How To Turn A Conversation Into Real Business Value
With the recent strains of the pandemic, many businesses have turned to Intelligent Automation as a solution to enable them to deliver efficiencies and cost savings. Yet often, many business leaders struggle to turn an initial conversation about Intelligent Automation into actual value.
Below, is a brief guide on how leaders can convert initial engagement in the world of Intelligent Automation into tangible and sustainable transformation for their organisation.
1. Identifying The Right Business Case
There is a lot of hype around Intelligent Automation, namely RPA and AI, and it is very easy for businesses to select any internal process to apply them to just for the sake of having the technology. This can be the primary reason why many projects fail to get off the ground – simply they won’t deliver value because there is no need for automation within this area or the challenge could be solved in another, simpler way.
Identifying the right business cases is therefore essential to be able to demonstrate value to the broader business through solving a real challenge. But how do you identify the right process/es to automate?
There are a myriad of process mining technologies available and many vendors provide data sheets to help you assess potential candidates, however, this can be time-consuming and costly. There are, however, technologies out there that provide a simpler way to evaluate your processes such as Lawrence and Wedlock’s Candidate Bot.
The Candidate Bot
The Candidate Bot enables you and your employees to submit ideas via a user-friendly chat interface and evaluates and ranks them on feasibility based on several criteria. This solution not only saves businesses and their CoE teams a significant amount of time but also ensures that automation candidates are validated and supported by a solid business case.
Additionally, through enabling employees to submit ideas, a business can gain a greater understanding of the real problems being faced by the workforce. As well as, helping to gain their buy into any solution deployed, increasing adoption and success rates.
2. Identifying The Right Technology
Once you have identified and truly understood your business case for automation, you can then start to look at potential technologies that will help to solve it. To do this, you must take the time to understand the technology itself and its applications.
There are a wide variety of applications out there and often these can be combined to provide end-to-end process automation within Intelligent Automation. Below is a summary of the most common technology solutions currently available in the market.
RPA
Standing for ‘Robotic Process Automation is software tools that use workflow, coding, and scripts to build automation that operates and orchestrates existing enterprise application processes and tasks via the user interface in the same or a similar way that a person does. RPA is typically intended to automate manual, repetitive, and rule-bound tasks with structured data and predictable or deterministic outcomes, with an effectively more mimicry approach to automation of tasks.
(Lawrence & Wedlock – FAQ – Lawrence & Wedlock (lawrenceandwedlock.com))
Conversational AI
A programmatic and intelligent way of offering conversational experience to mimic conversations with real people, through digital and telecommunication technologies. – (Deloitte – au-deloitte-conversational-ai.pdf)
Conversational AI is the application of technologies such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning which enables organisations to streamline the handling of real-time inbound user communications, queries, and tasks. Delivering enhanced self-service and improve experiences.
Intelligent Document Processing
Intelligent document processing (IDP) refers to a set of business solutions that use deep learning tools to automate document processing. With the help of RPA bots, AI, and computer vision, IDP extracts unstructured data from documents (e.g., email text, PDF, and scanned documents) and converts it into structured data.
3. Get Buy-In From Everyone
It is a well-known fact among business leaders that for a project to be successful you need to gain buy-in from everyone within an organisation – from the ground level up. For example, you may have implemented an RPA solution, but if your employees do not understand the technology, are hesitant to use it because of fears of job losses or it seems too complex then you will not get the results that you want.
Education is, therefore, key in gaining buy-in across an organisation. Take time to provide employees and key stakeholders with information about the technology you choose and the benefits it will deliver to them – whether that is time savings allowing them to focus on more rewarding work or making their lives simpler.
In Conclusion ...
Moving beyond the hype with Intelligent Automation and delivering true business value can be a challenge, but by really understanding your business’s challenges and the impact that the technology will have on everyday users, you can move beyond a conversation and start delivering tangible and meaningful outcomes with Intelligent Automation.
If you would like to get started with your own Intelligent Automation journey or find out more about the candidate bot, get in touch today.