Month: August 2020

Remote Working made efficient with RPA

I’ve always wondered how one can work remotely with the same efficiency as working from the office. But the last few months of working from home have made me realize that the key to remote work is the complete knowledge of your work and processes, and the availability of technology to support working from remote location/home. The challenge most of the companies face today is that the business processes are not adequately documented and only a handful of people know the end-to-end details of the processes. This leads to people following different paths of handling a business process subsequently creating multiple variations, different border case scenarios and problems.

COVID-19 poses the additional challenge for the new employees to be more productive in the shortest possible time. They are unfamiliar with the people and the processes and often apprehensive about asking for details in a remote setting. A similar problem is faced by existing employees with new task assignments as well. The problem is compounded as companies take time to adjust to the remote working dynamics and update their standard operating processes to ensure smooth and successful operations. This process change comes with its implication on training the present employees on the updated processes.

How can RPA help?

Companies who have already implemented Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have a clear upper hand in this pandemic situation. With RPA in place, processes are already documented, automated, implemented, tested and in production. RPA brings transparency and simplicity to both the company and the employees. This helps in providing clear understanding of the processes in remote work situation. This ensures that processes keep running without any challenges. In case of errors and exceptions or changes in the process, RPA products make it extremely easy to centrally manage and roll out the changed process.

Another key area where RPA tools can help is self-learning and building awareness of existing and changed processes. Tools which can assist with step by step guidance on the execution of the process are a must in this remote work situation. For instance, customer care setups will be immensely benefited with automation tools like AssistEdge Engage, which provide step by step guidance to end users for handling business processes. This enables on-the-job training of the users towards knowledge of the entire process, ensuring business compliance.

Third and the most important area where RPA is a game-changer is the ability to empirically detect business tasks from user interactions. Companies where the processes are not documented, can use process discovery tools in effectively identifying the steps of the key processes within their organization. Tools like AssistEdge Discover eliminate human bias during process discovery, provide process insights, assess process execution efficiency and recommend automation candidates.

AssistEdge RPA is an industry leading automation platform and provides several solutions to above-mentioned problems with remote work. AssistEdge RPA enables you to automate your processes and run it unattended remotely without any issue. It also has features like Guided scripting which can be leveraged too train the current and new employees without investing in expensive training programs. Also, AssistEdge Discover can help you in discovering your undocumented process tasks along with the identification of automation opportunities.

Most importantly, with AssistEdge RPA, both human and digital workers can work together remotely ensuring business continuity, while staying safe.

RPA portfolio management – Importance of RPA Admins

With the recent advances in cognitive automation technologies, Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is undeniably bringing a paradigm shift in the way we run our businesses. There are a lot of practical, experience-driven business insights that are powering today’s RPA. It is expected that C-suite executives will continue to drive organization-wide initiatives towards the adoption of RPA. Also, with the COVID-19 scenario, the importance of an error-free decision-making process has come to the fore even more. While enterprises are searching for a magical game changer to bring them massive productivity thrust and help them get out of the current situation, RPA is continuing to gain wider application and enhanced focus.

The increase in size and span of digital workforce has compelled RPA vendors to provide solutions to easily, reliably and economically administer and scale RPA setups. Thus, there is a need for key features from RPA tools to manage and optimize the existing digital workforce productivity as well as effectively plan the future growth.

Significance of RPA Admin in Portfolio Management

As it stands today, most of the recognized RPA vendors are equipped with the following basic features for Bot management:

  • Capability to configure automation and assign to Bots for automation
  • Comprehensive dashboards for Bot configuration, monitoring and management
  • Provision to start and stop bots on demand
  • Provision to dynamically allocate and release the VMs / hardware for running the bots
  • Provision to seamlessly manage application sign-in credentials
  • Tools for swift migration of processes from one environment to other.

Over and above these, there is an emerging view that managing digital workers is much the same as managing human employees and smooth interplay of Bots and Humans is the key recipe to success. Thus, it is becoming increasingly prudent for RPA vendors to enhance the experience of RPA admins by simplifying their day-to-day activities in orchestrating an RPA Bot farm.

Listed below are the broad categories and corresponding high-level features that comprises an RPA admin wish list for an effective portfolio management, which brings Bot and Human workforce together.

  • Task allocation
    • Features to assist in the capacity planning of existing setup or creation of fresh RPA setups
    • Clear guidelines on optimal hardware and bot configuration
    • Automated updates of application sign-in credentials from credential vaults
    • Automate the provisioning of bots on demand
    • Automate the provisioning of VMs / hardware required for running the bots
  • Monitoring task execution
    • UI that provides end-to-end monitoring of bots and real-time rolling view of bot farm status
    • SMS notifications / Email alerts for important events like errors and SLA violations
    • Comprehensive dashboards for overall monitoring and management of the RPA farm infra-structure
    • Mechanism to capture human inputs, if and where required in both attended and unattended process execution flow
    • Out-of-the-box supervisor bots that help in taking care of the basic repetitive tasks involved in managing a bot farm
    • Out-of-the-box tools and reports for regulatory compliance and security audits.
  • Cognitive Learning based optimization
    • Predict the process automation load based on the process request history in order to suggest an optimal bot configuration to handle variable load
    • Enablers for rapid POV (Proof of Value) instead of a mere POC (Proof of Concept) by identifying and calculating the various factors contributing to the TCO (Total cost of ownership). It should help in deciding “what” to automate by answering “why” to automate.
    • Methods and tools to use empirical models to identify and prioritize automation opportunities in a given business context.
    • Mechanism to capture the necessary data points for evaluating key Business KPIs like
      • Time savings
      • Cost savings
      • Reduction in SLA violations
    • Early identification of changes in the underlying application UI or change in business process to minimize process execution errors.

Conclusion

For any RPA platform, the RPA admins are the most important set of users. While they may not be the initial decision makers, the required traction and proliferation of an RPA platform cannot be achieved unless these key stakeholders have a pleasant experience in running their daily chores of administering a Bot farm. History of software products has shown that superior usability is one of the foundations for a leaner and cleaner product thereby leading to quicker deployments and motivates further scaling.

At AssistEdge, we are deeply focused on all the 3 pillars of RPA administration across task allocation, monitoring and intelligent bot farm management. Our broader strategy on Discover, Automate and Orchestrate helps partner our customers move towards Automation Singularity. For an effective portfolio management of any enterprise-scale RPA initiative, it is important to give the RPA admin’s wish list the highest priority. This will lead to an efficient resource utilization and drive cost efficiencies by eliminating redundant systems and help build tighter orchestration using automation. Each release of the AssistEdge platform brings to light new and innovative features to ensure a state-of-the-art user experience to RPA administrators and the overall organization in general.

Discovering the Pieces of the RPA ROI Puzzle

There’s no doubt that RPA has been able to deliver significant value to organizations over the years. The kind of impact that RPA has had is well illustrated by the kind of growth that the RPA market has seen. As per a recent study, the RPA software market grew by 63.1% in 2018 and 62.9% in 2019 as compared to modest growth of 13.5% and 11.5% for enterprise software market as a whole1. Moreover, the RPA market is well poised to reach USD 25.66 billion by 20272.

Organizations of varying sizes and domains across the world have embraced RPA with open arms leading to such impressive growth numbers and projections. To derive maximum ROI out of an RPA program, it is important for business leaders to consciously recognize the kind of value that they expect from it along with the investments that would have to make.

Benefits Derived from an RPA Program

Year after year, we see a huge jump in the number of enterprises selecting automation software to kick start their digital transformation journey. Analysts predict, almost 85 percent of large organizations would have implemented RPA in some form by the end of 20223. This says a lot about how RPA is benefitting enterprises globally. But, how do enterprises measure the success of their RPA implementation?

The value generated from an automation program is measured and tracked with the help of a variety of metrics:

  • Employee productivity

    A business process as a whole can be considered as an aggregation of multiple smaller processes including tasks that are highly repetitive & mundane and tasks that require higher-order cognitive skills. RPA is powered by a digital workforce consisting of software robots, which can very efficiently perform the mundane and low complexity cognitive tasks such as data retrieval and entry. This helps save a lot of person-hours. Once the mundane tasks are automated, employees can focus their energies onto the tasks that require critical thinking and empathy such as decision making and customer interaction. Thus, not only does RPA enhance employee productivity but also contributes to employee delight by freeing up their calendars.

  • Improved Compliance

    Organizations especially banking & financial institutions are confronted with stringent regulatory compliance standards. To comply with the regulatory standards, rules must be followed every single time without any scope of negligence and laxity. The digital RPA workforce can perform a specific task in the same manner without any distraction or discretion repeatedly for eternity. Along with performing the task with utmost consistency and accuracy, it also maintains a detailed step by step log for audit purposes, which makes it the technology of choice for organizations from a compliance perspective.

  • Enhanced Customer Experience

    Customer service is one-of-the-key touchpoints that help organizations maintain a strong relationship with their customers. To ensure a great experience and higher satisfaction for customers, employees need to perform their tasks effectively. While employees can focus on solving customer problems and managing the relationship with their critical thinking and empathy, the digital RPA workforce can take care of standard repetitive tasks such as log-in, data search, data retrieval, and data entry for multiple applications thus ensuring speedy and accurate task completion. This team effort of human and digital workforce ensures that the customer gets the best possible experience.

  • Innovation

    RPA enables organizations to be innovative in more ways than one. The most apparent way in which RPA enables is by freeing up person-hours that employees can now spend on solving new problems.

    Apart from providing the ability to connect to legacy applications such as Mainframes as well as to modern-day web applications, RPA also enables organizations to work with complementary technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, and business process management thus opening the door for designing most innovative of solutions.

    Even before a process is automated, process discovery capabilities provide an in-depth view of all possible variations of a process that already exists. Organizations can analyze these variations to come up with the most optimum process flow.

  • Cost optimization

    Although there are ways to quantify each of the above benefits, cost optimization is the most tangible of all the benefits that RPA can deliver. The benefit in terms of cost savings can be calculated by considering the cost factors that would have been applicable if the repetitive, mundane and low complexity cognitive tasks would have been performed by the human workforce.

    The most visible cost factors that can be saved are:

    • IT infrastructure including desktops, phones, etc.
    • Training costs
    • Hiring cost including rehiring due to attrition
    • Employee wages including benefits over multiple years

Investments for an RPA Program

Another key aspect that needs to be understood to track the ROI of an RPA program is the investment that an organization is making on an ongoing basis. Following are the cost factors that are applicable for an RPA program:

  • Infrastructure cost

    Infrastructure costs would include fixed as well as ongoing expenditures. The fixed cost would include:

    • One-time procurement cost of server machines and components in case of on premise deployments
    • One-time procurement cost of robot farm machines

    The on-going cost would include:

    • Subscription cost for cloud storage for running server components in case of cloud deployments
    • Subscription cost of cloud storage for deploying robot farms

    • One of the key factors that lead to cost optimization on this front is that unlike the human workforce, the digital workforce can share the same device without interfering in each other’s work and without compromising on the productivity and security considerations. It would not be a surprise if 100 digital workers work in parallel on the same laptop without interfering with each other’s tasks.

  • Cost for process discovery and design

    Traditionally, process discovery used to be performed by business analysts. A business analyst would meet the client, understand and document the use case in great detail, and handover the use case discovery document/requirements document to the development team. The development team would then design the process using the RPA process design tool commonly known as “Automation studio”. The cost here can be calculated as per the expenditure on human resources deployed for the above steps.

    Modern-day RPA product suites have in-built process discovery capabilities that can monitor the employees in action and automatically create process flow diagrams with different variations. These process flows can be analyzed, and the most optimum flow can directly be exported to the process design tool. The development team can then review and make changes to create a production-ready process. The kind of changes usually includes adding exception handling and notification mechanisms. The in-built process discovery capability is an important factor that organizations should consider while selecting the automation software.

    One key advantage of RPA is that a process can be executed by 1000s of digital workers without any training cost. Alternatively, multiple processes can be executed by the same robot without any training cost. Once a digital worker is deployed, organizations don’t have to worry about attrition, rehiring, and training of these workers ever again.

  • Digital worker licenses

    Digital workers or robots can be licensed on a subscription or perpetual basis. For large organizations that are in for the long haul, it makes practical sense to buy a perpetual license that puts no limit on the number of digital workers that can be deployed. As the implementation grows, more and more processes are automated over the years, and the organization can keep strengthening its digital workforce at no additional cost. For smaller organizations with a limited number of processes to be automated over the years, a subscription-based license for a specific number of digital workers makes more sense.

    Another key advantage that RPA offers is the ability to scale up or down on the click of a button. Once deployed, a digital worker can continuously work throughout the day thus supporting the organization and its employees across multiple shifts and time zones.

    In addition to the licensing cost, an AMC cost also has to be paid which allows the organizations to have dedicated customer support and free upgrades to the latest version of the software.

    There are licensing models that allows the organizations to pay on the basis of outcomes or value delivered instead of an upfront license cost. The flexible licensing models such as outcome based pricing is one of the key factors that organizations must consider while selecting the automation software.

The method for calculating ROI for an RPA program is a trade-off between simplicity and accuracy. For example, in the simplest of calculations, organizations may only consider the person-hours saved for their employees due to RPA along with the per hour cost of employees for performing the mundane and now automated task as part of the value realized calculation. Whereas, for calculating the RPA investment, the organization may just consider the license and AMC cost for digital workers i.e. robots. While the above factors would help measure the value realized, investments made and ROI of an RPA program in the simplest of ways, organizations should not hesitate to consider any other factors that may be having a significant impact on ROI of their program.

References

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/magic-quadrant

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-robotic-process-automation-rpa-market

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-11-13-gartner-says-worldwide-spending-on-robotic-process-automation-software-to-reach-680-million-in-2018

Demystifying Digital Process Automation

Business Process Management or BPM, Service Oriented Architecture or SOA, Enterprise Service Bus or ESB, Enterprise Application Architecture or EAI, Straight Through Processing or STP, Long-Running Processes, Workflow, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Rules, Document & Content flow, Case Management, Automation, Process Automation, Robotic Process Automation, Dynamic Case Management or DCM, Business Process Automation or BPA, Digital Process Automation or DPA, DPA Deep, DPA Wide. This endless list of business process concepts either confuses or scares most of the business users.

In this article, you will see how BPM, DCM, DPA, DPA-Deep, DPA-Wide, and RPA capabilities complement each other empowering the digital transformation journey of large organizations with low code, low-cost process automation features and helping them move towards achieving business agility in real-time.

Enterprises are trying to automate their processes right from the birth of the IT industry. High-priced till the 90s, only a few sectors like the BFSI could afford IT. The real IT applications started when some banks in the USA got mainframes deployed from the IBM labs to automate their General Ledger.

The 90s belonged to the IBM Mainframes. AS/400, UNIX, and Windows also had their footprints. Many Programming languages like C, Delphi, and products like the ERPs, Enterprise Databases soon became popular. By this time other sectors also joined the IT bandwagon to automate some of their enterprise processes. As an industry, IT was still quite young as compared to other industries such as the Electrical industry, which has been there for centuries now. Both the industries therefore, differed in the way they developed products. For example, an Electric Plug manufactured by one vendor can provide its desired functionality by connecting it easily to an Electric Socket manufactured by another vendor. Whereas the IT industry developed a lot of code while building these disparate online transaction processing (OLTP) systems which could not talk to each other! That gave birth to the concept of SOA and interoperability.

The BPM/SOA/ESB/EAI wave ruled the first decade of the 21st century. The second decade saw the emergence of new concepts like BPA, RPA, Robots, and Chatbots. Oxford University conjectured in 2013 that up to 35% of all jobs would be automated by 20351. RPA alone is likely to reach $2.9 billion by 20212. This has caught the attention of all analysts. However, most organizations are still not able to automate all their enterprise processes using BPM/BPA capabilities. This is what gave birth to Digital Process Automation (DPA) as a concept.

What is DPA?

If you are wondering why are there so many concepts for process automation? Don’t worry – nothing’s changing – it’s the same old wine in a new bottle. Mathematically DPA = BPM + RPA. DPA is a natural progression of the BPM concept, and in addition, it can discover and automate processes in scenarios where BPM typically fails. DPA is useful in cases when the process includes websites with no APIs, custom applications, or legacy applications.

RPA Tools like AssistEdge augment the BPM tools to automate these processes using a combination of web, windows, and image automation techniques. DPA is further divided into two categories – wide and deep. DPA Wide is suitable for automating processes of moderate complexity using low-code tools, while DPA Deep is suitable for automating highly complex processes.

Most large organizations have been following the trend and have already bought and successfully deployed multiple BPM/BAM/ESB/EAI tools/products available in the IT Product market. The BPM/BAM/ESB/EAI products typically use the “top-down” approach to automate enterprise processes. The RPA/DPA/DCM products typically use the “bottom-up” approach to automate enterprise processes. Combining the existing capabilities/expertise in the available BPM/BAM/ESB/EAI tools and these new complementary RPA/DPA/DCM Tools will help these large organizations achieve business agility in real-time, realizing the benefits of this process value chain. As the “top-down” and “bottom-up” merge, the RPA/DPA/DCM products look to strike the balance between robust process, rapid development, and low cost.

Importantly, post COVID-19 all these large organizations are re-inventing their business models resulting in the need for more innovative and agile business processes. This outcome-based digital transformation journey of large enterprises demands complex process automation capabilities with low-code tools to achieve business agility providing the business SMEs a bigger say in the development process.

The below logical architecture diagram captures some of the capabilities that these large organizations/enterprises already have. It also enlists the new set of complementary capabilities that the large enterprises need in different layers in their Enterprise Architecture to continue on this path of Enterprise Process Automation.

The ability to do UI level integration is critical for large enterprises as API and Data Level integration is too expensive and not possible in many cases. RPA Tools like AssistEdge complement the BPM/DCM/DPA tools to provide UI level integration capabilities to “automate” any application irrespective of the technology in which it is built. This is the reason why most large organizations today are looking to combine the capabilities of these BPM/DCM/DPA Tools with the capabilities of RPA tools like AssistEdge to automate Enterprise Processes as part of their digital transformation journey.

References

Leveraging Automation for effective customer communication

Increased adoption of eDelivery channels driving enterprises towards implementing automation for customer communication.

Communication is an important aspect of running a business efficiently. An enterprise needs to stay in constant touch with the customers to be able to serve them better. With the world going digital and electronic delivery (eDelivery) taking over almost entirely, regular communication has become even more important to stay relevant, and ahead of the competition.

Customer Communication needs span across departments and involve multiple stakeholders in an organization. For instance, in a Telco, the core billing department has quite a few communications to be sent to and received from the customers, so do the technical support, marketing, and collections departments. Similarly, in a bank, the relationship management team continuously communicates with the customers, so do the Billing/Invoicing and the marketing department. Besides, the various business lines like Loans, Credit Cards, etc. have their own set of communications/correspondence.

With the increased adoption of digital/eDelivery channels, the mode of communication has also become significant. Some communication must be sent over email, some posted over a website, some are better marketed on social media, for some others SMS is the most effective method of communication and, albeit with reducing frequency nowadays, some are even sent physically.

Considering all of this, having a coherent strategy that works across departments, stakeholders, business lines, modes of communications, and – not to forget, the multiple IT systems as well has become a complex challenge. Further, there are cases where we under-communicate or over-communicate with the customers – simply because organizations just don’t know who is sending what communication to customers. With all these challenges, not only is it difficult to comprehend a consistent strategy, it is even more difficult to implement it. The kind of flexibility needed to implement a Customer Communication strategy/plan is difficult to achieve as it goes through too many IT applications and causes too much friction in existing assets/investments.

In such a scenario, do organizations give up? Or leave every sub-unit or department to fend for themselves? Well, of course not. In fact, because of all this, organizations are more conscious and aware of the need to have a consistent customer communication management plan than ever before. They have tried out various approaches to solve this multi-faceted problem. Some organizations have tried various out-of-the-box (OOTB) products, and some have tried to create in-house solutions to manage these communications. And these options have provided results with a mixed degree of success. With the flexibility that is needed because of the multi-departments, multi-systems, and ever-changing customer demands, it is difficult to have a sophisticated hard-wired solution for this. This is where Automation and specifically Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes in. Adding another exciting dimension to this is Intelligent RPA.

RPA, in both attended and unattended form, is perfectly suited for this kind of scenario. It works as an OTT layer on top of existing IT systems, works with existing IT systems and if done well, creates a potent communication mechanism with the customer. RPA is non-intrusive and super-agile and works as a human would – only faster and with less “human” errors. It can bring in human capabilities as and when needed as well in the form of Attended Automation. It can take care of under-communication and over-communication as a centralized communications robot can track when was the last communication sent to a customer and therefore can hold back or expedite the next communication.

Let’s walk through this with the example of a bank and some specific communications it needs to carry out.

  • A bank would typically need to make a lot of marketing communications for any new product it launches. Prior to that they need to Identify the target customer and segment using feedback from past launch communications, determine the potential of the customer to buy a new product based on his past buying behavior, and automate the process of sending out the communication. Automation of processing/further reaching out based on customer response is another potential Intelligent Automation (IA) use case.
  • Sending various notifications related to loans to the customer – Bots can be executed based on pre-defined trigger points.
  • Sending credit card Bills (or for that matter, any other bills) to the customer – Bots can be invoked as per a scheduled interval.
  • Sending Payment received notifications – Trigger-based RPA can take care of this.
  • Processing feedback received from the customer (generic or specific to a product or an interaction), is a classic Intelligent Automation area – this can either be a trigger-based Bot processing feedback as and when received or a scheduled bot processing all the feedback collected in a given period in one go.

As you can see, many of these use cases are easily taken care of by RPA. There are plenty more such easily visible use cases across industries. The simplicity and ease of implementation of Intelligent RPA to cater to such use cases make it the best bet for any agile organization.

Moreover, beyond the obvious set of use cases mentioned above, there is another technology that helps organizations decide on which processes to automate and which ones to optimize/standardize. And it is as applicable to Customer Communications as any other space.

Process Discovery is a technology that helps organizations understand their processes and variations better by removing human bias and providing data-based intelligence. This helps organizations optimize the processes and guides them to select the right processes to automate. With this, organizations have found more automatable processes than what was obvious, and sometimes also pointed out processes as not-to-be-automated so that time/dollars are not wasted going after something that would be difficult to automate.

Case Study – A large bank in North America:

  • The Bank’s marketing executives had to manually collate information from 5 different portals (internal and external) to generate more than 180K Customer Financials report annually, covering the various aspects of the relationship with each customer. EdgeVerve proposed and implemented AssistEdge RPA for automating the entire process. With AssistEdge RPA implementation, the turnaround time has significantly reduced and is resulting in about 1.5M USD annual savings for the bank. The same team now processes tens of thousands of reports and send this across to each of their customers proactively.
  • As part of the COVID-19 response, the bank had an EMI moratorium offer for its customers. But sending it to thousands of customers and processing their response was a huge task and time was of essence. EdgeVerve implemented the end to end process within a week, leveraging the Intelligent capabilities of AssistEdge to put together the necessary information, send it to individual customers, and process the same on the bank’s legacy systems using the response received from the customers. The bot now sends details about the offer and processes customer responses for more than 32,000 customers every month.

To summarize, with increased adoption of eDelivery, enterprises are fast moving towards implementing automation for customer communication. Leveraging Intelligent RPA (Attended & Unattended) along with Process Discovery, can be a promising and agile answer to an organization’s customer communication needs. Not only can RPA handle the ever-changing underlying systems with ease; they can also handle these without IT involvement to a large extent.

AssistEdge provides a cohesive automation platform through its products like AssistEdge RPA, AssistEdge Engage, and AssistEdge Discover.

AssistEdge RPA offers a platform for automating various processes, bringing about sweeping changes across an enterprise. It provides the capabilities to build and execute both “Unattended” and “Attended” intelligent automation. Powered by Albie, the cognitive engine, AssistEdge RPA 18.0 empowers enterprises to embark on the journey towards Automation Singularity.

AssistEdge Engage helps organizations in reimagining their contact center and achieving superior customer experience. Customers benefit from faster query resolution, reduced hold time, increased first call resolution, and suitable offers, thereby improving brand connect and loyalty.

AssistEdge Discover is a leading process discovery product that captures and leverages user’s digital interactions to create business process maps and transformational insights that aids organizations in process improvement, automation, and efficiency. Powered by empirical data, the outcomes are free from human biases providing a powerful foundation for operational excellence and continuous improvement.

How to leverage Intelligent Automation in Dynamic Case Management

Any business or industry deals with a combination of business processes and tasks. Some tasks are completely structured/predictable, some less structured yet predictable, and some completely unstructured and unpredictable. The predictable and structured processes with well-defined tasks can be managed in logical steps, scripted, and programmed with some efforts and due diligence. These types of processes can be managed using a variety of traditional approaches such as Business Process Management.

On the other hand, managing unpredictable & unstructured processes requires on-the-fly thinking, applying the right business acumen, and making a quick decision to achieve the desired outcome. This is where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) could be a key solution element for handling the nuances of Dynamic Case Management.

Managing dynamic work is difficult, and therefore businesses across the globe have been experimenting with different techniques and approaches over time. For instance, consider the scenarios where work involves

  • Interacting with various stakeholders
    • across departments within an organization
    • sometimes beyond the boundaries of the organization as well.
  • Using various un-integrated software systems
  • Aggregating, assessing and managing data from various sources
    • Including unstructured data such as images, documents, etc.
  • Managing dynamic content and interactions
  • Complying with policies of the organization
  • Complying with legal requirements as per law of the land
  • Combination of a few or all of the above

As you would notice, a lot of this work is dynamic in nature – unpredictable in terms of what you find in the next step of the current process or the next iteration of the same process. Historically, a lot of systems have tried to address this problem, however, the core challenge of variability across software systems, dynamism in terms of data, processes, and stakeholders continue to remain challenges. The need of the hour thus would be to have a solution that doesn’t need a tight integration across systems and can bring not only deterministic but also cognitive capabilities to the fore. The proposed solution should not expect the underlying systems to be changed or tweaked or integrated traditionally as that might render the solution ineffective in managing the ever-changing scenarios.

Leveraging Intelligent RPA

The inherent capability of RPA to use front end automation in addition to the API-based or other backend integrations makes it a core contender in the race to solve the case management conundrum. RPA plays a pivotal role in achieving the rule-based ‘Deterministic Automation’ as well as the cognitive capability led ‘Intelligent Automation’ and enables ‘Human-empowered Automation’.

Deterministic automation in RPA is the proven art and science of using front-end UI automation through software programs called Robots. The robots can handle all variety of use cases spanning one or multiple software systems, management of data from varied sources, etc. much like a human user. This allows the human user to focus on high-value tasks and lead to better efficiency in case management. Additionally, RPA platforms like AssistEdge can provide tool-based “Process Discovery” allowing organizations to unearth their processes and variations better by removing human bias and providing data-based intelligence on process tasks.

In addition to the above-mentioned, Intelligent Automation in RPA allows handling cognitive use cases like image processing and unstructured data with the help of Automation Intelligence or Machine Learning techniques. RPA platforms like AssistEdge provide the flexibility to use industry-leading cognitive services for handling complex business processes. The tool allows drag and drop-based orchestration to stitch need-based invocation of AI and ML capabilities and use the provided intelligence to drive Robot actions.

Let’s consider the most basic document management scenario. Businesses have large amounts of unstructured data in the form of documents such as handwritten scanned papers, images, contracts, enrolment forms, email correspondence as well as data in various software systems such as invoices, purchase orders, sales orders, etc. Dynamic Case Management would need the ability to understand the data and then based on the insights from this data interact with software systems to complete the business processes. RPA tools leverage Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for reading through scanned documents and convert them into meaningful data. Further to this, Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are also used to generate summaries, locate contextual information, derive business insights, and more. RPA tools allow human users to review and approve the generated insights and recommended actions. Once done the Robots can formally update the case details into various target systems through front-end automation.

Dynamic Case Management through RPA is a great example of a human-machine partnership in which process handling is enhanced through Artificial Intelligence-driven decision-making and automation, providing greater precision. RPA platforms like AssistEdge thus help organizations handle dynamic cases and provide:

  • Human led automation of case management,
  • Accelerated productivity gains,
  • Improved SLA time for resolution,
  • Meeting required regulatory and compliance requirements
  • Reduced cost of operations and most importantly
  • Increased customer satisfaction

RPA (deterministic and intelligent) can be a potent approach to today’s dynamic and complex case management needs. They can help an organization in identifying automation opportunities and implement them in a manner that doesn’t impact any of their current assets. Additionally, this solution lends itself to a very agile change management process.

AssistEdge provides a cohesive automation platform through its products like AssistEdge RPA, AssistEdge Engage, and AssistEdge Discover.

AssistEdge RPA offers a platform for automating various processes, bringing about sweeping changes across an enterprise. It provides the capabilities to build and execute both “Unattended” and “Attended” Intelligent Automation. Powered by Albie, the cognitive engine, AssistEdge RPA 18.0 empowers enterprises to embark on the journey towards Automation Singularity.

AssistEdge Engage helps organizations in reimagining their contact centers and achieving superior customer experience. Customers benefit from faster query resolution, reduced hold time, increased first call resolution, and suitable offers, thereby improving brand connect and loyalty.

AssistEdge Discover is a leading process discovery product that captures and leverages user’s digital interactions to create business process maps and transformational insights that aid organizations in process improvement, automation, and efficiency. Powered by empirical data, the outcomes are free from human biases providing a powerful foundation for operational excellence and continuous improvement.

Delivering superior customer service with live chat

Applications have become a part of our lives. Especially the ones that allow us to stay in touch with our friends, colleagues, and families with just a click. Chat applications such as WhatsApp, Skype, or Facebook Messenger are fast becoming common ways of interacting. And in unprecedented times such as now, with global pandemic affecting our lives in every way, such chat applications act as support enabling us to stay connected with the world.

Live chat software has also permeated business operations. They are the new “must-have” for organizations looking to make customer services more personalized and responsive. If we look around, we see a majority of companies be it banking, insurance, or utilities already have live chat options on their websites. Live chat helps bring customers closer to support teams in just a click.

In many cases, live chat with chatbot capabilities using unified dashboards is helping transform the customer service landscape by reducing the effort and turnaround time required to serve the customers. Chatbots are effective in handling basic customer requests such as product enquire or status of a request or complaint. When the requests are more complex and require higher cognitive skills, it can be easily transferred to a live agent for resolution. Live agent applications come with a variety of features making the experience both seamless and enriching for both customers as well as the support agents.

With COVID-19 giving rise to an additional challenge for the customer service operations with increasing norms of lockdowns, social distancing & work from home, organizations across the world are facing challenges. Not all business operations can run smoothly in the work from home model, especially the ones which require face-to-face interactions with the customer or the need to refer to data to provide support to the customer online. As the global pandemic led to reduced availability of people supporting the contact centers, this resulted in the high acceptance of live chat agents with chatbots to provide service to customers.

As opposed to the calling model, the live chat with the chatbot model helped reduce the load on customer care executives and helped improve the customer experience by reducing the turnaround time for service request resolution. For example, a customer service agent can only attend to one customer at a time when on phone, but that same agent can manage multiple online chats simultaneously. Live chat agents working remotely can access a lot of knowledge articles or earlier chat interactions for reference thus reducing dependency on the supervisor or colleague. Should there be a need, the live chat can be transferred easily for the supervisor to handle any escalations. The live agent has a lot of pre-canned messages to quickly respond to customers without typing in. This helps to standardize the analytics around live chats. All these features help make customer service a delightful experience both for customers as well as customer care executives.

AssistEdge Engage offers key capabilities around automation and collaboration in customer service space through Live chat, Co-browse, Unified Dashboard, and One-Click automation. AssistEdge Engage Chat brings in the capabilities around live chat interaction with customers like intelligent routing, context transition, canned messages for quicker and standard response, ability to capture feedback and access to knowledge articles, or earlier chats for quick response for a complex request.

Here’s the link to a customer case study which showcases how AssistEdge Engage Chat helped an organization in managing and exceeding customer experience in during COVID-19.

How can enterprises achieve Automation Maturity?

What is Maturity in an Automation Journey?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become the go-to automation technology for enterprises across the globe today. However, only a few enterprises can claim to have achieved maturity in their automation journey. What does maturity in automation mean?

Automation maturity can be defined by 4 dimensions –

  • Scale – The most used, but often misleading parameter. Usually, enterprises who have deployed a lot of bots (in 1000s) are considered to have achieved a certain maturity in their automation journey. However, it’s not necessarily an accurate representation of maturity. The right scale is measured by not just the number of bots, but the impact that it has had on the business.
  • Security – While the true scaling-up can help businesses achieve the right results, another important aspect of the automation maturity is how security is handled during the automation. RPA bots handle sensitive data, access business-critical applications, and perform high priority business processes. A true mature automation setup would include the right controls and mechanisms to ensure the right data and operational security.
  • Reliability – Enterprises with a mature automation program depend on bots to execute critical business tasks. To make this feasible, the automation setup must be reliable for the SLAs to be maintained. Multiple factors such as strong program management, robust operations and reliable support structure and scalable automation platform come into play.
  • Governance – A well-defined governance overseeing the development, deployment, monitoring, and management of bots is a sign of a mature automation program. It provides the assurance of quality, minimized risk, and no rework. While the model of governance could be centralized or de-centralized, robust governance ensures the successful scaling of automation programs.

A mature automation program is reflected in real business results, not just in terms of the number of bots. Significant labor-cost value (usually in Millions of man-hours saved) is a major business benefit, which the organizations can realize through re-deployment of the high-value human workforce or actual operational cost reduction. A well planned and executed automation program also provides other business values like better sales, higher revenue collections, and better compliance. For e.g. a large global electronics manufacturing client achieved 21% better collections in their F&A department within 3 months of automation implementation with the AssistEdge RPA platform.

What is needed to achieve this maturity?

  • Clear business goals and vision – Executive sponsorship and vision for automation programs are crucial to achieving scale and maturity. Usually, automation programs that are part of bigger business transformation initiatives have better chances of success. For e.g. in the large electronics manufacturing client, the automation program is part of a 5-year Hoshin strategy to transform their F&A operations. This ensures that the program has visibility and oversight all the way to the CFO office, thus ensuring a clear business involvement.
  • Cultural adoption – It is important that the automation program is adopted by the organization as part of its culture and is not looked at as an external initiative. Embedding the improvement and automation culture, not just in the program team, but across business teams goes a long way in ensuring scale, success, and adoption of the automation.
  • Program Governance – Implementation of a structured governance program to deliver on planned objectives is critical. The best method to achieve this is the CoE (Center of Excellence) model. A central team is formed across different business groups to monitor and manage the program, but the design, development, and deployment are decentralized at the individual business group. Large automation programs usually have multi-layer with regular steerco meetings with different teams involved.
  • The right Automation platform – A scalable and mature automation program can only be built on a stable and feature-rich automation platform. Key features of such platforms include –
    • Ease of Configuration – Out-of-box configuration capabilities for all enterprise applications, best-in-class experience and robust enablement to democratize automation
    • Centralized Bot Governance and monitoring – Platform portal to remotely manage and monitor a huge number of robots
    • Enterprise-Grade Security and Reliability – Features like Advanced Credential management and role/access control and advanced debugging
    • Business Analytics and Dashboards – State-of-the-art analytics and reporting on the Bots performance and business results
  • Right operations and services partner – Any large automation program involves multiple teams – different business groups, operations teams, infrastructure team, RPA platform team, Services team, etc. A mature program is a result of good chemistry between all these teams and a good governance structure that allows seamless working. It always helps to select the right partners that have the trust of the business teams. One key aspect of choosing the right partners is the readiness to take ownership of business outcomes. Thus, the vendors should have their skin-in-the-game”.

Conclusion

A truly mature automation program is measured, not by the number of bots, but by the business results it helped achieve. It starts with the executive sponsor setting an aspirational target for the team and setting up the right vision for the program. Multiple teams work seamlessly governed by a central COE team in delivering automation at scale. The organization stands to get significant business outcomes from a mature automation program, far beyond the expected operational cost reduction.

The art of selecting the right RPA vendor

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become the most sought-after tool in the last few years. While it started with the basic automation of daily mundane and repetitive manual tasks, the key benefits that made RPA attractive include reduced cost; speed, accuracy, and consistency; improved quality, and scalability. It also provides extra security, especially for industries with a high amount of sensitive data like financial services. RPA expanded with API integration into other enterprises, connectors into ITSM systems, terminal servers, and Intelligent automation leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Most enterprises across the world are on board their digital transformation journey and many are considering the options available to get started with theirs. Today, over 50 RPA technology providers are operating worldwide at different scales. Though many organizations have already chosen and adopted RPA tools suitable for their needs; the successful implementation of RPA depends on the type of vendor, their processes, pricing strategies, and capabilities. RPA vendors offer multiple options but here are some of the key factors enterprises need to consider before choosing their RPA tool:

Process Discovery

The basis of successful RPA implementation is based on the identification of the right process for automation and understanding the nuances for the processes, which is being carried out regularly in the organization. Typically, process identification is carried out manually, which has its challenges and biases. On the other hand, process discovery provides a platform to empirically analyze the data and identify the most suitable path variations for automation. Process discovery empowers organizations with deep process insights that not only accelerate the automation strategy but also identify the opportunities for process excellence and workforce efficiency.

Product Automation Capabilities

Enterprises generally have a staggered application landscape across different departments. This makes it crucial to validate the applications involved in the process chosen for RPA and are those applications supported by RPA Vendors. Though most vendors nowadays support RPA for all commonly used applications; it is still imperative to validate at the initial stage to avoid any bottlenecks in later stages of RPA implementation.

Efficiency and Reliability

The automation efficiency and reliability for RPA products depend on the ratio of the number of transactions executed successfully vs the total number of transactions. Higher the ratio; more efficient, the reliable product will be. One of the key point to consider here is how product tackles transactions which are failed; do they provide any automated retry kind of a mechanism or manual intervention is required to re-execute failed transactions.

Deployment options

RPA vendors offer different deployment options. However not all RPA vendors support all these options. Enterprises need to understand the advantages/disadvantages of each deployment model and identify the fitment based on their business requirement.

  • On-Premise deployment
  • Cloud deployment (Client private cloud)
  • Cloud deployment (Cloud-managed and serviced by Product)

Scalability

Scalability is one of the most important factors to consider to leverage the ROI RPA offers. Below is a set of areas that encompasses the scalability aspect in RPA space.

  • Versatility – Applications, API, AI/ML, Browsers, OS, Extensibility
  • Infrastructure – Horizontal/vertical scale, benchmark, and guidelines
  • Operations – Simplicity and Extensibility
  • Pricing for Scale – License, Metering, and Monitoring
  • Highly Complex Automation – Case Study
  • Ecosystem – AI/ML, Abby, BPM, Cloud providers
  • Specialized offering – Citrix, PDF

User Experience

UX plays a very important role in the success of any product; be it a web application or desktop application. Here is a list of benefits that a good UX design can provide.

  • Ease of implementation
  • Reduced process design time
  • Clear calls to action (CTAs)
  • Motivates users to interact with the content
  • Keeps away from wasting resources
  • Increased productivity

Product Technical Support

There’s no such thing as an ideal scenario. Therefore, it is important to know how a product supports its clients when something goes wrong. How quickly the product responds to the issues and fixes them is very important when operating in a scaled-up production environment. A strong and reliable support system thus becomes one of the important factors to consider while finalizing the RPA vendor.

Product Security

With the emergence of advanced technologies, cybercriminals have also found more ways to get into the system of many organizations. Since more and more businesses are now relying on software products for their crucial operations, the importance of software security assurance must be taken seriously – now more than ever. Here is the list of security features, which a good RPA tool must possess.

  • Prevention of viruses, spyware and identity theft
  • Protection of valuable information
  • Protects networks and data from unauthorized access
  • Information security and business continuity management
  • Ensure compliance
  • Security for clients
  • Allows employees to work safely

Governance

RPA has garnered a great deal of attention because of the benefits it brings to operational efficiency. However, as it is a relatively new approach for organizations, RPA typically starts with processes that lack the necessary detail to ensure that errors are mitigated, and risk is reduced during the development and operation of the automated “bots”. Without a structure to control it, automation becomes more responsive, more agile, and less administrative. However, that lack of clear governance increases the risk when automation is expanded and used more widely. The RPA tool should provide better visibility to people involved in the process, pending notifications, ROI dashboards, and various other monitoring and controlling mechanisms.

Pricing

This involves many things like license fees, implementation, maintenance, and many more. Here simplified licensing and pricing must be a key point to consider. Some vendors have complicated pricing like separate studio license, separate bot license, separate orchestrator license, etc. It is always advisable to go for simple license strategies as it adds more clarity and transparency to it. Choosing a vendor based on their pricing strategy can be a cost-effective decision.

Conclusion

RPA can help enterprises save time and money while enabling optimum use of resources. However, choosing the right RPA vendor plays an important role in the successful implementation of RPA and faster realization of ROI. Enterprises should carefully go through the above criteria before selecting any RPA vendors. Each tool has a specific purpose and one must evaluate the full potential of an RPA tool.

AssistEdge RPA, an award-winning and cohesive automation platform that offers new opportunities for scaling up and helps enterprises accelerate their journey towards complete digital transformation. From being an Innovator with the best market approach to a leader in Attended Automation, AssistEdge RPA combines the power of RPA and AI, thus empowering enterprises to be future-ready.