Real Life Cases of Efficiency in Business Processes

This is something I learned not long ago, when you write a check and you deposit it or cash it at a bank, if it comes from another banking institution, then the banking institution scans the checks and sends them over to your banking institution in a format called X9 (known as Image Cash Letter). It is known that many banks face challenges when processing the images of the inter-bank check images and that they have a sizable team working what comes their way. Traditionally, these have been difficult to automate precisely because the high number of differences with each bank’s check format; add now the difficulty of reading the mix of print parts of the check like the routing and account numbers plus the portions handwritten by the customers ?

Similarly, other banks receive Letters of Indemnification and they come in different formats, depending on the originating institution. Due to the many differences between the letters from the institutions, banks need human intervention to capture all the data. For a human this is tedious, repetitive work; it is prone to errors too. If that wasn’t enough, this being so manual, is a lengthy process. That is money that isn’t being recycled back into the institution quickly. Similar to the scenario above, this is difficult to automate precisely because many of today’s technologies depend on templates. They need data to appear in specific parts of the document without variations. A new document type comes in, then a new template needs to be created.?

New technologies (yes, including a mix of Large Language Models) open the door to this type of breakthrough. What's best, is that this type of complex implementations have become cheaper as the innovative technologies proliferate.?

The world of intelligent automation, I like to say, is an esoteric one. Inteligent Automation is not a ‘product’ per se. There are no specific bells and whistles that the tech has. These technologies are amorphous in that they can be used as a platform which you can use to take from here, from there, mix and match data and things, and then produce an output and do something with it.?

Imagine that you have your order to cash process, that in that process there are approvals needed, there is key data that needs to be extracted from another system to provide to the approver. That order to cash process perhaps offers reporting but may not offer actual intelligence over the end-to-end integrated process. An intelligent automation layer would facilitate your Order to Cash process, where the digital robots would pull on demand the additional data required for the approver and would email them so. Because of their nature, the digital robots would be able to provide intelligence on the work they are doing, length of time cases take to be worked, etc. You can even go further and have the digital robots feed all that intelligence to a database where you can connect Business Intelligence dashboards to.?

The possibilities are many, indeed.?

Take for example, a telecom company that was spending too much sending technicians to the field when a customer’s device quit working. Technicians’ time, vehicle wear, mileage, insurance, etc. can quickly pile up. This company decided to add digital robots to perform additional tests with the equipment prior to sending the technicians out. After automating, the costs avoided are up to $20M USD per annum. Quite sizable, right??

Here is another example: When you call a call center, usually those long pauses are because the representatives are going from one application to another. Because of how data is fractured, reps often have to enter data in one system, then another, wait for A to update before they can update B, etc. An intelligent automation platform would allow a single screen where the reps operate; the digital robots can and should do all the work with the legacy systems in the background.?

Intelligent Automation can even go into logistics. Take the case of a logistics company that had millions of dollars in broken engines because the drivers did not do regular maintenance. The waste was not only in the engine repairs, there were costs also of bringing in new tractors to deliver the trailers to their final destination. There were missed deadlines, unhapy customers, etc. An intelligent automation initiative helped bring these costs down to zero. Yes, zero. The company implemented a process that would not book trips when an engine required maintenance, it would communicate with the drivers and tell them to go to the shop for maintenance.?

All these are real cases of intelligent automation. The real power of these technologies more than anything is simple: imagination and order. Imagination in that one must often times look at the big picture and picture what things should look like. Order in that there needs to be a proper way to choose what to automate –that gives the most ROI-, that solutions are designed for performance, resilience and scalability, that delivery adheres to best practices and that once live, intelligent automation solutions can easily communicate back and forth with their human counterparts.?

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