Automation – The New “Must-Have” For Enterprises

1. Automation – The New “Must-Have” For Enterprises By Mavenick Consulting

2. Today, more than ever, the speed of delivery is a differentiating factor for the success of any organization wanting to maintain an edge over the competition. As organizations are under pressure to shrink the time to market for their products and services, my case is that the best way to move forward is to automate business processes.

3. BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION (BPA) Over the last decade, the focus has been on ways to streamline business processes (process optimization or re-engineering) to increase efficiency and improve the user experience. Today, newer technologies including Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are bringing about transformational changes across industries.

4. DEVOPS: CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION, CONTINUOUS TESTING, CONTINUOUS DELIVERY Automated testing can also be used to simulate large volumes of data and the actions of large numbers of virtual users, interacting with a network, software, and web applications, more efficiently that with manual testing. Business process automation is being widely applied to various other roles, functions, and departments, such as… Insurance Banks and Financial Services Customer Care Portals IT Back Office Processes

5. INSURANCE In the insurance industry, automated processes are used for checking policy renewal, recalculating policy premiums, early detection of fraud and loss, and data gathering. Automating these routine processes has resulted in fewer errors and reduced operational costs. The insurance company staff can now focus their time and attention on their new customers and on improving their core business.

6. BANKS AND FINANCIAL SERVICES Banks and other financial services have automated a wide array of processes, such as making new account entries, generating reports, sending notification emails and messages to clients, processing of credit card orders. Another key use-case is in early fraud detection by tracking account activity, purging known old data, and so on. This has allowed these institutions to achieve significant operational efficiency, scale, and resilience.

7. CUSTOMER CARE PORTALS Using online customer care portals, users can now make changes to their investment options, or make ticket bookings, order products, or take an online training without the need for any human intervention. Most organizations have automated their front-line customer facing operations using software-driven Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems. This helps them to reduce cost and provide 24X7 support. These systems guide customers by accepting key tone or voice-based responses and pass on instructions to the underlying application to complete a transaction. Similarly, optical character recognition (OCR) technology has been around for a while now. This helps save a lot of time and effort when creating, processing and repurposing various documents.

8. IT BACK OFFICE PROCESSES Many organizations have automated their batch processing and night-time data center operations. Organizations can thus manage their night time operations with minimal staff on duty. This has become a huge opportunity considering how many large enterprises have geographically distributed support centers, strategically located to take advantage of the 24-hour day. I am personally aware of cases where RPA has helped cut the processing time of sales incentive calculations from 2 man-days to 2 hours. This is a favorite area of mine – I can think of so much more to talk about here but maybe in future posts.

9. OTHER AREAS Business process automation is also being widely applied to various other roles, functions, and departments, such as finance, HR, data entry, inventory management, shipping, purchasing, and billing. In a nutshell, there is the potential for almost universal applicability in making repetitive business processes more predictable and manageable.

10. CONCLUSION Business process automation is no longer the future – it’s the present, and in many ways, it’s now the imperative! While it certainly does not eliminate the need for human workers, it does eliminate the need for humans to perform routine, uninteresting, repetitive tasks that require little or no judgement. It provides an opportunity for enterprises to focus their workforce on higher value activities.  It promises better returns, improved performance, agility, and quality. As the use cases for automation are increasing by the day, more and more enterprises are embracing the wave of software-driven automation to reap its benefits – is it time for you to join them?