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POINT OF VIEW

People are employed for their skills, and ability to adapt to new environments and challenges; and yet, they often spend their time dealing with the mundane.

Each person contributes their unique views and abilities, which is great for innovation and creative work, but not so necessary when a consistent result is needed to a well-understood process.

Companies that are growing must recruit and train staff at an unsustainable rate, however, large numbers of new people often impact the delivery of consistent growth and service delivery.

Intelligent Automation typically results in cost savings of 40% to 75% (Forbes)

Whether you want to automate key processes or complex operations or integrate different departments, Responsiv Unity can help reduce your manual business processes and improve decision-making by combining core automation and integration tools such as business process management.

Reduce Costs by Improving Productivity

As companies grow, the cost of maintaining a good quality customer service grows too. The result is that margins remain the same as the proportion of revenue, and the risks of a downturn, staff non-availability, and inconsistent service delivery increases rapidly.

Automating and integrating complex systems and processes increases overall business productivity and ROI.

Intelligent automation eliminates cost by completing repetitive and predictable activities as well as those that cause the most re-work or data quality problems. The idea is to break the cost-income link to deliver improved margins as a proportion of income. Automating and integrating complex systems and processes increases overall business productivity and improves return on investment (ROI). Key benefits include:

Avoid recruitment disruption, cost, and training time.
Give staff more time to think and to be innovative.
Increase capacity without increasing staff costs.

Automation can improve service quality by delivering consistent results and extended hours of service, as well as creating opportunities to deliver new services using new channels and technology. Processes can then be transferred to a human when innovative or creative solutions are needed. This allows:

Consistent time to response, format, and content of response.
Accurate and consistent application of policy.
Consistent use of information.

The power of intelligent automation is that it eliminates cost and creates new opportunities by allowing people to focus on tasks that benefit from “human value” while a machine delivers the mundane tasks in a reliable and efficient way. New opportunities are created by giving time to think ahead and supported by the new capabilities and ways of working that automation delivers; for example:

Extended hours using automated systems.
Improved data quality and faster responses due to integration.
Reduced re-work and accurate reporting.

Intelligent Automation completes tasks the same way, every time, without taking tea breaks, calling in sick, going on holiday or leaving early to pick the kids up from school. The automation and integration of components, processes and systems create a transformative solution that will enable you to focus on what really matters and make a significant impact.

Create New Opportunities

For a while now, the narrative surrounding intelligent automation has been that millions of jobs will be lost to the march of technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence. Yet there is no supportive evidence. Research suggests that it is more often a way to grow the business and with it the demand for experienced employees.

Contrary to popular fears about job losses, the World Economic Forum predicts that intelligent automation will result in a net increase of 58 million jobs. (WEForum)

Think of the big picture when in doubt of investing in automation. The key is to frame such decisions in terms of how to become more productive, more efficient, more reliant, and therefore more competitive.

One objective is to create more time to focus on innovative ideas and creative ways to deliver improved business performance. Examples include:

Keeping up with changing demands and customer expectations.
Investigating new technology to further improve company operations.
Looking for new opportunities for automation.

Intelligent Automation creates opportunities by generating information about how the process operates and not just artefacts that reflect progression. It leaves an audit trail that can be displayed and reported in management summary reports, but it also helps you:

Improve how you visualise the way data flows around the business.
Increase the time to value for each activity and customer interaction.
Discover how a customer interacts with different parts of your business.

An opportunity to oversee

Automation can be used to provide oversight of processes that pass through many different organisations and departments, allowing us to identify bottlenecks, points of error, and to gather metrics about where the costs and delays may be occurring.

Discover new efficiencies and ways to avoid expensive activities.
Communicate changes to the process to everyone at the same time.
Support parallel processing across multiple departments.

An opportunity to build relationships

It is tricky to meet customer demands, one simple mistake could cost you future revenue. Use intelligent automation to clear low-value tasks to make time for human-to-human relationship building and to deliver a tailored experience to your customers.

An opportunity to improve business controls

Caseworkers tend to “cherry pick” cases that are considered to fit their personal skills and comfort zone. This can mean that “harder” work is delayed or ignored until it becomes urgent or past due.

About 60% of occupations have at least 30% of their activities that are automatable (McKinsey)

Automation creates the opportunity for a supervisor to set rules about how work is allocated, for example, to appropriately skilled or experienced staff, and the priority for each case or activity. The result is a team better balanced, where everyone can gain experience and skills.

Deviation in delivering a process to save time or accidentally entering the wrong data puts the company at risk and increases the cost of operations to rework and correct the problem. In this example, intelligent automation can be used to improve validation to assure data accuracy and assure that processes are followed as intended, with no workarounds. A reduction in human error results in more accurate and valuable data for your business.

An opportunity to improve recruitment and staff training

Automation can help you fill staffing positions more efficiently by automating early screening and management of the overall process. End of the day, candidates are not the only ones with an interest in how their application is progressing.

With AI and machine learning, you can summarise CVs and enrich them with insights such as descriptions of companies mentioned, or an index of qualifications and skills. Doing so, helps candidates benefit from a positive recruitment process and have a positive experience of your organisation from the beginning.

The use of intelligent automation can also help with the expansion of the onboarding process to include movers, joiners, and leavers to assure that security access is granted and revoked properly, and that staff have the right personal equipment to deliver their role.

Movers: Existing employees changing roles by promotion, moving department, or joining a project. Movers need to have the right desktop software, personal equipment, training, and access to systems and data.
Joiners: New employees joining the company who require induction to the company, health and safety, credit and security checks, and standard personal equipment. Joiners are often modelled as joiner-movers because once they have been through the company induction, they “move” to a role.
Leavers: Existing employees leaving a role and leaving the company. This is often modelled as a “Leaver role” to allow the mover process to move them to a leaver role with no security access, no need for any assets, and a set of tasks to enter the role, including exit interviews.

Automation simplifies and formalises these processes to deliver improved management insight, assured coverage of the required activities, and efficient completion of the task.

An opportunity to streamline customer onboarding

Internet customers expect next day delivery and fast turnaround of orders that make manual processing too slow to deliver. When a customer pays for a product or service, they want access to it yesterday.

Automation takes care of data validation at the point of collection and assures its delivery to all the places it’s needed.

Processing orders manually requires validation of every piece of information and time to get corrections and missing information. Here, intelligent automation can take care of data validation at the point of collection. When a signed purchase order is received, the customer will have access in minutes rather than days.

An opportunity to refresh legacy systems

Your business operates with the support from computer systems that have been added throughout the life of the company. Each system reflects the style and technology of the day it was built and operates according to the ways of the world at that time.

Older companies will have a mixture of systems from different vendors, that use different ways to store information, and that require experienced users to operate.

Extend the useful life of trusted legacy systems.

A manual approach usually means volumes of resources and considerable manpower to accomplish a simple task. In this example, automation can be used to place a reliable user experience between your staff and the computers. The result is consistent use of terminology, simplified sharing of information between systems, and a thinner desktop and security model to reduce errors and cost.

Automation technology will take care of the integration between all systems involved and provide a robust and intelligent solution to your business.

An opportunity to enhance compliance and mitigate risks

When you process sensitive data, its handling is regulated, and errors can result in reputational damage and financial penalties. An insurance company, for example, can use intelligent automation to calculate payments, make predictions used to calculate rates, and address compliance needs.

57% of employers want to use automation to improve human performance and productivity (Willis Towers Watson)

Using intelligent automation can mitigate compliance risks and save you money with a reduced likelihood of security breaches and improved accuracy and decisions using real-time data.

Intelligent Automation can also help you understand how the business really operates. Use the new insights to identify risks, isolate areas of contention or luck, and develop strategies to monitor and enforce that don’t add significant costs to the organisation.

The Responsiv Unity automated offer processing tool reduces invoicing and on-boarding by over 30%, formalises PO acceptance, and reduces customer wait times by several days on average.

Intelligent Automation and Responsiv

Whether you want to automate key processes or complex operations or integrate different departments, Responsiv Unity can help reduce your manual business processes and improve decision-making by combining intelligent automation and integration tools.

Built on IBM software, Responsiv Unity reduces risk and overheads by delivering all that you need in one box. Each module is pre-designed and preconfigured to install and work without the need to separately procure operating systems, monitoring software, or development tooling.

Explore our Responsiv Unity product.

Improve Business Productivity with Intelligent Automation