“The notion of a digital workforce to augment our human workforce will no longer just be a concept; it will be a reality.â€
An insightful conversation about all things Robotic Process Automation (RPA)! From cognitive automation to how RPA will change business operations in the next five years. Neeti Mehta Shukla, Co-founder, Automation Anywhere speaks to the ReadITQuik team and gives us a peek into the vast world of automation.
How have you seen the C-suite’s approach to automation as a business driver evolve over the last several years – not just on the shop floor but across business functions?
A few years ago, learning about the latest automation advancements was more or less optional and was limited to certain processes or application technologies. Today, this is not the case. Technology has increased the number of things that can be automated, and this has changed what the C-Suite now takes into consideration.
For many in the C-Suite, it has improved the overall efficiency and directly impacted the bottom line – and productivity is what makes the overall enterprise successful, allowing them to reallocate resources to achieve optimal productivity. Across industries, leaders must examine the benefits automation can bring to their customers.
Tell us more about your vision of what RPA can do for enterprise and mid-sized businesses. What are the fundamental differences in the way large and growing organizations would deploy RPA as an enabler?
In any organization, be it small or large, automation yields improved productivity. In fact, as part of our recent research focused on the augmented human enterprise, 74% of U.S. respondents reported employee productivity has improved due to automation.
Let’s consider growing businesses, for example. They typically do not have as many resources at their disposal. For instance, maybe only one person is running the payroll department. In this case, automation can address the lack of resources and reduce the mundane tasks this resource must be in charge of.
For large organizations, automation helps unearth broader benefits, such as new customer offerings, standardizing processes, reduction in data errors, and increasing employee creativity and innovation. On a broad scale, companies of all sizes have their own goals and visions and automation plays the role of enablement.
What is cognitive automation and why or how could it be a game changer?
Cognitive automation refers to AI techniques that are applied to automate processes. Unlike other types of AI, such as machine learning or deep learning, cognitive automation solutions imitate the way humans think. This is especially useful in dealing with the vast majority of data we have in our systems that are not completely digitized.
Cognitive bots can detect critical information hidden in documents (such as contracts and invoices), emails, voice recordings, and chat communications. Traditional automation can’t access the vast majority of this data, which leaves knowledge workers with the heavy lifting of painstakingly finding the right information to “feed†business processes. Now with cognitive automation, up to 80% of data can be automated quickly with 100% accuracy, freeing humans to do more meaningful work.
If a CTO or CIO of a large organization in a ‘non-tech savvy’ industry is tasked with building a competitive RPA strategy for the business, where would she begin and what should she prioritize?
RPA is a means to competitive strength regardless of industry. Given this, CTOs/CIOs need to identify their top business problems and see how they correlate with their long and short-term goals. A good way to start is to look at the top five challenges and see what could be solved by automating the day-to-day process within these challenges. You can ask yourself, will automation enable me to deliver faster, eliminate errors or reduce a financial burden? If so, start by automating these tasks first.
Tasks that follow business rules or processes that are not prone to many exceptions are prime candidates for RPA. The good news is that with RPA, the implementation period has shrunk to weeks not months, so it’s a matter of identifying these white spaces that can be filled with RPA technologies. Then you can scale from there. We often see organizations starting with 10 to 50 bots in the first 3 to 6 months, and scaling it to hundreds merely within a year.
What would be some of the KPIs for an RPA investment and how could a manager demonstrate ROI?
No two businesses will have the same KPIs, but for any company, it boils down to identifying what processes and goals matter most to them. For example, the time and cost for generating invoices could be one of the most crucial elements of how an operation is run. No matter the case, listing out segmented KPIs and keeping a track of the progress before and after RPA implementation is key in demonstrating automation’s value-add. Organizations track error reduction, cost savings, manual hours saved, ROI, transactions processed and much more.
One of the reasons technology leaders have become less relevant is because they did not fully understand the language of functional leaders. What are your tips for CTOs and CIOs trying to better understand the language of business and to demonstrate the business impact of any technology?
Today, with so much technology at our disposal, it becomes even more imperative for business leaders to keep up with the latest advancements. Business is increasingly tasked to deliver their services faster, cheaper, better. On the other hand, CTOs and CIOs drive technological absorption in many cases as they keep track of security concerns or compliance needs, not to mention usability and support.
Understanding the ways technology can add value to the business is of utmost importance. Adopting the right technology in general, but RPA in particular, directly impacts business goals, such as time to deliver or operationalize, customer centricity and service, market reaction times, and partner and vendor management, among several others. RPA is so easy to use that anybody can build bots, yet the technology needs to be developed with enterprise-level security and control for IT departments. RPA is the democratization of automation technology.
If analytics and AI is the future, what mindset and skillset changes are needed today – across core functions – in order for large organizations to remain competitive tomorrow?
Large organizations have to constantly innovate, execute, and evolve to remain competitive. Almost everyone now uses a laptop for work – and we all had to learn how to use computers in order to do our jobs. In the same way, from a skill set point of view, each of us must now learn to work with bots.
Today, data is a big part of processes, and we have so much data that we need to not only digitize but also operationalize. Organizations need to change their mindset to automate anything that can be automated – that will help us focus and deliver more knowledge work. Take the analysis generated by automation to create better products, services, systems, and deliver things that were not possible before now. This will allow organizations to innovate, execute, and evolve to remain competitive tomorrow.
What technologies and trends are you tracking in RPA as we go into 2020 and beyond, and what is going to be the new normal in 5 years from now in the way business is executed?
In the coming years, and already today we see the next wave of RPA virtually impacting every single vertical and every single process, including but not limited to finance and accounting, HR and customer service. Businesses that have deployed RPA will begin to notice promising automation opportunities almost everywhere they look.
Mindless, repetitive tasks will soon be completely automated, thus allowing human workers to upskill and strategize about business growth and make existing business processes smarter and smoother. The notion of a “digital workforce†to augment our human workforce will no longer just be a concept; it will be a reality. We will enter the era of the bot-enabled human.
Thank you for letting us peek into the vast world of automation, Neeti. We hope to speak with you again, soon!
About Neeti Mehta Shukla:
NeetiOpens a new window is the Co-founder and Senior Vice President at Automation Anywhere, where she is responsible for leading brand and culture strategies and initiatives across the company. An avid strategist, she brings over 20 years of business management, marketing and entrepreneurial experience from a wide variety of industries including technology, business consulting and advertising. She is the company’s thought leader and vocal advocate of “bot ethicsâ€. Neeti influences business strategy in scaling and driving company success.
About Automation Anywhere:
Automation Anywhere is the leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the platform on which more organizations build world-class Intelligent Digital Workforces. Automation Anywhere’s platform uses software bots that work side by side with people to do much of the repetitive work in many industries by combining RPA, cognitive, and embedded analytic technologies. The company provides automation technology to several financial services, insurance, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, telecom, and logistics companies globally. For additional information, visit automationanywhere.com.Opens a new window