Overcoming the challenges of intelligent automation with Data Reply

Robotic process automation (RPA) software is the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market. It’s easy to see why. Intelligent Automation (IA) and RPA tools automate repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing up employees to do more high value work. In turn, this helps organisations deliver better customer experiences, increase business agility and improve productivity. Yet, many companies are struggling to realise these benefits, or are not exploring them at all, due to the real and perceived challenges associated with the technology.

As an analytics and data processing firm, Data Reply has helped many businesses implement IA and RPA solutions.

Although IA and RPA have applications in almost every industry, many of the logistical and technological challenges that businesses face – from making the business case to automate to implementing and embedding the technology, are the same. Data Reply supports companies in solving these common issues, which include achieving scale with automation, embedding security into systems and overcoming roadblocks in artificial intelligence (AI) projects.

IA has many individual sensory capabilities; from using image recognition to scan photographs, to converting the spoken word to text, to predicting the future based on past actions. However, scaling this technology is essential to achieve true business transformation. Getting it right means marrying vision and strategy. This follows three stages:

• Establishing capability: In this phase, big picture thinking is needed to define and communicate a shared vision and create structured organisational roles – as well as tending to the details of governance boards; agreeing on a standardized approach and communicating outcomes against KPIs. Personnel should also be a key consideration: with questions around training core teams and establishing delivery methodology key to this part of the process.
• Replicate & ramp up: Once the vision is established it’s about replicating and ramping up the processes underpinning it. RPA needs to be aligned with future organisational design decisions, with examples of success used to incentivise staff to buy-in and encourage seeking out new automation opportunities. Core teams can be called upon to train and mentor new team members and establish codes of best practice.
• Deliver differentiated performance: The final and ongoing stage in the process is delivering differentiated performance. A virtual workforce should be embedded at the heart of the organisation with a seamless handover of work between humans and robots while minimising disruption.

IA at scale can have many applications, for example the technology can be used to automate ID card processing for global money transfers. By automating this process, valuable man hours were freed up as the technology could automatically locate and extract 4 fields of data from each ID card: Name, DOB, Address and Expiry Date, thereby ensuring its validity. The process was complicated in that the original system was unable to read non-Roman script being presented on certain ID cards. Automation however meant that the data then passed to a RPA solution for external translation services, which translated the text to the Latin alphabet which could then be read and automatically processed.

With any technology, security absolutely needs to be a main priority. For IA the biggest security issue often arises at the point where human and machine interact. For example, human error during an automated financial reporting process can result in one company losing-man weeks and a delay on the reporting of the group’s finances.

Other security issues that need to be considered include rogue access; data loss; hacking; privilege abuse; vulnerabilities and malware, which all show the centrality of security to IA implementations.

But like well backed up data – all is not lost! Those looking to implement IA should heed security protocols like encrypting data and multiple layers of authentication, along with reducing access rights and requiring human validation on certain processes.

No discussion of IA would be complete without an examination of the organisational changes that are taking place. New technologies will create a number of different roles in the future, with a rise in titles like: ‘human thinking coach’; ‘cloud cleaner’; ‘chief productivity officer’; and ‘data detective’.

When we think of the benefits of automation, we typically consider things such as time saving, headcount reduction and reducing processing times. But there are other significant benefits which Data Reply have delivered for their customers, which don’t typically appear in business cases:

• An empowered workforce: removing menial tasks from your employees would pave the way for switching employees to more value-adding work. This consequently builds capacity and drives larger financial returns over the long term.
• Standardised, yet agile: automation creates a double-win by not only standardising process execution but also allowing for rapid changes to the standardised processes to cater to business requirements and end-user demands.
• The process improvement opportunity: introducing automation within an organisation is an opportunity to understand the business need and potential added value processes can deliver. This is crucial as they are seldom designed, documented or revisited.

IA impacts also AI. Faulty data or human error could affect AI and its smooth running. IA can overcome the roadblocks in AI implementation. It explores how faulty data or human error could affect AI and its smooth running and how too often highly qualified data scientists were not conceiving new ways of utilising data but cleaning and correcting faulty data.

AI “eats data”. It needs a lot of correct data to be able to function. There are practical considerations – things like enforcing two factor authentication – but human considerations as well. Indeed, successfully implementing AI also meant incorporating fairness; reliability & safety; privacy and security; transparency and accountability.

IA has already been shown to have profound and far-reaching benefits and, while it is difficult if not impossible to predict with complete certainty where the technology will go next, what is more certain is that its use will only proliferate.