RPA, RBA and AIOps alignment with Business Outcomes

The impact of the Pandemic has been severe for most Industry sectors; unless one has been lucky to be in the Technology Industry and in particular, the technology industry that quickly enhanced Secure video collaboration amongst Work from home workers. There is a huge second wave and third wave impacting many countries.?Let us do all we can to help them as we do.

The SMB and Mid-Market segment have been the worst affected by the Pandemic.?As a Board Director, we have managed to stay afloat thus far.?As responsible Directors we are all hard pressed to consider ways and means to have as many of our employees in business, subject to affordability, to run the business.?The economic forecasts for UK as a country are looking good.?It is time for business recovery.?Whilst we look forward with optimism, we must still maintain a cautious outlook since there could be a knock-on impact of the second wave in other countries to the global economy.?We must also remain wary of a potential third wave. We must now innovatively manage several priorities:

Grow the business.?Invest in the front-end of the business to enhance profitable sales and enhanced customer experience.?

Optimise the business.?Determine unique ways and means to optimise the mid-office and the support functions to be competitive.?

Manage the risks.?Mitigate the threats and Seize the opportunities, govern with robust Information management, Systematic compliance to regulations and Secure the organisation.

Technology can help.?Let us focus on one of the technologies today, RPA [Robotic Process Automation] and AIOps [Operations execution using Artificial Intelligence].?In simple terms, RPA helps to automate the additional tasks that are still carried out manually outside of the IT systems.?AIOps is used to code repetitive tasks [they call it Scripts which also enables Run Book Automation] and allow this code to be automatically executed within the IT systems.?

Grow the Business

How can RPA or AIOps help you Grow the Business??Let us look at just a few commonplace examples where Automation can help you in some of your business functions.

Marketing – Like many traditional businesses, you must be having a Physical marketing as well as Digital marketing.?As one of the use cases, you can automate the capture of Physical content into Data.?As another use cases, you can then use automation to integrate the various sources of data to manage the leads.?You can then introduce further automation to disseminate this information in a consolidated way to enable your Sales team and Leaders to optimise customer engagement.?You can also use Automation to determine whether customers have entertained and/or acted on your mass communications campaign. That is about Marketing.??There are plenty more.?Engage with Excelencia .?We can help you.

Sales - Do you have multiple suppliers doing portions of work and does your customer need one integrated Invoice??Use Automation to extract and integrate into one Single Invoice.?On the other hand, is your customer in need of splitting one integrated invoice for the work you have done to accommodate the needs of Costs centre budget management??Use automation to split one Invoice into many.?Do you have a customer who prefers repetitive products and sales proposals to align with their work products spend??Use Automation to generate it for you, i.e., avoid manual errors associated with copy and paste!?There are many more examples.?

Customer Services and Experience – Do you have retail stores, and you want validation that all the systems at the stores are functioning as needed??Use AIOps to automatically verify, validate and communicate that they are Ready for Business.?Use AIOps to automatically fix a till system or alert support units when it is likely to fail or automatically report the support units when it has failed.?Do you have Service centres and/or Authorised service providers from whom you expect end of day Works, Parts and Assets reports??Use Automation to help you with that.?Do you want to help your customers know when their products warranty is likely to expire??Use Automation to disseminate the information.?You can use Automation to accelerate your Know Your Customer [KYC] from wherever they are.?Enhance your Customer Experience.?

Optimise the Business

You know your business.?We are establishing some common ground on Use cases and how we can learn from each other.?Let us then consider a few cases for Optimising the business.

Supply Chain Management - You can use Automation to scan and upload Invoices into your ERP system.?You can use Automation to verify the Invoice against the Orders placed by your company.?You can use Automation to verify and validate Inventory against consumption and if you continue to have Manual inspection of Inventory, you can use Automation to upload it into your systems.?Many more use cases exist.

Human Resources and Talent management – Do you have several applicants against a job posting??You can use Automation to upload the applications and use artificial intelligence to scan for applicants’ eligibility for the position and let precious Executive manpower to focus on the applicants that are eligible to be called for Interview.?Do you have a continuous talent capability development model??You can use Automation to upload certifications gained by your employees and use it to nominate internal candidates for newer roles.?These are just the simple ones and there are many more.

Information Technology [IT] management – It is not just your normal business functions, but several IT processes could be automated too.?For example, you can use RPA to automate your Joiners and Leavers process thereby reducing some of your IT costs and as a bargain, improve your employee experience.?Is your IT Service Desk busy resolving many Incidents and Problems??You can use an aspect of Automation called Run Book Automation [RBA] to automate execution of the tasks that are executed manually to resolve IT problems.?Do your IT people feel bogged down resolving the same repetitive issues and not be there to support your Change requests??You can subsequently use AIOps to further the Automation levels to automate the decision making and orchestrate execution of the resolution tasks.

Manage the Risks and Compliance

Every business has risks – both Opportunities and Threats.?Risks and Compliances are quite a broad spectrum.?RPA has since covered a lot of ground since its inception in the previous decade.?Rather than cover them all, let us go through how Automation and AIOps can help us manage some of the key ones.

Risks and Compliance – You can automate Anti Money Laundering alerts.?You can automate the verification of reports that are aligned to internal and external regulatory requirements.?You can automate the sharing of data between systems to enable consolidated reconciliation of reports.??Fraud and Copyright management is naturally a big issue for Boards.?You can use Automation with AI to detect frauds and copyrights violation.

Cybersecurity – You can use RPA to detect threats and send out the alerts.?You can use Automation for automated updates to your Applications, Systems, and devices.?Assuming you have Security Incidents and Events Management to continuously monitor your Enterprise IT and Digital systems, you can use Automation and AIOps to automate triage and even resolution of the repetitive known issues.?Do you have issues with say, Certificates Management, because you have acquired or merge with companies???You can use Automation to help you with that.

Automation and AI is not about reducing the Workforce.?There is an element of that, yes.?It is more about augmenting the human to combat new threats and issues, it is about augmenting the humans to deliver a better customer experience, improved sales, and manage risks better.?Not every use case can deliver the same benefits to your business as it did for the others since the scale, complexity and context could be different.

About the Author

Jagadish is a Senior Executive leader & Digital evangelist, who has been successful at building and/or turnaround Practice capabilities, Presales/Sales enablement/Solution consulting capabilities for Application Services and IT Infrastructure Outsourcing services.?Jagadish has extensive and wide-ranging experience of Digital - Apps & Infra Transformation solutions achieving customer business outcomes thereby delivering high win rates. Prior to that, Jagadish has delivered large Outsourcing & Technology Transformation programmes.?

Jagadish as established a network of partnerships and collaborated with partners to achieve Digital transformation for customers.?He has used deep analytics, industry insight, competitive insights and business outcomes based consulting approach to deliver differentiated solutions. Jagadish has also led the creation of the Service Integration & Management and Cloud Practice capabilities.

Apart from speeches at major events, Jagadish has also written many articles on LinkedIn Pulse.

Acknowledgements: All learnings from Mentors, Colleagues, Customers, Partners and Knowledge forums gratefully acknowledged.

#Automation #RPA #RBA #aiops #artificialintelligence #ai #cio #cdo #chiefinformationofficer #chiefdigitalofficer #chieftechnologyofficer #cto #digitalmarketing #supplychain #supplychainoptimization #procurement #sales #risks #risksmanagement #frauds #fraudmanagement #soar #cybersecurity #compliance