INTERVIEW
WHY IPA IS KEY TO AN EFFECTIVE AUTOMATION STRATEGY ADAM BUJAK, GLOBAL HEAD OF THE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION OFFER, CAPGEMINI, TALKS ABOUT WHY YOU NEED AI FOR BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION. How do you define IPA? Is it a combination of AI and RPA? t Capgemini, we define intelligent process automation (IPA) as the “golden triangle” of artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and smart analytics – combined and aligned with a deep understanding of processes and value creation. We leverage RPA to process structured content and AI for unstructured data. These two technologies deliver a huge amount of data, which can be used to deliver process-related insight. Leveraging predictive or smart analytics enables organizations to make more informed decisions about the way in which they automate their business operations
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What are some of the substantial benefits of IPA? The main benefits of IPA are delivering an augmented workforce at scale. Combining virtual and human workers delivers more value to organizations by taking the robot out of the human and enabling people to focus on more valuable activities, while enjoying higher reliability and quality from machines. An end-to-end IPA solution should enable a client to seek guidance on starting an automation journey, scale up their operations, and enjoy the benefits of sustainable automation, including augmented operations at scale, increased productivity, enhanced operational efficiency, a humanized customer experience, increased revenue, and enhanced agility across their front, middle, and back office. 36
CXO INSIGHT ME
OCTOBER 2019
To give you an example of some tangible outcomes Capgemini has delivered, in the finance and accounting (F&A) space, we helped a global fastmoving consumer goods company automate its credit-to-cash (C2C) processes, resulting in 95% reduction in transaction processing time, 90% reduction in FTE deployment, and 95% improvement in efficiency. In human resources (HR), we helped a European multi-national aerospace corporation augment its human capital management (HCM) platforms through implementing a next-generation HR platform and automation toolset, resulting in 40% reduction in cost of service, 50% productivity savings, and 45% reduction in vendor spend. And in the supply chain, we helped an international medical device, pharmaceutical, and consumer packaged goods company implement a powerful statistical forecasting engine augmented with machine learning, resulting in 20%
reduction in mid-term forecast error rate, 35% reduction in short-term forecast error rate, and 20% improvement in demand planner productivity. Can the whole process chain be automated? Assuming that an organization has a suitable technology in place to deal with human activities that are to be automated, then the entire process chain can be automated. This is dependent on the currently existing limitations of technology. We also use process discovery to separate out the exceptions, and automate those exceptions where there is a strong business case and return on investment to do so. Why is it important for businesses to have chatbots? Humanized interaction with chatbots enables organizations to address hundreds if not thousands of requests simultaneously, thereby removing the communication bottleneck. Chatbots enables organizations to expand their automation reach though adding a functional and practical interaction solution. This comes back to automating the entire process chain. When you combine the potential of chatbots with AI and RPA, then you can get closer to automating the full flow of business operations. What is key to success with IPA? Organizations need to overcome a range of business, governance, technology, talent, and change management-related challenges to drive intelligent automation at scale. As detailed in a Capgemini Research Institute Report last year, this requires a fundamental change of approach to reimagine the organization, think strategically about change, and recognize the significant opportunity to be gained by operating differently. The key is putting the client at the heart of all their activities to stimulate the erosion of organizational silos around the front, middle and backoffice processes. Done effectively, this can result in the emergence of a new, borderless, highly-automated clientcentric organization.