functionalities and business requirements that are customized as per business needs is good to go for SMEs.

While selecting an EMM service provider there are certain aspects that need to be considered:

• Deployment- Cloud or on-premise. 
• Implementation- Installation or custom programs
• Hardware- Best-in-class or own
• Security- Configurable or preconfigured
• Architecture- Open, extensible, multi-tenant, or change-ready
• Network- Preconfigured or configuration required
• Integration- With enterprise systems or APIs
• Upgrades- Automatic or manual
• Migrations- on-premise or cloud
• Licensing– Per-user or per-device

No matter where your business data and information live, an ideal enterprise mobility management product should provide a data access experience that users will embrace, respect & enforce granular policy controls, ensure end-to-end security, does not disrupt the existing business processes, enables simple & efficient team collaboration tools and is highly flexible & storage-agnostic.

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In the hyperconnected world, organizations are embracing a range of new ideas into their structure and have turned towards Business Process Automation (BPA) as a way to enable flexibility, efficiency, and responsiveness within the organizations. It is, therefore, not surprising the impact of BPA is wide-ranging and its introduction in the business has both managerial and technical ramifications.

What is a business process?

Business processes are a set of tasks or activities that must be executed in a certain sequence to achieve the desired business goal. It is the backbone of any organization and even a minor error can cause significant loss. It is essential for companies to pay constant attention to the improvement of these processes in order to pursue operational & process excellence.

Business Process Automation is a fundamental change in the way organizational activities are organized and executed by using a broad range of technologies. It supports the specific work activities and automates the tasks that were previously performed by humans

. The work is delivered to the resources that can either be human or software applications when it needs to be executed. The specification may consist of fetching highly complex dependencies between tasks and other resourcing strategies, which makes the entire process complex. Automation engineering has a central role to play here. 

Business Process Automation ensures that all the assets continuously operate predictably within the most profitable range to drive consistency, reliability, better yield, and improved quality using minimal energy.

In a large corporation, business processes span across various departments and stakeholders. Manual and undocumented processes are cumbersome to control & visualize and the situation becomes even more complex in the case of organizations that are distributed geographically. It raises a risk of stakeholders using outdated or inaccurate information to create the possibilities for guesswork and frequent improvisation. 

Through automation, repeatable, enforceable, and managed processes can be developed. Business process automation can be used to improve visibility in processes with real-time status and reporting.

Business process automation leverage a broad range of technologies and is often covered under popular enterprise apps like ERP, HRMS, and other tools that enforce the best practices in the industry. Some of the common types of business process automation are:

• Basic Automation: Simple, rudimentary tasks are automated to eliminate errors and improve transactional work. The most common examples are Business Process Management and Robotic Process Automation.
• Process Automation: In order to manage the business processes consistently and drive transparency, process automation is leveraged. It can significantly improve productivity and efficiency along with providing valuable insights. 
• Advanced Automation: Advanced automation integrates multiple systems to support complex processes. It relies on unstructured data powered by machine learning, NLP, and predictive analytics.
• Intelligent Automation: Intelligent automation harness the power of AI to automate tasks. The system can learn and make decisions based on the situations they have experienced and analyzed.

Business Process Automation is based on three basic principles:

Regardless of the scope, scalability, and complexity of the system, BPA is based on the interlinking of three critical pillars- Orchestration, Integration, and Dynamic Process Automation. Orchestration empowers managers and the IT team to collaborate & automate the processes with the help of visually appealing interfaces.

The integration enables the communication between systems & applications to implement critical process flows that can facilitate decision making. The final pillar is dynamic process automation, wherein rule-based and automatic execution is facilitated amongst various systems to streamline the processes and eliminate errors from manual tasks.

Why Should you Automate Business Processes?

Ask your employees about their least favorite tasks at their job, and the most probable answer is a lot of paperwork & documentation that is repetitive, and tedious. Such tasks take away significant man-hours without adding value to their lives. Apart from process improvement, automation help to free up the knowledge workers for more strategic and creative tasks. 

Humans are not the best when it comes to remembering and repeating things, machines are. An organization can improve the potential of its employees by automating the mundane processes using technology. Business process automation offers numerous benefits, which is why businesses are turning their attention toward integrating automated processes in their business management system with the aim to either save or make money.

Here are a few reasons why you should automate your business processes:

Business Agility

The business is changing faster than ever. According to the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ theory, changing quickly is an essential trait to ensure sustainability or one has to see itself be overtaken by competitors.

Organizations are becoming highly demanding as to how often & quickly they need changes. This pressurizes the IT team that is already overworked & has a limited budget. Business process automation can help by offloading some work of IT and letting the employees focus on tasks that add more value. 

A business can be agile by establishing a system that allows its decision-makers to react rapidly to changes with minimal disruption. Automation can prepare an organization to be fully prepared to adapt and remain flexible for long-term success. 

Visibility

One of the reasons why your business should automate is the need for end-to-end visibility. The key to improving performance with a high degree of reliability is automation. If your business has processes that span multiple vertical systems across departments and each of which may have various workflows and reporting built-in, the struggle persists to get full end-to-end visibility.

When a business process is automated, the maximum value an organization garners out of it is understanding the process in-depth and further optimizing it based on the knowledge gained. While implementing business process automation, the issues can be identified and improved before they become big.

Compliance

The ever-changing government rules and regulations are difficult to comply with. To add further to the complexities, the organizations that need to comply with multi-country regulations incurs significant cost and efforts related to regulations. Even though compliance is not a competitive area for business, & all organizations in the industry have to comply with the same set of rules. Compliance is an essential area to focus on as it may lead to a serious negative effect on business.

Automation can increase the traceability as to who has changed the process & review the historical process data, along with enabling orchestration of the best practices that reduce the risk of breaching the compliance.

Employee Efficiency

Every employee has their own thought process and decision-making, which means the process isn’t consistent & predictable. This leads to increased risk and less efficiency. Automation can ensure a well-designed routing, and parallel work to ensure high employee efficiency. It can defuse the conventional siloes, where employees need to wait by facilitating communication between teams, departments, and multiple sites. 

Business process automation can help achieve smarter workflows that are unified with the processes, increase system uptime, reduce scrap & rework and enable real-time monitoring & tracking at every stage to improve the efficiency of employees and save their valuable time.

Customer Experience

A significant improvement in processes can be witnessed by modeling them and then executing them in a unified system. Automation can help drive commonality in the processes across an organization. It ensures the process is handled in the same way every time to ensure the same experience is provided to customers, partners, and employees.

Using technologies like AI, ML & NLP, highly responsive customer support can be offered by tracking the customer’s actions and understanding their needs.

Automation can help identify the customer issues, and their intent to provide real-time support. Increased customer satisfaction and retention are the certain benefits of business process automation.

Business Process Automation Examples

Automation experts often opine how automation brings about higher productivity, saves time, and frees employees for more creative tasks. The most common belief is automation greatly helps data management and record-keeping; however, it enables absolute control over various business processes within and between organizations. The six classes of business processes that automation revolutionalize the most are:

Accounting Processes:

The various financial & accounting processes that can be automated are account payable & receivable clearance, financial closures, supplier management, general accounting, cash disbursement, financial control & reporting, revenue management, tax, financial planning & analysis, risk management, etc.

Administrative Processes

Administrative support processes like time-keeping, mailroom, leave applications, library services, calendar syncing of multiple people, appointment scheduling, statement of work, customer database, bills payment, etc are some of the tasks that can be automated to take away the mundane missions of the day. It will take routine and repetitive tasks off the list to focus on important ones and increase productivity.

Core Processes

Value-added services that directly impact customer satisfaction and their needs and are strategically crucial for an organization like order entry, claims processing, design engineering, employee onboarding, customer relationship management, workflow assignment, task management, chatbots, etc are the most celebrated examples of automation.

Customers are usually at the beginning and end of core processes and their wishes & fulfillment are critical for business success, which is why automating such processes can ensure consistency and resilience in the organization.

Management Processes

Business processes that support management planning & control functions like planning, budgeting, and performance reporting are also common examples of business process automation. Automation can assist management processes that assist planning, organizing, staffing, directing & coordinating. A considerable amount of time can be spared.

Ad hoc Processes

Business processes that satisfy unique and transient needs are ad hoc that are usually undocumented or unmonitored. They create chaos and are unpredictable. Automation of such processes enables visibility in organizational operations, brings stability to processes, and helps the organization stay competitive. Examples are processes that support special staff meetings, promotions, small projects, conferences, etc.

Knowledge-Intensive Processes

Knowledge-intensive processes that gather and process information or knowledge that emphasize the core competence of the organization require very specific knowledge. Typically expert involvement is critical to driving the success of such processes; however, parts of the process could be supported by automation. Examples can be a new product or service development, marketing processes automation, software development & strategy development, etc.

Automation in Action…..

Some of the most common examples of business process automation in business today are:

Chatbots

AI-driven bot automation solutions are the communication channel that had witnessed the largest growth with 92% since 2019 (Drift). Users engage with chatbots in a variety of ways like purchases, meeting scheduling, inquiry, sign-ups, ticket booking, etc, making an efficient self-service tool for users. Chatbots help reduce the costs and time of support.

Employee Onboarding & Offboarding

Automated employee onboarding and offboarding processes leave a lasting imprint on the employees and speak about the company’s culture. On the other hand, it can navigate the business challenges like lack of resources, unstandardized processes, legal compliances, employee turnover, etc.

Automation of employee onboarding tasks like document distribution, & authorization, secure IT provisioning, pushing benefit plans, etc, and offboarding tasks like access removal, scheduling exit interviews, farewell email, gift, etc can create an amicable welcome and goodbye to the employees.

Customer Onboarding

Seamless customer onboarding is critical for long-term customer satisfaction. Automation of customer onboarding activities like workflow digitalization & system integration, touchpoints management, form automation, contracts & proposal automation, quotes & invoice management, etc, can drive highly productive results. A consistent customer onboarding impact customer retention rate and ultimately the business outcomes.

Accounts Payable

Tedious manual data entry and repetitive validations in the accounts payable process involve high chances of errors and are time-consuming. Automation of invoicing, AP workflows, data entry, matching & verification can significantly prevent fraud and increase transparency in the system.

Task Scheduling

Task scheduling tools can manage and automate the tasks effortlessly along with eliminating the need to switch between various applications. Scheduled task automation executes at the designated time even when the system is off, this saves extensive time and provides a comprehensive view of the overall tasks to increase productivity and ensure the optimized use of resources.

How to start your business process automation journey?

The business process automation journey varies for every organization; however, there are some universal steps to get started. To realize the full potential of BPA, a phased approach is essential. Many organizations have experienced success by focusing on developing awareness and adoption across the organization along with building capabilities and skills.

The automation maturity model can progress across three phases- Initiation, Industrialization, and Institutionalization. Here let’s focus on the Initiation phase which emphasizes establishing the capabilities of the organization.

• Product & Process Evaluation

During this step, it is required to evaluate the products and identify the candidate processes to automate. This is possible by understanding the difference between the capabilities of humans and machines. Humans are less capable when it comes to repetitive and mundane tasks; however, machines are very good at it.

Identifying the processes that are best done by humans and machines can help identify the candidate processes to automate. Further, a business case can be created based on the analysis if it makes sense to automate the process.

• Project Mobilization

Once the process that can be automated is defined and the business case is created, it is essential to get it approved. At this stage, the resources required to automate the process can be determined and secured to mobilize the project further. The organizational roles can be defined along with the broader changes that are essential to support automation.

• Design & Development

Roll out standardized design, processes, & approaches to define the scope and benefits extended by automation opportunities. Further, the outcomes against KPIs can help build an awareness of automation throughout the organization. Getting input from the employees who are directly affected makes sense to design & develop the workflows. Training the core team and establishing the environment, architecture, and delivery methodology can support the initial processes.

• Launch

During the launch phase, few processes can be automated using the right tools identified in the previous stage. Automation can either be a success or fail, testing the process efficiency can help understand the gaps and optimize the automation further. 

• Ramp-up

The next processes identified in the first stage can be automated. If required advanced training can be given to the affected employees. Measuring automation benefits and effectiveness can help tweak the process and ensure volume ramp-up.

• Continuous Improvement

Automation is a continuous process, to make it run smoothly with minimal or no human intervention, continuous improvement is essential. The best practice is to review and automate regularly to assess what improvements are required to make it more impactful. Continuous improvement is the constant pursuit of perfection in all efforts. 

What Is the Goal of Process Automation?

While flexibility, reliability, transparency, performance, and scalability are often sought as the goal of process automation, it aims to create a common enterprise-wide view of each business function and is considered the form of doing business that spurs the organizational growth and transformation. Some of the top goals for implementation of the automation techniques as a part of a business process are:

Transaction Frequency & Repeatability:

Process automation enables a simple, integrated, streamlined process flow that frees human capital from mundane tasks. The monotony of the work reduces the productivity at the workplace as there are fewer chances of achieving the same results when a repetitive task is done by humans, therefore, an automation’s primary goal is to increase the business outcomes by automating high frequency and repetitive tasks. By coordinating tasks and routing them efficiently, automation improves business processes manifolds.

Operational Excellence:

Reaching a new level of operational excellence is another top goal of business process automation. Human-centric & system-centric workflow automation can improve employee & customer experience by delivering high service levels. Speed and adaptability to changing business conditions are the foremost challenges an organization faces.

Automation is the driving force that can increase operational excellence with its flexible and highly responsive solution offerings and execution. While analyzing the candidate processes, the pain points in the existing processes are often recognized, automation can resolve these challenges by simplifying the process and reducing the number the steps and finally the product cycle.

Sustainability:

Every organization should take care of future roll-outs; however, it is a daunting task. Automation techniques that take care of most business needs & processes and possess adequate opportunities to upgrade or improve the system with changing scenarios and requirements of the business environment can drive organizational sustainability. So to ensure business continuity, automation can be aimed to implement.

Quality & Cost-effectiveness:

The inclusion of automation tools and techniques is aimed to ensure consistency in terms of quality and cost-effectiveness. By eliminating human error, ensuring accuracy, and creating complex goods with fewer costs while identifying the errors along the way, it is expected automation can revolutionalize the quality control process.

Communication:

Communication is the driving force behind revenue rise and business growth. Automation can facilitate effective communication which is essential to building trust. It moves people through a funnel until the right message at each stage is delivered. One of the main goals of automation is managing communication effectively to make a decision faster. The ability to control communication goals in real-time is what makes automation an attractive investment.

Support:

The automated system is expected to handle 1:1 minor routine tasks. Also, the various business processes that are conducted in a non-functional environment are subject to uncertainty and disruption, automation creates a stable environment that supports the business processes to work efficiently.

Moreover, automation can reduce the business risks by ensuring higher regulatory compliance through granular process monitoring, error reduction, automated reporting, and auditable events trace-back.

Business Performance:

Automation transforms the business outcomes through better contract support, reduced sales cycles, increased working capital, improved customer satisfaction, and others. The innovative new solutions enabled by automation help organizations in differentiating themselves from competitors.

The manual tasks that are automated slow down the business efficiency; however, to maintain the competitive edge, agility is crucial, automation can contribute to business agility and eliminate the manual steps that are cumbersome and less effective.

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