January 2022

Reaching the next million customers – What’s in store for Manufacturing Companies?

Manufacturing organizations aiming to reach the next million customers need to access the potential that emerging markets offer.

The primary channel to sell in these markets is indirect. This channel enables inventory break-bulk, working capital requirements, last-mile delivery, and various other benefits that would nearly be impossible for the manufacturing organization to provide at scale themselves.

This indirect channel brings its own set of unique challenges, such as working with non-exclusive distributors as well as dealing with manual operations in the value chain. The lack of visibility to distributor sales and inventory results in poor supply chain planning and execution, leading to “unfulfilled demand,” frequent “out-of-stock,” “low market reach,” and even “loss of revenue.”

This requires a cloud-agnostic demand sensing solution combined with a robust mobile ordering engine that can enable large manufacturing organizations to overcome these challenges and attain a strong hold in emerging markets.

For non-exclusive partners, a data exchange would be required to connect the organization to its channel partners and capture the partner sales inventory data irrespective of the file formats and ERP systems they might be using. If required, this data is then harmonized and transformed to match the organization’s hierarchy.

For exclusive distributors, a cloud-based order shipping and billing solution is essential to capture data in real-time and enable insight-driven supply chain decisions.

Lastly, for those retailers based in remote locations and not served by a distributor, a lightweight mobile app to capture orders, thus enabling non-linear market coverage.

We have built all these capabilities at EdgeVerve and have helped deliver some powerful benefits to our clients such as:

Our solution is trusted by 25+ Fortune 500 companies and is enabling visibility to $100bn+ annual revenue, connecting these companies with 6000+ distributors and 5mn+ retail outlets. With a presence in over 130 countries, our solution is available in 6 languages.

Learn more about our TradeEdge platform.

Employee Centric Democratized Automation

Introduction

A majority of organizations globally have adopted automation as a key capability to move products, services, and customer experience to the next level. For organizations today, it is critical that every employee is thinking and working towards automation as a way of life. Automation and AI are no longer complex pieces of technology that only a few can understand and apply in their workspace; they are becoming more part of our day-to-day life. We start our day with various automation and AI-based products around us, be it our phones, television, or other smart devices. This reinforces that automation and AI can be applied anywhere and by anyone; they add value and help take things to the next level. Organizations have gone a big way already, making automation an essential enterprise technology. Now is the time to make it part of every employee’s daily work so that individual productivity gains can be added to realize the organization’s overall productivity goals.

Half of business technologists produce capabilities for users beyond their own department and/or enterprise, according to a new survey from Gartner, Inc. They are primarily responsible for building analytics capabilities (36%), but are also involved in building digital commerce platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation, among others.¹

Why Democratize

As organizations are looking to be more agile and responsive to the changing markets and technology, they want to make each employee a partner in this journey. When employees embrace automation as their day-to-day tool, they begin thinking about deriving benefits in ways that were not thought of earlier. Automation is not just an organization’s goal anymore but every individual’s goal, thus helping employees move towards more fulfilling roles that can add value. Democratizing automation helps align the organization towards the objective of “Automation as a way to work,” which allows each employee to think and find ways to reduce effort and improve quality in his\her daily activities through automation. When you have a Bot for each employee, they think of automation as a means to help them move to the next level at work by focusing more on activities that require human qualities and add value. Enterprise automation in a few scenarios is more prone to failures. In such scenarios, employee-driven automation can help make automation more robust.

How to Democratize

Automation technologies like RPA (Robotic Process Automation) from an early stage have been citizen developer friendly. These technologies allow users to create automation using their studios, providing tools to drag and drop activities and build a process. With the emergence of Low-Code/No-Code platforms, Business SMEs have tools to not only design automation themselves but also to create and connect them to a user interface or Apps. Low-code/No-code platforms provide a simple GUI-based interface with various pre-built elements and adaptors to help citizen developers design automation in a very intuitive way on their own without any developer know-how. Organizations can adopt the following steps to democratize automation:

Future of Automation Programs in an Enterprise

Enterprise-wide RPA programs will continue to be the primary driver of automation-based efficiency programs for an organization, but they are also looking to bring in individual productivity measures. Since not all manual, repetitive processes can be automated through unattended RPA, specific processes need manual intervention, due to several reasons like:

While organizations will make automation a more decentralized function through democratization, it is still a cultural change, not merely technological. They need to bring an automation mindset where it’s also an individual goal, not just a department or business unit. In this regard, citizen developer friendly automation studio and Low-Code/No-Code tools will play a significant role in the adoption and spread of these technologies.

AssistEdge provides a holistic automation platform that comes with an in-built Low Code Application (LCAP) Designer with drag & drop, point & click ability to build feature-rich responsive web apps accessibility over desktop, laptop, tablets, and mobile powered by iOS, Android, or Windows OS. LCAP designer also supports pre-built Integration with Attended and Unattended Automation, thus mitigating the need for Application APIs for integration with legacy applications.

AssistEdge Enterprise Personal Assistant is another offering that empowers employees to automate everyday tasks with contextual assistance that can typically enable up to a 20% reduction in manual efforts with a 3X improvement in employee satisfaction. All these capabilities are business users friendly, thus bringing automation closer to end-users.

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-09-21-gartner-survey-reveals-half-of-business-technologists-produce-technology-capabilities-for-users-beyond-their-own-department

Unlock New Possibilities: Embedded Automation & AI for Enterprises

Introduction

Robotic Process Automation today is no more an unchartered territory for enterprises. Deterministic automation has captured the low-hanging fruits of manual operations; however, lack of embedded automation and AI has failed to deliver potential benefits of enterprise automation.

RPA solutions have definitely evolved since deterministic automation, with the help of extendable AI to address contextual actions, but what is still missing is a native capability to continuously learn, recommend and automate use cases, without enforcing users to engage with a new technology platform.

Consulting firms such as Deloitte, EY are strong proponents of establishing an Automation Center of Excellence before enterprises venture into the adoption of a new tool for automation. A CoE may give a holistic view of RPA implementation, define criteria to shortlist processes for automation and metrics to measure RoIs.

Although advanced automation solutions such as AssistEdge offer out-of-the-box capability to define the above governance structure by providing process mining, automation, and analytics over a cohesive platform, the automation journey has still been human-triggered.

The Pivot to Embedded Automation

RPA is now being looked at as a strategic solution rather than a tactical implementation to gain immediate cost reduction benefits. Therefore, it is imperative that automation goes as an embedded, non-intrusive and partially-invisible component with enterprise applications.

Enterprises rely on a software center or cloud to distribute certified software with employees. With embedded automation as a packaged offering against each application, users will invariably learn about the automation possibilities against processes built on available apps. Another advantage of having plug-in-based capability distribution is not all workstations can support a monolithic automation suite, but with an embedded automation plug-in, a user will have the option to publish a probable candidate for automation to cloud for review and configuration.

The traditional approach of disseminating the value of automation has been establishing CoE, conducting information sessions on tools and methodologies, defining criteria, and working closely with operators to evaluate the fitment of automation tools to processes. With a focus on automation scalability, solutions are being relooked to make the platform citizen developer friendly; however, every new application support by an RPA tool demands retraining of members. An embedded automation plugin to apps in focus will encourage users to explore automation, while at the same time allowing invisible AI to understand possible patterns in a transaction. The AI component will not just monitor and identify automation use cases, but also continuously recommend newer opportunities for automation as the engine learns and acquires new capabilities from the cloud.

Retail applications predominantly operate out of web browsers or mobile apps; however, enterprise applications, due to secured VPN, have been monolithic applications and, for one of these reasons, were not user friendly. Today, the technology platform for enterprises and retail is converging due to secured SaaS infrastructure, ensuing demand for seamless and effortless automation. Automation & AI today is seen as a packaged solution that can instantly convert manually intense operations to headless automation. That said, a cohesive automation platform such as AssistEdge will be able to let citizen users manifest these expectations via a SaaS platform for process mining and one-click automation configuration of processes, cloud-based contextual knowledge base, and deployment to fast-track the automation journey. As part of making the platform more obscure, while being available as a 24×7 enterprise assistant, automation platforms must now come embedded with all leading enterprise applications and must try to build seamless process automation, with limited need for an automation studio.

AssistEdge Platform – Benefits and Capabilities

The AssistEdge platform currently offers extensive recording capability across process mining and automation, saving numerous hours in process configuration. With plug-ins for EdgeVerve’s line of solutions – Finacle, TradeEdge, and major enterprise applications such as SAP and Oracle, users will be able to immediately convert manual interaction to these apps to a digital worker that can operate as headless automation or as a digital assistant.

Enterprises today wish to have a one-stop-shop for all automation. For instance, with embedded automation, a Finacle user will be able to automate tasks that demand core banking data to be manually submitted to revenue management applications via embedded plug-ins of AssistEdge. With native AI capability, the plug-in will continuously monitor missed tasks that could be automated and generate benefit forecasts as MIS. On approval from the management on an in-built low code platform, the AI engine will automate and publish the task to a remote server, pleasantly surprising the user on the next round of process execution by auto-shrinking the manual engagements, while offering an Automation Singularity platform for human-bot interaction. The continuous monitoring and recommendation engine eliminates the need for an idea-pool, which is entirely built on user feedback and requires extensive analysis to generate possible automation benefits. The embedded automation is one key solution for enterprises to visualize RPA and AI at scale.

Not just has the technology been converging for enterprises and retail, so is the business model, wherein today’s enterprises want to invest on demand to better manage the impact of the economy. Herein, plug-in-based embedded automation will let enterprises closely monitor the automation adoption per users, and witness AI driven scaling of operations.