Intelligent automation connects digital process automation (DPA), robotic process automation (RPA), and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide efficient and intelligent processes and align all aspects of your organization with the vision of constant process improvement, technological integration, and increasing customer value.
Yesterday, Perficient’s General Manager of Automation along with our Principal & Chief Strategist of Organizational Change Management (OCM), a featured speaker from a top electric power and natural gas holding company in the Southeast, and a featured speaker from one of the largest banking institutions in the U.S., came together for a virtual roundtable discussion on automation.
During the discussion, the speakers shared their primary objectives for leveraging automation, the benefits of automation, obstacles they have faced during automation adoption, and what their teams are focused on next. Continue reading for key takeaways from our discussion.
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Think Big, Start Small, Act Fast
Having a big goal in mind while prioritizing specific use cases ensures that what you pursue drives value in a reasonable amount of time and allows you to create success criteria prior to execution. Choosing the right use case that is relatively small, but will also have a big impact, establishes proof of concept and paves the way for other successful projects down the road.
Our speaker from a large U.S. financial institution recalled that his team created 3-, 5-, and 10-year roadmaps for automation adoption, starting with quick wins that would build trust and additional investment. His team’s first initiative involved BPM and creating workflows with automated approvals. They then launched RPA initiatives for his company’s commercial lending and security-based lending products. Now, a bot books 99.9% of loans accurately into a loan origination servicing platform.
As part of a longer-term initiative, his team is creating a consolidated data store feed. Using cloud infrastructure, they will create a data lake that will take merge bank data with the consolidated data store to create a one-stop shop for reporting.
Our speaker from an energy and utility company shared that his team introduced bots to do lightweight automation on several processes. It helped his team determine if those processes were worth investing more automation technology into.
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Create a Plan for Achieving End-to-End Automation
Intelligent automation is not accomplished by a single technology working independently, but rather through a combination of insights and technologies acting in concert. While partial automation can be achieved through traditional DPA platforms or process orchestration, intelligent automation occurs at the intersection of process mining, DPA, RPA, and AI. Without all components, processes will not be fully optimized or achieve maximum automation efficiencies. Additionally, establishing an overarching environment that enables integration between different experiences is ideal.
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Establish Governance
It is relatively easy to create an AI or machine learning proof of concept, and eventually, you will have multiple teams creating their own models to perform similar tasks. Beware, however, that this can result in duplicative training and tuning efforts, different outcomes and predictions, and variances in accuracy. The goal of automation is to create, train, tune, and task one model so that all efforts to curate, label, and define data are put into a common engine.
Start by creating purpose-driven architectures and leverage each technology platform for what it was inherently designed to do: optimize your overall solution by creating repeatable patterns and scalable components across the enterprise.
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Prepare for Change Management
Perficient’s Principal & Chief Strategist of OCM emphasizes the importance of aligning teams around new technology, especially automation solutions that may have negative associations. The advent of new technology does not mean that people will never perform a certain task again – it means they will do it differently. Technology does not replace human efforts, but rather it augments them to make systems and processes more efficient.
It is important to communicate with your teams and teams that are impacted by new solutions on the value of automation adoption and its benefits to daily operations. Additionally, he recommends that you educate teams on both the upstream and downstream effects.
Why Perficient
We have deep expertise in best-in-class automation product offerings. Your needs are unique, and we can help you determine the product or system for your particular use case. We also provide readiness evaluations, business case development, implementation and migration services, and rapid development and pilots.
We are recognized by Forrester as “One of the 13 Digital Process Automation Service Providers That Matter Most” in its Forrester Wave: Digital Process Automation Service Providers, Q3 2020. Additionally, we were cited as an integrated service provider in the Forrester Now Tech: Robotics Process Automation, Q4 2021.
Ready to leverage automation as a driving force for digital transformation? Let’s talk.
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