So, why is there so much interest in RPA/AI? Is it just hype or is it for real? Should you invest in it or should you wait?
To answer these questions, one has to visualize the bigger picture and how things are shaping at the macro level. Here are some of the trends:

  • Digital Transformation: Traditional businesses are faced with competition from the likes of Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Google, Microsoft and Facebook to name a few; inevitably being forced into changing their business models to adapt to this new digital reality.
  • The rise of the omnichannel: Consumers are increasingly preferring to do their shopping digitally and interact with merchants with minimum touchpoints in a seamless manner across all channels.
  • Availability of Actionable Data: Digital businesses are able to collect data and actionable insights about their customers in real time and adjust to the market demand accordingly. For example, Uber rates go up if there is a high demand in an area for its rides on account of some event. Similarly, Airbnb is able to hike its listing rates based on the demand in an area.
  • Scalability: It’s much easier to scale up if you are a digital business. It took much less time for Airbnb and Uber to overtake their traditional counterparts in terms of market size and market cap.
  • Flexibility: Digital business is more efficient, responsive to customer needs and able to cross-sell. The business case for automation of repetitive retail processes shouldn’t be hard to imagine. Automation and technology support myriad topics, including the use of online channels, curating offers, personalizing products, automating supply chain and payment processes, and adding experiences that cater to increasingly niche interests.

So, what’s not to like about it? Nothing really if you ask us!

In our opinion, the biggest value will come from engineering business processes. RPA/RCA will make the business processes faster, less error-prone, more intelligent and self-improving. This will also make the tasks of C-Suite executives easier to transform their organizations digitally and as a result, become more proactive to marketplace dynamics and more responsive to customer experience. Artificial intelligence (AI), powered by data science and machine learning (ML) techniques, can go further than ever before, as multiple layers of decisions can be combined to have a machine make decisions or provide strong recommendations for actions. AI will play a vital role in all of this. Some of the areas where AI is already making inroads is in enterprise space are in:

  • Visual Understanding: Being able to understand a graphic and identify the elements
  • Document Understanding: Being able to understand document context e.g. extract information from legal contracts, invoices, etc.
  • Process Understanding: Being able to observe user behavior to learn and discover common tasks and processes. Identify processes for automation based on ROI.
  • Conversational Understanding: Being able to analyze sentiment, chat and voice input and able to route requests to the right team or department and integrate with chatbots and voice

One of the most powerful sets of knowledge-embedded (intelligent) technology components within AI is robotic process automation (RPA). Intelligent RPA can be thought of as “the orchestrator,” aka the organization or the meta-layer. Intelligent RPA brings together a set of tasks, consolidates them, and orchestrates multiple systems that replace the repetitive human intervention processes that involve aggregating data from multiple systems (or taking a piece of information from a written document and entering it as a standardized data input).

All this sounds great but as we all know the challenge lies in implementation. So, let’s consider what is involved and how we can go about implementing these technologies. The first step is choosing the right consulting partner. It is very hard to do everything on your own and doing it right is even harder. So, as a first step, it is imperative that you choose the right consulting partner.

What to look for in the consulting partner?

Consulting partners come in various shapes and sizes especially those that want to cash in on the flavor of the day. Here is what to consider when looking for the right consulting partner.

  • A strong commitment to client success over their own.
  • Strong brand presence and value recognition.
  • A rich history of past experience in implementing RPA solutions.
  • Knowledgeable resources with certifications in RPA solutions.
  • Strong domain expertise in specialized verticals e.g. BFSI, Healthcare, Telecom, etc.
  • A strong partner ecosystem that brings the best of breed solution offering.
  • A delivery model that is global and based on Agile Methodology and best practices.
  • A metrics-based approach to ROI.
  • Excellent past client references.

Identifying and working with the right partner is perhaps the most important and crucial step to ensuring a successful RPA journey. Here are the other steps once a partner is on board.

Steps in an RPA implementation roadmap

Below are 4 broad steps to implement RPA in your organization

  • Identify a suitable RPA implementation scenario
  • Have a phased approach to RPA implementation
  • Build a Robotic Operating Team to carry out the execution process
  • Establish a Center of Excellence or CoE
  • Have dedicated individuals for process discovery, governance and change management within the CoE.

The Tangentia advantage

Tangentia understands RPA products and business very well and is now a Gold Partner of UiPath. In addition to Tangentia’s deep RPA talent pool, Tangentia has developed its own advanced RPA bots leveraging the UiPath platform. These bots once implemented significantly reduced the time needed to perform repetitive, mundane and tedious tasks within a financial services company. When people are able to do higher value work, more gets done and job satisfaction increases.

How can Tangentia’s partnership with UiPath help your business

UiPath has partnered with competent partners like Tangentia to take it’s RPA platform to organizations looking to implement automation in their business systems and processes. Tangentia offers the following services using UiPath:

  • Helping you with build Center of Excellence (COE).
  • Rent, lease or buy bots.
  • Software resell and professional services.
  • Bot maintenance, monitoring, support, and enhancement straight from our Bot Operations Center.
  • Training on how to leverage RPA for your industry.
  • Staffing solution to augment your RPA project teams.

For more information on how Tangentia can assist your business in its digital transformation journey, please visit our booth at Financial Process Automation Conference (F-PAC) 2019.

FPAC 2019
Register Now