Process Automation vs Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has become a buzzword among business managers. These managers are sometimes overwhelmed by the thought of what transformational changes their businesses may need to undertake to remain competitive, future-proof, resilient and meet customer needs at scale. Some others are curious about how to keep up with the digital momentum and fast-paced technology changes impacting today’s business world. In all, the desire to transform operations, products, and services appear to be top of mind for most business managers. To this end, it is not uncommon to see businesses invite technology service consultants and digital strategists to help them navigate their journey to business transformation through digital technologies. I am privileged to be in some of these meetings. The common assertions for the IT team are that “We have automated all our processes”, “We are almost becoming paperless”, “We recently acquired some software to automate all our business processes”, and “We are meeting our digital transformation objectives”. Many seem to equate process automation to digital transformation. Ironically, despite the efforts at automation, these businesses keep losing customers due to poor customer experience, the inability to satisfy customers’ demands and resolve tons of customer complaints. Digital transformation is not entrely the same as automation, however there is a connection.

Customer value is the key

Process automation is synonymous with process digitization. It relates to business process improvement, which is making things more efficient from the operational excellence and cost perspective. Process automation is an operational necessity with enormous benefits such as enabling a business to standardize its operations and ability to scale faster. However, when compared to digital transformation, automation is only an enabler, a driver or at best a compulsory component. Gartner emphasized that digital transformation goes beyond making existing business processes more efficient and extends to creating or unlocking new value for customers. Fundamentally, it is about automation (scalability and operational efficiency) and customer centric value proposition. It is about leveraging technology to build systems of intelligence that enable businesses to empower employees, optimize operations, transform products, and engage customers. Digital transformation is a journey and would continue to evolve. To generate new sources of income, businesses re-think their customer experience along their value chain. To connect and engage with their customers in new ways, employees need to be empowered to innovate and operations optimized and modernized.?And with more insight about customer behaviour and needs business can transform their products and services.

Process automation or process improvement initiatives can be a good starting point, but it is never enough to get a business digitally transformed. There would always be something or a process that is ripe for automation. A business could be running its operations efficiently and optimally but still, lose its customers and key employees to a competitor simply because the competitor is a digital disruptor with a business model that positions it for unprecedented value creation for customers. More businesses continue to disrupt industries and markets by using available technology and data to reimagine their products and address customers’ unarticulated needs. Meeting customers’ ever-changing expectations call for speed and agility. There is need for resilience and proactivity in providing viable solutions to solving customers’ pain points. Innovation also needs to be inclusive and democratized

Technology Investment and Business Outcomes

As businesses continue to heavily invest in technologies that align with their business priorities, we continue to find misalignments between business expectations and what the IT team can deliver. Given the dramatic changes in the markets, businesses also need to rapidly transform to respond to the changing customer needs with data-driven decisions governing marketing, sales and overall operations. Along with this new reality, comes the inability of existing digital solutions to scale as neededomers need, owing partly to the dearth of technical professionals to meet the demands for automation and digital transformation. It is near impossible for organizations to staff their IT needs as fast as they arise. Most businesses struggle to find the technical talent to build applications to close the demand gap for process improvement and imperatives for business transformation. Ground-up software development can also be time-consuming and expensive as it brings with it a host of security and compliance considerations which require extensive upfront investments to ensure that applications run seamlessly and face no regulatory problems, hack, or data breaches. Long time to value and market, difficulty with aligning with business expectation, deficiency with actionable insights and high total cost of ownership can make custom apps or customizing apps an unpleasant experience. Integration of apps with other systems to create a single source of truth can also be very challenging for most organizations.

Unleash Innovation Within

Rather than trying so hard to get more developers or heavily investing in developing software in-house, businesses are turning to low code developments to enable them adapt and respond to rapid developments in real-time. This is particularly so as the model of waiting for the IT department to provide solutions is no longer realistic and sustainable. A pacesetter amongst the low code platforms is the Microsoft Power Platform. Power Platform is a rapid application development platform that enables employees with limited or no coding abilities to innovate and build apps fast with the market’s most intuitive point-and-click approach to app design.The Power Platform enables people without coding or programming backgrounds to participate in automation, bringing the technology to anyone in need of a solution. Non-IT members of organisations, such as Admin and Human Resource teams and departments can build applications seamlessly to improve their operations. For instance, members of Admin departments could build inventory apps to manage office consumables, while the finance team could build petty cash or expense reporting apps.The possibilities are endless.These non-IT memberss are sometimes called citizen developers who build customs solutions that meet business needs.They create, integrate, and iterate model-based solutions, thus animating important business ideas.Since they are closer to the business and understand the needs better, leveraging the Power Platform breeds limitless innovation between citizen developers and the IT team to create enriched customer experience and value.Power Platform also offers professional developers a suite of powerful tools for rapid application development to meet business demands faster. It thus makes business transformation a team sport.

What is the Power Platform?

The Power Platform is a suite of tools comprising primarily 5 components namely Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages and Power Virtual Agents. This integrated platform allows any business to analyse and visualize real-time business performance for actionable insights, quickly and easily build custom apps, automate workflows and integrate AI capabilities.

Let us examine these components.

Power BI is your business analytics and intelligence tool which allows you to easily connect related or unrelated data sources and turn them into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. These insights can be shared with anyone who needs to act on them.

Power Apps comprises tools, services, connectors and data platform within a rapid application development environment, for building customer apps. It provides a drag-and-drop experience which when combined with business logic can be transformed into easy-to-use, mobile-friendly enterprise applicatioons for standard business needs.

Power Automate is a service that helps create automated workflows between business apps and services. You can thus seamless synchronise files, get notifications, collect data, automate repetitive tasks and lots more, thus saving valuable time.

Power Pages allow you to build and launch customised, low-code business websites that connect customers to vital information and services.

Power Virtual Agents empowers organisations to create powerful bots to proactively engage your customers, employees and visitors to your websites or services. It leverages a guided, no-code graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers.

In addition to the foregoing, the Platform leverages some key services such as the Dataverse, Data Connectors and AI Builder. The Dataverse is the data backbone of the Power Platform that enables you store your data in a scalable and secure environment dynamically. The AI Builder provides you AI models designed to optimize your business processes. The Data connectors, on the other hand, allow services within the Power Platform to connect with apps, data, and devices. The Power Platform has more than 700 data connectors such as connectors for Oracle, SharePoint, SAP, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter and so many more. These connectors facilitate integration with third party systems. This enables other business systems designed with Power Platform to leverage data that is residing in legacy systems and vice versa.

Why the Power Platform?

Leveraging the Power Platform reduces the time to value when automating business processes for efficiency and developing solutions to meet the ever changing and evolving business needs. Powering your application development using the Power Platform significantly reduces your development time and resources typically associated with professional services, license costs, integrations and staffing of resources with programming and related technical skills.

It accelerates innovation at scale with fusion teams throughout an organization being able to analyze data, build solutions, automates, and create chatbots. Every member of the organization is thus able to contribute to operational efficiency, improved employee productivity and engagement, transformed services and great customer experience.

Your ability to collect data, analyze and act on same is improved drastically. The Power Platform’s native support for most web, iOS and android platforms out of the box while you are better able to support a mobile and remote workforce enables you securely support a mobile and remote workforce.

You must win

Automation is an essential part of Digital Transformation. You cannot digitally transform without automation but can automate without digital transformation. Digital transformation is not an end but an iteration. There will always be digital hotspots that require transformation as your business evolves. Navigating your path to automation and digital transformation can become effortless, accelerated, inclusive, and democratized by leveraging the Power Platform for your business objectives.

Where are you on this journey? We want you to win, we are here to help. Let the tested and trusted hands of Reliance Infosystems handhold your organization through its digital transformation journey. Click on this link to contact us and lets get started