Opportunity for Automation in the Post Pandemic Era

From its humble beginnings two decades ago to today, RPA has come a long way. The growing impact and importance of low-code / no-code,?and the labor market shortage is propelling RPA growth, in the post pandemic era. From machine operators to service professionals, organizations across industries are facing challenges due to short supply of goods and services. The opportunity for RPA to deliver its purpose of automation of human repetitive tasks is NOW, more than ever in the past. The current situation that organizations find themselves, answers the Why and When questions related to automation.

A recent IDC report suggests that up to 40% companies world-wide increased their use of software bots and other forms of automation in response to the pandemic.?

Many organizations have automation and AI as key initiatives in their digital strategy but only a few seem to have firmly progressed with their plan and continue to realize benefits. Reportedly, the indecisiveness regarding automation is due to the inherent questions about How to take the journey and What processes can and should be automated. This article tries to address these questions related to automation.

Automation tool providers recommend similar but slightly different approaches for adoption and sustenance of automation within an organization. All automation providers recommend creating an automation Center of Excellence (CoE) to deliver success. The automation CoE is a practical approach / strategy, as it puts the process discovery, assessment, and ownership in the hands of the organization. The debate, whether an external consulting and implementation vendor should be involved, will continue to exist. The combination of a CoE with external consulting and implementation vendor seems to be working well for a lot of organizations, aligning to?“best in their business” approach.

A typical Automation CoE defines the overall automation program vision/ strategy, roles and responsibilities, approach, success criteria, key stakeholders, automation tools, best practices, security & governance, etc. All automation providers prescribe best practices-based approach and model for CoE that works best for their tools.

Predictable success of automation projects is ensured by discovering and defining the right processes for automation. Process discovery /mining is a popular approach recommended for discovery and value assessment of ideal automation process candidates. While there are many tools that help with process discovery, CoE / IT Teams can follow a general thumb rule to assess existing processes.

Defining automation candidates starts with assessment of existing processes, across business functions. Following are some of the criteria to assess existing processes for qualification as candidates for automation.

Courtesy Blue Prism

The above approach works, regardless of the industry and automation tool under consideration.

There are many automation use cases across industries and business functions that fulfil the above criteria. Some of the common ones that have delivered business value through automation, are mentioned below.

Artificial Intelligence programs; which are now broadly available thanks to the Cloud; can be inserted into RPA flows and taught to make subjective decisions that can improve over time, also called Intelligent Automation (IA). ?Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) capabilities are improving rapidly, making solutions built around these capabilities more reliable, feasible, and popular.

To quote Jeff Bezos, Founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon:

“I predict that, because of artificial intelligence and its ability to automate certain tasks that in the past were impossible to automate, not only will we have a much wealthier civilization, but the quality of work will go up very significantly and a higher fraction of people will have callings and careers relative to today”

Intelligent Automation, built on the continuously improving accuracy of AI and ML algorithms promises to reduce human dependency by offering alternative intelligence and decision making that is data-driven and capable of improving with time and more data. Several business processes and tasks that needed human oversight, judgment, and action, are now candidates for Intelligent Automation. Processes / tasks such as document processing, Video Analysis, Language translation, Anomaly detection, Transaction fraud detection, etc. are regularly finding their place in automation, to reduce human dependency in the automation loop.

Whether Intelligent Automation reduces human dependency or augments human capacity, it is definitely here to stay and aid in human transformation.