SMART AUTOMATION: How Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Today is Creating the Leaders of Tomorrow

This article complements the first episode of my new video series "What and Why First - VIP" featuring global experts in leadership, strategy, innovation, and value creation. My guest is Mathieu Rebeiro from Toronto, Canada. Mathieu works in Management Consulting, focused on Financial Services and specializes in Process and Automation Design. He has 15 years of experience helping businesses exceed their goals and deliver exceptional client experiences.

In this interview, Mathieu is talking about Smart Automation, the blend of technologies that we use to automate complex business processes, including AI and intelligent automation, bots and natural language interfaces and robotic process automation (RPA).

Josué: Mathieu, tell us a fun fact about you?

Mathieu: Fun fact about me is I have traveled for one of my vacations to the Arctic in Canada, that was probably 15 years ago, and I was there for about a week and I went out on the tundra, follow the wildlife officer around on some of their travels in the local area, saw some herds of caribou, watch them tracks some polar bears, quite the experience, actually almost got run over by a herd of caribou while we were out there.

Josué: That sounds fascinating! Where in the Arctic where you?

Mathieu: If you're looking at within Canada, one of the territories in Canada is the Nunavut Territory with the Hudson Bay, the largest body of freshwater. Right off of Hudson Bay there is a small town called Rankin Inlet, the town that I was in. It's pretty much surrounded by Arctic tundra, it's kind of frozen dessert, very dry cold climate. I was there in the wintertime and I recall the temperature being so cold that it was hot! The wind was so cold, it burns your face. If your skin was exposed you felt the moisture being sucked out of your skin due to how dry and cold it was. It was quite an experience because I've never felt cold and so hot. It is hard to imagine if you haven't felt it firsthand, cold like most people probably never experienced. It was a good trip, lots of learning experiences for me, including don't use traditional winter clothing up in the Arctic because you will freeze! Some of the residents there were kind enough to loan me different articles of clothing to keep me warm including handmade traditional clothes that the Inuit would wear to keep warm up there, I felt like I was wearing like 20-30 pounds of clothes.

Josué: That sounds like a very unique experience! I have never been in a place as cold as the Arctic. I am glad you had an opportunity to experience that. In the case of the space that you now work on a regular basis, how would you define Smart Automation?

Mathieu: I should probably start by saying automation is not new to a particular industry. I think what's happening right now is there is an evolution happening in the world of automation, which is making automation tools easier to use and more accessible to a wider to pool of individuals than what was previously available. 

So, in the past, organizations were using automation to help their business and typically it was only in the hands of people in the IT space. Whereas today IT is still very much involved in automation but the simplification of some of the tools and the intuitiveness of kind of how you learn how to use them and apply them since there have been improvements in that area, now you have people who traditionally would not be involved or participating in automation work, who now are. People in operational roles, even people in sales roles in some organizations I've seen, are actively involved in automation. By actively, I mean some of them are actually building automation themselves to help themselves in their current role. So people are actually looking at opportunities to say: “How do I automate elements of my job to make my job easier for me?”

Automation is being used, and it from my perspective, should be as a means to scale what you do. If you want to do more and faster without necessarily working harder, again about your point of smart automation, that's really what the world of automation looks like today. It is continuing to become easier for more people to use automation to make their lives easier, their work easier, their partners and clients work easier. It's really a huge enabler that we're seeing in the industry, whether it's Financial Services or even outside, everyone is realizing now that automation is accessible more so than it ever has been.

Josué: Right! What you are describing, I am oversimplifying tremendously here Mathieu, I use the term "democratization of technology." What would be, in your experience, an easy area, "low-hanging fruit", for organizations that are thinking about automation to get started?

Mathieu: Good question, if you look at the manufacturing sector, they've had physical automation in place for a very long time. In automation manufacturing, they have a different idea of what automation is. If you just say automation, they're thinking of machines and factories, automating tasks maybe people were doing manually before automation existed. If you look at the auto manufacturers, for example, even today they are increasing the amount of physical automation and physical robots in their operations. The shift now is that even individuals or businesses in the manufacturing sector are looking at automation, not as the typical automation, not just physical robots. Big automakers today in North America and in the world are now using software automation tools to help with their business processes that complement their physical process. They are using the software now that help them with their reporting, for example. Automations are helping them with manual, repetitive, rule-based activities. Whether it's sending out new email updates to people or building presentations or moving data from one system or one application to another. 

Historically, if someone wanted two different applications that don't share the same language to communicate with one another, one would build something called see an application programming interface (API) between them. Now some of the automation tools available in the market place allow you to move information freely between two applications were normally it would be possible without actually doing or using a programming language or coding interface between the two. You could use simple automation now.

So, if you look at every business, all of these businesses have accounting departments, they all have some sort of finance group or tax group. Some of them might be smaller departments where one person has to manage their finances. Every company has to do the paperwork for taxes, accounts payable and accounts receivable functions. They all have some sort of administrative department or sales departments. Large components of them can be automated with a number of solutions available the marketplace today, whether is account reconciliation, generating sales leads, HR related processes, helping to onboard, transfer, or promote employees, transfer employees, for example. Many of these activities are frequently paper-based processes and or quasi-digital processes, where it looks like it's digital but it's actually just on pictures, paper, PDFs, or forms that need to be manually filled out, some of it could be automated with a lot of simple automation tools available the marketplace. By doing so you can free up resources and help companies do more and scale their businesses.

Josué: If you have been in the corporate environment for some amount of time, you might remember when more powerful tools became available to the regular users, take Microsoft Excel for example or MS Access, it the IT's leadership mind these tools were allowing the users to create a fragmented landscape of business logic and business rules that are now residing in people's computers. I believe the automation tools available now allow for some centralization of the business logic and that knowledge, even allow for reusability of that business logic among users, correct?

Mathieu: If you look today, many companies will use Microsoft Excel, they will use it to create macros. People who know how-to might use Visual Basic for Applications VBA to create macro automation. That usually falls in the realm of end-user computing or EUC tools in the Marketplace, tools that are user-friendly, intuitive, accessible, and available to individuals outside the IT space.

There are also many good resources that will outline what governance looks like when you're setting up an automation program. In many cases, at least from what I've seen experienced, enabling and empowering your workforce with some of these automation tools, actually creates more clarity and transparency around your business, and your business processes, than many companies have ever had before. So, opening this up outside of IT should and it can strengthen the relationship and partnership between IT and the business more so than it ever has before. As we break down those walls are those silos and erase the seams between verticals in an organization, when done right, it encourages more collaboration and teamwork.

And, when you have the right governance and place too, both IT and business start to learn a lot more about their processes, create standards around those processes, and understand about what opportunities exist to improve those processes. In many cases, it's a huge plus from my perspective, rather than a risk, enabling new individuals who traditionally don't operate in the IT space.

If it's structured right, you can do a lot with those extra resources. You are essentially opening up your IT department to be as busy with more complex use cases and the more simplified use cases that were consuming time for you before, now you can get help from people outside IT. Now IT can work on those bigger and more complicated things that require programming knowledge that they previously didn't have the time to do.  

To be clear, you're not going to build a software application with many of the automation tools that we are going to refer to and companies are using right now. You'll still need to use your traditional and even some of the newer programming languages should do so to build an application. It is really about when you're looking to move data between the existing applications and you're looking to kind of navigate those applications with the help of an automation tool that creates Bots for you, that's where we're seeing a big lift in many companies. When they're realizing what automation is and some of that kind of foundational automation tools that people are getting started within their journey – we are not talking about artificial intelligence or machine learning here – that is not very complex to learn or use or apply and they can go a long way with those tools, more so than I think they realized, before they even start touching some of the more “advanced technologies” in the machine learning, AI space.

Josué: What kind of resources are available for individuals and teams wanting to learn more about smart automation?

Mathieu: That's an excellent question, given that a lot of the newer automation tools have just become popular in Canada and North America over the last 24 to 36 months. In the world of Academia, we're starting to see some resources come out at post-secondary institutions, but it's still relatively new. In terms of reading material, I haven't seen a lot out there yet there. There are some spattered resources on YouTube, but I wouldn't say there's usually one good solid I wanted to go to, at least that I'm aware of. Online, there is not a tremendous amount of formal training. Some of the companies that are offering automation solutions have some good learning programs on their website. I believe in a number of them though require you to have a license to their software, I may be wrong there since it changes from time to time, but a number of them have some good training program. There is no much out there, but I think we'll be seeing more of that in the next year or so.

Josué: Thank you so much, Mathieu, for sharing such great insights and expertise. If you were to summarize in one sentence the "what and why" about smart automation, what would it be?

Mathieu: I would say that smart automation is breaking down traditional barriers within businesses by empowering and enabling operational resources to install their own business problems.

About Mathieu Rebeiro: Mathieu works in Management Consulting, focused on Financial Services and specializes in Process and Automation Design. He has 15 years of experience helping businesses exceed their goals and deliver exceptional client experiences. Mathieu lives in Toronto, Canada.

I encourage you to watch my video interview with Mathieu. 

Until next time, cheers!

Josué Batista is a business technology and strategist, solutions architect, international speaker, and writer with a concentration on digital health and emerging technologies, in particular, distributed ledger technologies (blockchain), artificial intelligence, and the internet-of-things. Schedule time with Josué to create and execute a strategic plan that takes advantage of Digital Business Transformation, improves the business value from your technology investments, and unleashed innovation for your organization, employees, customers.?