Enabling Digital Transformation through Intelligent Automation

The term ‘Digital Transformation’ has become synonymous with large enterprise businesses and niche digital disruptors who are driving a paradigm shift within their industry group. However, organisations across the globe, no matter their size, are evaluating and transforming their business models to leverage emerging digital technologies, with the aim of improving customer experience, increasing operational efficiency, and reducing the risk of disruption.

This transformation is essential to ensure competitive advantage and remain relevant in a digital world. Agility and innovation have become key to keeping pace with the competition and maintaining market share, which in many cases involves expanding the internal workforce to focus on and undertake transformative activities. We recognise this additional burden creates challenges, however by injecting a Digital Workforce through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Cognitive Services, alongside streamlining business processes we look to remove these constraints.

Digital Workforce

Implementing and leveraging a Digital Workforce, it is possible to perform repetitive, high-volume tasks, introducing greater speed and consistency whilst enabling a scalable resource pool. This replication of the manual processes is available in any system or application, whether they are cloud-based or on-premises, and provides the power to see vast improvements in productivity and service, without significant investment, risk, or disruption.

These improvements remove resource constraints allowing for value-add tasks- such as customer experience, revenue growth, and transformational activities to be focused on.

The components to create an intelligent digital workforce are:

– Robotic Process Automation

The key component forming the execution layer of the Digital Workforce is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA uses software robots to emulate how a user interacts with systems and applications through native user interfaces. Software robots can consistently carry out prescriptive logic-based functions to ultimately automate end-to-end processes or process parts, without the need to modify underlying systems. RPA can expedite back-office tasks in areas such as procurement, finance, IT and human resources, or business processes that require access to various systems.

– Orchestration

Orchestration is key to the management and optimisation of the Digital Workforce. By leveraging and orchestrating the Digital Workforce across business functions, greater value is derived than processes which are locally managed by individual departments. Through a central console, automations are developed and tested before being deployed, and are subsequently managed and optimised to ensure maximum return on investment.

– Cognitive Services

Cognitive Services is a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), expanding the capabilities of RPA. It enables automation of tasks which would typically require human intellect and cognition, leveraging services such as Text and Sentiment Analysis and Optical or Image Character Recognition (ICR and OCR). This enables functionality such as processing and effectively responding to natural language text within various formats including email, documents, live webchats, and extracting data from formats such as PDF files without needing to hand over to a human.

Once structured and analysed, this can act as a trigger for an RPA process or can be integrated within the process itself to enable a greater degree of automation and further maximise return on investment.

– Advisory Services

As part of our advisory services, we perform a series of workshops to understand the challenges, constraints, and pain points of your organisation. This allows us to tailor and demonstrate how operational efficiency and business agility can be improved with the automation of various processes. The objective is to evaluate and identify critical processes which have the appropriate automation characteristics to allow for a cost-benefit analysis to be performed, underpinning the business case for automation.

– Pilot

We understand that the best way to truly articulate the benefits of automation is to demonstrate them. This is why using one of the key processes identified, Ultima will work with both the IT department to procure and set up the infrastructure (if required) and the specific business function to automate the chosen process. Once deployed, the exact benefit and return on investment for this process can be realised against the business case.

– Scale

Having demonstrated the potential ROI for automation via the pilot process, the next step is to scale. When considering the most appropriate way to scale the platform, Ultima will work with you to ascertain the strategic goals of how automation is to be woven into the core fabric of your organisation, allowing for a framework for the centre of excellence (components such as pipeline generation (optimise before automating), governance, change management, etc.) to be formulated.

Ultima’s Proposition

Our Intelligent Automation services are focused on helping you achieve more- from your investment, your workforce, and your data. We believe that the digitalisation of your organisation is a journey which will advance over many months and possibly years, but in order to move forward, the right foundations need to be in place. We incorporate data analytics, Cognitive Services, and Automation in our offering to provide a solid base which will enable you to carefully leverage your workforce, investments, and data.

To learn more about our Intelligent Automation services, click here or talk to your Ultima Account Manager to get started.