Automation – The New “Must-Have” For Enterprises

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Automation The New Must-Have For Enterprises

• By Mavenick Consulting

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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.
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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CONCLUSION

• Business process automation is no longer the
  future its the present, and in many ways, its
  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?