Building a Cohesive Platform for Automation

A product firm believes in developing a solution that addresses a customer’s pain point as well as ensures that the solution is widely adopted within an organization to realize the product benefits. While a majority of product firms focus on addressing a specific pain point of an entire use case, developing a cohesive platform is one approach, wherein an organization builds solutions for each section of the entire lifecycle of a transaction.

Microsoft, for instance, can be seen with products such as Server, Database, Vision, OCR, and Business Intelligence, trying to address the complete line of requirements with its cohesive platform.

On the flip side, how often do we see enterprise implementation consisting of a cohesive platform? What stops enterprises to venture into a cohesive platform?

When it comes to automation, can a cohesive platform be built for robotic automation? Will the industry accept a cohesive platform?

Building a cohesive platform requires deep insights into the entire lifecycle of a use case. Enhanced collaboration and understanding across multiple entities involved in the lifecycle of the use case is essential to build an offering that addresses the entire line of pain points to achieve the ultimate goal of developing a cohesive platform.

For instance, when we talk about the automation industry — while most of the top product vendors in the recent Forrester RPA Wave rely on collaboration with other vendors to address an entire use case involving process discovery, automating using intelligent automation capabilities, EdgeVerve decided to venture into the creation of a holistic solution for automation use cases.

At EdgeVerve, we offer a solution starting right from shortlisting the eligible process for automation using Discover, seamlessly automating majority types of application via AssistEdge, to even facilitating monitoring of digital workers of competitive vendor products over a unified dashboard — Orchestrator. EdgeVerve took this cohesive platform as a challenge after witnessing numerous use cases, where either wrong processes were picked for automation, citizen developers faced challenges in automating processes or an organization implemented more than one RPA vendor offering.

Although, the industry insights helped EdgeVerve to design the right business offering, mastering each of the product capability has been an arduous journey which was well-captured in the recent Forrester and Gartner Wave, wherein EdgeVerve is ranked in the leader’s quadrant. EdgeVerve applied a staggered approach towards the development of a cohesive RPA platform:

Industry Perspective:

Mike Beecham, CIO International Society Bank, wishes to implement RPA to achieve efficiency and save cost; however, statistics showing the failure percentage of RPA implementation has made him apprehensive of the investment. He is looking for a solution that covers his use cases and guarantees him forecasted benefits.

His best bet would be on a cohesive platform that takes over from process selection to robot monitoring. The EdgeVerve team applies Discover’s automation blueprint methodology to select the right use cases and auto-automation capability to feed inputs from Discover to AssistEdge to automate shortlisted use cases. iPad version of Control Tower allows Mike to control AssistEdge robot execution, while Orchestrator manages all robots deployed across International Society Bank.

The harmonized communication format across the cohesive platform facilitates seamless process automation and monitoring. The cohesive automation platform hugely benefits in terms of turnaround time and RoI.

Microsoft and EdgeVerve are successfully able to create a cohesive platform offering, applying their industry insights. Here are a few other essential properties that drive a firm to venture into the platform approach: