Many organisations have taken steps to address operational imperatives to de-risk, de-lever, refocus, simplify, and drive out cost. But now they are also starting to look at transformations to address market imperatives and become more agile. Enterprises today are highly manual and siloed with a traditional workforce model that inhibits their demand to be customer centric and grow. They are seeking to evolve and introduce cognitive capabilities that augment the automated enterprise and have operating models that place human to robotic interactions and machine learning at the core. The future enterprise is characterized by a rapid shift away from product centricity to the development of market centric solutions adaptable to micro trends and capable of autonomous, and real time decision making. The application of Intelligent Automation enhances and connects disparate parts of the organisation systems, data, and work force capabilities overcoming traditional barriers that prevent true customer centricity.
Intelligent Automation (IA) is the layering of automation and intelligent technologies that transforms the traditional workforce into the intelligent enterprise. It has profound transformational benefits and organisational implications that require robust operational excellence and organisational change to be successful. Robotics is the first stage of Automation Journey which leads to an Intelligent Enterprise (Artificial Intelligence). Robotic Process Automation will be driving efficiencies across the value chain for repetitive manual activities, critical to create operational data and capacity that traditionally has not existed. Automation acts as the ‘conductor’ of the manual workflow and repetitive tasks intelligent technologies can then seamlessly augment and enhance the process with conversational intelligence and AI to enable real time decisions.
Robotic Process Automation has multiple value drivers:
- Speed to Implement -RPA works through the UI layer and avoids a traditional process integration (e.g., IT resource investment, business requirements documents, significant development time)
- The Key to Scale – a virtual workforce can respond to growth events (e.g., organic, acquisitive) with speed, agility, and resiliency
- Robots Never Sleep – many of today’s digitally enabled processes can be orchestrated to operate autonomously 24×7, driving real time transactions
- Value Focused Talent – priorities of the employee workforce will shift to solving complex challenges, innovation, strategy, and other business development activities
- Improved Quality & Control -RPA reduces error, produces detailed activity logs, and enables programmable controls
Although a digital workforce provides great benefits, it also fundamentally changes the operating paradigm and associated risk profile. Why? A digital workforce fundamentally changes the nature of your operations and touches every part of the organisation – Governance and change management are essential to the success over the long term. RPA and Cognitive Science/AI efforts often fail because they do not address specific operating model, governance and change management requirements
