Orchestrate Business Processes with Intelligent Automation
RPA Summit- Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Summit – North America recently concluded on May 21, 2021. It is one of the finest gatherings of its kind for Intelligent Automation. Experts and leaders of international repute from many leading organizations gathered for this virtual summit sharing their insights, knowledge, success stories around Intelligent Automation and RPA solutions.
AgreeYa was a sponsor at this event and our experts Arindam Ray Chaudhari, Chief Operating Officer, and Herb Labrada, Associate Director, Solutions delivered a powerful opening session titled “Orchestrate Business Process with Intelligent Automation” at the summit. During their session, they talked about how organizations can orchestrate business processes using intelligent automation and how Intelligent Automation is proving to be a gamechanger for organizations.
Read on to know all about what our experts shared there along with other industry experts who spoke at the Summit.
How it started; Traditional Automation Vs Intelligent Automation
The sessions revolved around the automation technology journey in the last decade. They shared that what initially alarmed technology experts and people in general for fear that Automation might destroy their career and they perceived it as a threat to their jobs, was later changed. People began to see a brighter future with Automation as it can bring multiple opportunities for growth and employment. Reports like the adoption of automation in a business process can raise the annual productivity growth, lower the operational costs by 30%, and sustain growth by the evolution of process through analytics and machine learning from the likes of McKinsey, Gartner, Forrester further strengthen their belief.
Speakers emphasized the fact that Intelligent Automation goes much beyond Traditional Automation. Intelligent automation helps the organization realize the next level of operational efficiency, experiencing true insights, and accelerate its digital transformation initiative.
Traditional Automation involves creating or rewriting code, creating APIs, heavy BPS engines, complex macros, and extensive human intervention. The initial steps in Intelligent Automation are process discovery; it involves uncovering opportunities in the organization through analyzing existing data, and recognizing the pattern. Further, it includes identifying areas to improve and add business value to the process.
Accelerating Automation Maturity
Experts at the summit also accentuated the fact that Intelligent Automation as technology has also grown from a system that replicates repetitive human actions to a system that thinks, and has capabilities to handle judgment-oriented tasks. Latest and most advanced ones being the systems that learn and understand the context and adapt accordingly.
We were very thrilled to know from the experts that the world is moving towards Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). AIOps involves real-time data to derive correlation, build patterns, and translate them into an automated solution.
Identifying Processes for Automation
Moving forward during the session, the experts educated the audience about how they can identify which processes to automate in their organization. Experts share that one of the biggest hurdles to digital transformation is the burden of existing business processes that consume the majority of resources and leave zero time for strategy and innovation.
For the convenience of the audience, they classified them into few buckets such as –
- Manual and repetitive processes, especially involving large teams
- High volume and low complexity tasks
- Rule-based processes
- Processes with a low exception rate
- Processes with standard readable electronic inputs
The experts stressed the fact that implementing automation at the right places helps allocate human resources to high-value tasks, instead of mundane tasks. They further accentuated that technology is only as good as the people who use it. Implementing lean and scalable infrastructure, standardizing data, using RPA, visualizing inputs & outputs, and integrating systems are a few ways to make the best use of technology going forward
Ensuring Success of Automation Project
While we all agree that organizations are in a haste to automate their business processes for long-term advantage and sustenance. However, specific divisions, departments, and their users frequently have their own specific requirements for automation. Thus, it is important that organizations and their technology partners must come together to warranty triumph in automation projects.
Experts at the summit also shared few tips teams can follow to ensure the success of their automation initiatives –
- Maintaining a multi-year vision of your automation initiative
- Focus on business outcome with the agility to deploy the right technology as per the business requirement
- Consistently benchmark your Intelligent Automation Framework to get the best outcomes
- Customizing solutions for specific functional requirements
- Ensuring calibration and alignment for all business units, and service lines
Managing Organizational Change
Adopting automation in your organization is as much about bringing about a new technology change as it about bringing an organizational-level change. Therefore, it is important that organizations must understand that for the holistic success of their automation initiatives it require changes at three levels; People, Processes, and Systems. We need to have an alignment of people, processes, and Systems.
“Success is driven by your organizational culture as much as by technology“
People – Immediate need for new skill development, including but not limited to significant changes to workforce planning activities
Processes – Need to re-design business and operational processes. Re-define customer roadmaps. Re-frame decision and control, performance and incident management processes.
Systems – Integration of emerging technologies with legacy systems. New technology implementation process (SDLC, Agile, RPA). Need for new technology partners for efficient delivery and support
Intelligent Automation Use Cases
While experts agreed that Automation has application in all industries now, they enlightened the audience with some of the common use cases for IA implementation.
- Decision-making at various interface points, thereby eliminating manual intervention
- Analysis and reporting of structured and unstructured data patterns
- Understanding context in various documents for translation into action
- Managing self-configuring and re-configuring systems in case of unforeseen situations
- Managing automated customer interactions
“Most projects fail due to unrealistic expectations since the beginning”
AgreeYa’s Viewpoint
AgreeYa got the ball rolling by diving deeper into the early days of automation and how automation has evolved over for the event by sharing the recent research data and expert opinion in the industry about Automation. Read on…
As per McKinsey & Company, the adoption of automation in a business process can raise the annual productivity growth and sustain this growth by the evolution of process through analytics and machine learning.
If the RPA growth trend continues, it will achieve “near-universal adoption” in the next 5 years as per Deloitte. In fact, by 2024 large organizations will amplify their existing RPA portfolios by 3 times and will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes- Gartner.
Being agile and ability to better adapt to fast-changing situations is the way forward, especially amidst the current global pandemic. With remote working, reduced staff, decreased budgets, Automation became the need of the hour. Our experts also talked about the key drivers responsible for automation during the session. They cited the below-mentioned factors as the key drivers for the increased adoption of automation –
- Evolving and changing business processes
- Digital transformation
- Emerging technologies
- Need for increased security and control
- Lower operational cost
- Need to increase revenue
While many businesses have already adopted automation solutions and a lot many others are considering adopting; it is important that the organizations must understand what to look for when selecting an automation solution. Each solution has its own strengths; depending on the automation need of the business, there are multiple options to choose from. But the bigger question is the success based on the selection of the right tool or solution. So, the right fit not the best fit is the key
Experts at AgreeYA feel that the below-mentioned factors are most important to consider while choosing an automation solution for your organization –
- Ease of implementation – to avoid downtime and enable a smooth transition
- Ease of use – A user-friendly, flexible tool that requires less training and one that can be controlled easily.
- Technical features and architecture – cognitive capabilities, and others that are important for organizational processes. Architecture must support desired performance, scalability, and security.
- Scalability and exception handling – Scalability to carry out many instances of a process. And good exception handling, especially for error-prone processes.
- Integration capabilities with existing tools – seamlessly integrated with existing Solutions and IT Infrastructure without much disruption.
- Governance & security – provide better visibility, ROI dashboards, Audit logs, and various other control mechanisms, and security parameters to drive compliance and governance.
- Total cost of ownership – A very important factor for calculating ROI.
Moving forward, our experts also showcased AgreeYa’s Intelligent Automation Offerings, including;
QuickApps-AgreeYa’s award-winning No-Code Application Development Solution. It helps build solutions up 80% faster. Advanced features like point and click feature for codeless development, custom actions, and workflows enable users to build insightful dashboards and automate reports. Quick Apps offers easy integration, upgrade & migration.
QuickApps is today being used by 250+ organizations to take their SharePoint processes to the next level.
Leverage Microsoft Power Platform to build low-code Solution. Comprised of PowerApps – for applications, Power BI – for analytics, Power Automate – for workflow-driven automation, and Power Virtual Agents – for chat BOTS. As a Microsoft Gold and Power Platform partner, AgreeYa has been helping organizations modernize applications, improve business intelligence, automate business processes, and deploy virtual assistants with our Power Platform services.
It offers benefits like a 70% reduction in application development cost and ROI of up to 362% in 3 years.
Complex and Enterprise level RPA –Ui Path is the market leader for driving hyperautomation. As a partner, we help deploy and build automation around Ui path for our customers.
BeatBlip for Business Process Automation; AI-powered, all-in-one test and process automation solution. It enables organizations to automate not only mundane, repetitive, rule-based tasks but also highly complex and cross-functional processes. BeatBlip allows the gathering of data from disparate systems, data extraction & processing, digitization, document verifications, etc.
Enjoy benefits like 90% improvement in productivity, 75% reduction in cycle time, and 40% reduction in operational costs.
If you missed us at the conference and would like to know more about our Intelligent Automation Offerings, Connect with us for a free consultation session.