The 10 Most Recommended Enterprise Document Automation Solution Providers 2018

www.insightssuccess.com November 2018

The

10

Most Recommended

Enterprise

Document Management

Solution Providers 2018

Editor's Pick Media Industry and its’ Digital Transformation

Editor’s Desk Chatbots: A Dynamic Digital Gesture for Creative Entrepreneurs

Steve Luke CEO

Eclipse Corporation

Eclipse Eclipse Corporation: Delivering Enhanced Enterprise Class Document Solutions

Documenting Future with Automation

D

ocumentation and its assembly is quit a clichéd task, isn’t it? Who likes to type same data again and again, or assemble the documents without a complete idea of what is its use? Paying handsome amount of salaries for just assembling data is not a good idea too. Additionally, you can’t consider a human effort without considering human error, can you?

When it comes to work efficiency and cost optimization machines are always ranked higher to the humans.

Machines are stereotypically something that reduces the human efforts. In the case of automation the definition upgrades a little. Automation enables machines to analyze and catalyze the work, and allow humans to seat back and eat their meal while working. Automation has truly revolutionized every possible sector with its emergence. Now it has knocked the doors of documentation processes.

Industries like legal services, supply chain management and in insurance are merely nothing without a document. If we consider human error in these industries missing or even having a small typo in a single document can cause an unendurable loss. Automating document assembly and other consequent processes concerning the document can unburden whole lot of pressure of the expediter and employees as well.

Realizing this opportunity, tech visionaries around the world has invented surreal systems that can automate documentation, and the time consuming tasks like its assembly and restoration. These include logic-based systems that use segments of pre-existing text and/or data to assemble a new document. These systems can also be used to automate all conditional text, variable text, and data contained within a set of documents.

Document automation software abstracts users from the underlying legal language of a document template and instead presents them with a questionnaire that collects relevant data and guides them through the document creation process. Based on the input provided by the users, the appropriate data and elements of

the master template are then automatically inserted into the final document, which is generated by the system and then returned to them.

Uncovering the better ways document automation has specifically made an inimitable mark on the legal framework. Law firms are finding it harder and harder to maintain profitability as they lower fees and increase unrecoverable hours to remain competitive. Document automation reduces unrecoverable hours and other costs associated with document drafting and can help firms win new clients, retain key clients and not only restore, but also increase partner profits by making possible the compelling combination of better service at a lower cost.

Similarly, Supply chain management has witnessed a huge inevitable impact of document automation. As supply chains become more complex and global in scope, runaway costs are harder to corral. Since every order is processed through intelligent automated system, quick and accurate fulfillment is all-but-guaranteed — preventing manual expenses from chewing up profits. It is not just about Legal Services or Supply Chain the document automation systems are capable of transforming the proceedings of several other industries.

With an aspiration to exhibit the appreciable benefits of document automation and highlight its capabilities Insights Success proudly presents an exclusive edition of “The 10 Most Recommended Enterprise Document Automation Solution Providers, 2018”. The magazine features some distinctive companies with remarkably scalable, flexible and adept document automation solutions which are enabling associates to see beyond horizons.

Featuring as the Cover Story we have Eclipse Corporation, a provider of enterprise document generation solutions for banking, education, healthcare, insurance, government, logistics, manufacturing, telco and utilities applications.

In addition, to delight of its readers the magazine also includes some insightful articles from industry leaders and our very own in-house editorial team.

Let’s cherish the joy of reading shall we?

Kedar Kulkarni

Contents 08

Cover Story

Eclipse Corporation Delivering Enhanced Enterprise Class Document Solutions

20

Quality Vision Managing Quality in the Technological Age

Editor’s Pick

40 Knowledge Keys

28 Maestros Insights Helping Organizations with Visual Workow Automation

Human Capital Management: AI Can't Replace the Human Side of Recruiting

Articles

Media Industry and its' Digital Transformation

Editor's Desk Chatbots: A Dynamic Digital Gesture for Creative Entrepreneurs

Employees' Diary

24

34

42

A CONTENTED EMPLOYEE IS A KEY TO SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS OPERATIONS

18 26 32 38 46

FORCS 18 The Leading Enterprise e-Form and Reporting Solutions Provider

frevvo 38 Helping Organizations with Visual Workow Automation

Formplus 26 A Unique Platform Creating Forms to Collect & Manage Data

Forms On Fire 32 iPEGS 46 Empowering Users with Customized Digital Forms

A Cloud-based Forms Automation Solution Provider

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Executive Editor Assistant Editors Contributing Editors Visualiser Art & Design Director Associate Designer Co-designer

Pooja M. Bansal Anish Miller Bhavithiran Murugan Jenny Fernandes Kedar Kulkarni Ishan Mittal Bhushan Kadam David King Amol Kamble Sanket Zirpe Shweta Ambilwade

Art & Picture Editors Paul Belin Jayant Khanna Senior Sales Manager Passi D. Business Development Manager Peter Collins Marketing Manager John Matthew Business Development Executives Steve, Joe, Alan, Vishal Sales Executives David, Kevin, Mark, Manish Technical Head Jacob Smile Technical Specialists Amar, Aditya Digital Marketing Manager Marry D’Souza Online Marketing Strategists Alina Sege, Shubham, Anup SME-SMO Executives Prashant Chevale, Uma Dhenge, Gemson, Avdhut Research Analyst Patrick James Circulation Managers Robert, Tanaji Database Management Stella Andrew Technology Consultant David Stokes sales@insightssuccess.com

November, 2018 Corporate Ofces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

Follow us on :

Insights Success Media and Technology Pvt. Ltd. Off. No. 513 & 510, 5th Flr., Rainbow Plaza, Shivar Chowk, Pimple Saudagar, Pune, Maharashtra 411017 Phone - India: +91 7410079881/ 82/ 83/ 84/ 85 Email: info@insightssuccess.in For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.in

www.facebook.com/insightssuccess/

www.twitter.com/insightssuccess

We are also available on : Copyright © 2018 Insights Success, All rights reserved. The content and images used in this magazine should not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from Insights Success.

Reprint rights remain solely with Insights Success.

Eclipse Corporation Delivering Enhanced Enterprise Class Document Solutions

‘‘

Tell us about your needs and let us show you how we can solve your document, form or label challenges.

‘‘

Cover Story

Steve Luke CEO Eclipse Corporation

E

nterprise content management systems and document management are often referred to as archiving, document workflow and automation of scanning documents to eliminate human intervention in processing paper documents. Established in 2005, Eclipse Corporation supports various industries with document generation and management software solutions. Its focus is on customer communications software which includes an enterprise-class solution to design, present and deliver business critical dynamic documents, labels and fillable forms.

led them to the top of the industry, delivering a single solution for designing forms, documents and labels that work with any business software. This concept offers document management for the full life cycle of a document or form. Under the leadership of their founders, the Eclipse R&D team has been successful with its DocOrigin software. This solution is now utilized in all industries and provides scalable pricing to meet the needs of companies of all sizes.

The company’s flagship software solution, DocOrigin, is delivered via a global partner network. This advanced enterprise-class e-form software was created in 2012 and is constantly being enhanced to provide the latest technology available, while providing enterprise stability and performance. Further, it was implemented by using the knowledge and experience gained while creating legacy form software solutions like JetForm - Adobe Central, PDF Wizard, FormsPlus and R-Forms/400.

Currently DocOrigin is installed in more than 3,000 companies in over 60+ countries globally, including two Fortune 10 clients.

The major challenge for Eclipse is that their customers have to face hard facts. Thousands of these companies still use software that may be 15 to 30 years old, and most likely has been sunset for 3 to 15 years. For publicly held companies, using the unsupported software may create a compliance issue and potential share holder concerns. Replacing enterprise forms solutions can take months or years. Eclipse has created Rapid Migration software to reduce the migration time by 20 to 80%.

They have form conversion software to auto convert many of the leading legacy forms software like Adobe Central, Adobe LiveCycle, and OpenText StreamServe.

Their automated conversion can convert simple, medium and complex form templates in seconds, and the conversion can range from 60 to 95% complete.

Considering that the design of a simple or complex form can take hours or weeks, this can reduce a complex conversion from years to months. With Eclipse’s ability to switch out one form at a time, and leave a legacy forms system in place while other forms are being

Steve Luke and Alex Riess are the founders of Eclipse Corporation. These two have shaped the company while having a serious influence on the enterprise document industry. As CEO, Steve co-created the software and hardware used in HP laser printers to produce forms in 1992. This included one of the first e-forms software products with a GUI form designer for the IBM Midrange computer systems. On the other hand, Alex is the CTO of the company, the brain behind the creation of PDF Wizard for Oracle’s EnterpriseOne ERP software. The PDF Wizard software was introduced to automatically convert the output of Oracle EnterpriseOne forms into a dynamic PDF template in seconds. PDF Wizard was a huge success, the software was implemented in the production software of JetForm - Adobe Central which was installed in 71% of the Fortune 1000 companies by the year 2000.

Steve and Alex jointly brought the concept of Integration Without Modification(R) to a reality in the document industry. IWM gives DocOrigin the power and features to provide forms that meet the needs of every industry. This

‘‘

DocOrigin is efficiently localized for international character sets and currency to support global companies.

‘‘

Redefining Entrepreneurship

Tackling Challenges

A dynamic Telco bill generated with DocOrigin

completed, they also reduce the stress and complexity levels for IT and the departments they serve.

A Reformative Product Headquartered at Cape Coral, Florida, USA; the company is fortunate to have a team of experts with many years of experience, who propel Eclipse towards success. The company’s creation of the methodology, Integration Without Modification® allows its customers to adopt DocOrigin with minimal or no changes to their business software. This lets customers design, present and deliver forms, documents and labels to meet the demands of the Fortune 10, but provides scalable pricing to meet the needs of SMBs. DocOrigin’s reliability, performance and features are critical to the business processes at 3M, AT&T, GE Healthcare, Konica Minolta, McKesson MedicalSurgical, Mele Printing, PPG Aerospace, to name a few.

‘‘

We spot no business, technical or logical reason to force a client to replace their software. DocOrigin should be the last forms software you buy!

‘‘

Another big issue is that many of these customers think the business software they purchased has a forms and document software included, and some do. However, these products are not as robust and feature rich as a dedicated forms software like DocOrigin. This would be the equivalent of going to the dentist when you need an oral surgeon.

Unfortunately, these companies do not realize until they are getting near go live that the forms software provided by their ERP or other business software will not meet their demands.

Eclipse’s OEM partners like GE Healthcare, Guidewire Insurance, Exictos, Tyler Technologies and more embed DocOrigin software in their systems.

DocOrigin is implemented in banking, education, government, healthcare, insurance, logistics, manufacturing and telco OEM systems. While talking about the company’s competition, Steve emphasized, “Our partners and our team have been crucial in providing the knowledge and global experience which played a major role in our ability to compete with the competition.”

Additionally, Eclipse’s team of pioneers understands the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none!” It was this mindset that caused the experts in 2010 to focus on the enterprise forms software and improve its interface with all the business software applications. Due to this, the company’s DocOrigin software interfaces with any business software to produce documents, archive documents or manage content. Eclipse’s commitments to industry standards, open source files and form template files using XML instead of proprietary templates makes its customers more comfortable and connectivity via web services and APIs is easy.

‘‘

Don’t change your business software, change your forms software.

Apart from this, the company provides APIs and Web Services to automate the connectivity between its document generation software and other document systems such as enterprise content management, records management systems and ERP- MRP- HRP -MERR systems.

A Disruptive Strategy Over the years, the company has been producing forms software with the support of a specialized team of experts, who have learned from successes and mistakes.

They have created an extremely reliable and powerful product. One of the best things about DocOrigin is that it just needs the customer’s data to present the advanced presentations and efficient omni-channel delivery the customer expects.

The Eclipse team thrives on improving the performance and features of the software every day of the year.

Eclipse uses a unique installation procedure that simplifies and eliminates the complex process of upgrading to a newer version. Their regression testing process allows their customers to upgrade the software in minutes.

Eclipse publishes newsletters and blogs to educate users on topics and features that are often overlooked so they can stay up to date regarding attributes and regulations which help them reduce cost. Features covered are PDF/UA & 508 compliance for people with visual disabilities, GDPR, adaptive fillable forms that display efficiently and effectively on PCs, tablets, phones and more.

Envisioning the Future Eclipse’s mission is to develop a never-ending document software solution for their clients. It is undertaking a different approach, instead of forcing the customers to repurchase forms software like other vendors. The company wishes to create a long-term relationship with its clientele, providing cradle to grave document management, being there for the full life cycle of a document or form.

In addition, Eclipse is continuing to improve its software and offers new versions to all its clients with M&S or SAAS licenses.

‘‘

SUBSCRIBE

READ IT FIRST

TODAY Never Miss an

Issue

Yes, I would like to subscribe to Insights Success Magazine.

Global Subscription Date :

Name : Address :

Telephone : Email :

City :

State :

Zip :

Country :

Check should be drawn in favor of: INSIGHTS SUCCESS MEDIA TECH LLC

CORPORATE OFFICE Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone: (614)-602-1754,(302)-319-9947 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

Company Name

Management

Brief

Avoka Technologies avoka.com

Philip Copeland CEO

Avoka Transact is a digital business platform used to accelerate customer acquisition and increase business agility in financial services, government, and other industries.

Eclipse Corporation eclipsecorp.us

Steve Luke CEO

Eclipse Corporation is a provider of enterprise document generation solutions for banking, education, healthcare, and other utilities applications.

FORCS forcs.com

Park Mi Kyung Co-founder

FORCS is the leading Enterprise e-Form and Reporting solutions provider worldwide and served industries in achieving increased Business Revenue, Productivity, and Customer Satisfaction.

FormFast formfast.com

Rob Harding Founder & CEO

FormFast is utilized across the heathcare organization to solve a wide range of document automation challenges.

Formplus jade@formpl.us

Busayo Longe CEO

Formplus is a cloud-based enterprise-focused form building solution which helps SMEs efficiently collect, manage, and store data using any cloud storage service.

Forms On Fire formsonfire.com

Kendall Kunz Founder & CEO

Forms On Fire is a leading provider of mobile data collection capabilities with advanced experience in form design, integration, workflow, and form analytics.

Frevvo frevvo.com

Ashish Deshpande CEO

Frevvo is the leading company with 100% visual, point-and-click software solution that helped its customers achieve operational efficiency and digital transformation.

iPEGS Ltd adam@ipegs.co.uk

Adam Leese Co-founder & CEO

iPEGS is an innovative mobile application company that enables users to build customized digital forms.

Legito legito.com

Ondrej Materna CEO

Legito is lawyer-friendly software for creating responsive documents that know how you think and edit themselves.

Mobsted mobsted.com

Alex Burlitsky Founder & CEO

Mobsted is a unified platform that provide everything needed quick and easy to learn and use, and can be integrated with backend systems.

The Leading Enterprise e-Form and Reporting Solutions Provider

N

owadays businesses are shifting towards the direction of providing the best customer experience by enhancing existing service delivery channels. In recent times, major players have built an omni-channel experience for their customers to transact effectively in the banking and insurance industries. FORCS is among those players.

FORCS is one of the leading Enterprise e-Form and Reporting solutions provider in the market and aims to infuse the culture of a paperless working environment to all the businesses. It is also focusing on developing innovative enterprise paperless solutions to help enterprises achieve an increased business revenue and productivity.

Headquartered at Korea and founded in the year 1995, FORCS has operated so far across Asia Pacific regions with its regional offices in Singapore and Japan and has served over 4,000 customers worldwide in order to transform their business digitally. Currently it is working with 18

more than 50 business partners around the globe in pushing paperless transformation to all industries.

has been certified as a familyfriendly company by the Korean government and also been listed on KOSDAQ for trading.

A Remarkable Entrepreneur

A Unique Methodology

As the Co- founder of FORCS, Park Mi Kyung is responsible for managing and developing the FORCS enterprise solutions. In 2017, she was elected as the chairman of Korea Digital Content Association and dedicated herself to improve the business environment of e-Form and digital content industry. She is also the Senior Vice President of Korea Venture Business Women’s Association which aims to foster a better business environment for female entrepreneurs. As a result, Park was awarded as the ‘SMB Entrepreneur of the Year’ at a Presidential commendation in 2016.

During the early stages, there was a paradigm shift towards paperless workflow where most of the businesses faced challenges in creating enterprise mobility suite and electronic document enabled innovative business model. To overcome this inefficiency and survive in the competitive business world, an increasing number of businesses started adopting smart technologies to enhance their business processes.

Additionally, Park Mi Kyung emphasizes on work-life balance and strives to make FORCS a womenfriendly or family-friendly company.

Due to her constant efforts and contributions to the industry, FORCS

To cope up with this, FORCS came up with an idea of replacing paper form with e-Form by using its core product OZ e-Form which allows anyone to convert paper form into electronic form within minutes without the knowledge of programming. Further, it is easily integrable into any existing business activities internally and externally.

| November 2018 |

We aim to help our customers achieve their goals as we see their success as our success.

—Park Mi Kyung Co- founder

In addition to this, FORCS has created a whole new paperless working culture in the country and encourages businesses to convert paper document into electronic version in the easiest way possible. It is also enhancing the business processes of its customers through implementing its whole new paperless solutions and changing how services are being delivered. In a way, these solutions are unique as they were developed with a purpose to revolutionize the working culture and comprise a range of dynamic features such as e-Signature, camera, voice recorder, barcode scanner and more. This is used to complement the business systems such as SAP and ERP to ensure a seamless working experience. Furthermore, this has topped the benchmark test (BMT) and has been recognized as the fastest solution that can be used for achieving screen execution, touch signature input response, and file conversions speed.

| November 2018 |

Currently 60% of the Korean paperless market is using FORCS paperless solutions. FORCS has won numerous awards from the Korean government and has been recognized as the market leader in providing paperless system in the country.

Future Advancements The vision of FORCS is to become a global software company with client’s success. To accomplish this goal, it is steadily investing in R&D and emphasizes on ‘smart paperless solution for digital transformation’. It also aims to broaden and develop its businesses overseas. On top of that, FORCS has been cultivating a company culture by fostering relationships and developing gender equality policies so that it can be recognized as one of the best companies to work for. These policies ensure that all employees get a fair and equal opportunity in career advancement, since Park Mi Kyung believes in the statement, “happy employees make happy customers”.

The Satisfied Clientele “The greatest feature of OZ e-Form is its powerful responsive digital form. Financial consultants can modify insurance application terms immediately, and the modified agreements are sent to our database instantly. Our organization’s efficiency and productivity increased significantly after the implementation of OZ e-Form. It’s truly impressive!”Project Manager of Smart Planner from Hanwha Life Insurance.

“OZ e-Form’s automatic digital form generation and scheduling functions minimize daily administrative work.

All our Field Engineers carry out field inspections conveniently with a mobile device. Complicated inspections are simplified with digital form as there is greater input accuracy as compared to paper forms.”- Associate Director of Information Management of the Korea Elevator Safety Agency.

19

Quality Vision

Chris Budd Co-founder

Isolocity

Managing Quality in the

Technological Age 20

| November 2018 |

Q

uality is a factor in any business, the importance of a quality management system ranges anywhere from “Essential” in industries like Air Travel, and Automotive to “Important” in businesses such as event planning, and consulting. Some industries are required by the government to meet a certain standard, and some are simply required by the big players in their client base. One thing is consistent in all industries, the long term success of a business is dependent on the adoption of a quality management system in some form. If errors are allowed to be repeated, they will eventually erode a business.

Quality management software is the technological solution for managing quality. It represents the latest generation of quality management systems and poses a significant opportunity to any type of business.

Quality and Resistance to Technology Although the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept has been around for some time now in many industries, it seems to be a slower transition in the quality space.

Many companies established their quality management systems years ago which are based in word, excel, and sometimes even physical paper. Quality systems face a strong resistance to change, the stakeholders remember how hard it was to condition employees to follow new compliance procedures and don’t want to do it all over for the sake of going digital. Sometimes they think switching to a quality management software is costprohibitive, especially in the small to medium business

About The Author

| November 2018 |

space. They settle in knowing their current system is going to get them certified, but this mentality puts these slow-movers at-risk.

The idea that overhauling a quality management system will drain company resources is an archaic one. Yes, the last time the business implemented a quality management system, it was painful. It was done on the backs of Microsoft documents, it depended on certain people to remember all the “if this, then that” triggers. It required the same information to be written out on form after form. That is all very difficult and very bureaucratic, it’s no wonder there is trauma from the memory of that implementation, the neophobia is completely justified.

It’s time to start challenging this fear of change because a divide will form between those that adopt a quality management software and those that don’t. Those that do will see a significant drop in quality management hours and therefore, a drop in overhead. These companies will be able to offer their customers better prices and better quality all at once.

The idea that switching to a quality management software will be painful is a fallacy. When a quality system is already in place, there are very few adaptations required of the employees. They need to login to a new interface, maybe some format changes from the old forms, but otherwise, it’s asking them to do MUCH less.

Chris Budd is the Co-founder of Isolocity, a quality management software designed to drive customized quality management systems for a wide variety of companies.

Isolocity supports the management of formal systems such as ISO 9001 and other standards in the ISO family, HACCP, GMP, FDA, and most custom quality systems.

21

Our clients have reported saving as much as 25% of their quality management time, or saving them from making additional hires. Many clients have reported an easy transition, sometimes the switch is flipped in a matter of a day.

of FDA regulations) require signatures in many processes, we were able to build this right into the software

Quality Management Software Adapting to Needs

We reduced our clients’ work efforts by allowing their vendors to participate directly in their system, for instance, many CAPA documents are completed by vendors, we made it so they can do this directly in our clients’ systems.

At Isolocity, we have adapted our software to meet the needs of a diverse range of clients. Our initial build left us with a software that drove the quality management process automatically for those needing: specification management and inspection, real time SPC, CAPA, document control, internal auditing, inventory management, HR management, equipment management, and/or supply chain management. Among the more exciting technological adaptations are: •

Mobility

Many users of our system are inherently moving while on the job, and use their mobile devices to capture photo documentation, we married these requirements with our functionality.

•

User based permissions

Not all information in a company should necessarily be accessed by all employees, we mirrored this need by allowing our clients to maintain everything within their system and restrict information as needed.

Ÿ

External Delegation & Communication

On The Horizon of Quality Management Software We have our sights set on a few technological trends that we feel will be relevant to quality in the future, here are a few of the more exciting ones: Ÿ IOT and AI

With the advent of smart fridges, smart slow cookers, and even smart garbage cans it’s clear any “thing” can be made smart. As more of a business’ equipment and supplies become smart, the quality management software will be able to capture more information and use less human input. Imagine a smart caliper sending product inspection measurements directly to the system, or a smart machine shutting down automatically when SPC goes out of tolerance. Or a smart spectrometer, a smart hotel cleaning cart, the list goes on. Imagine this layered with AI, predicting problems before they even happen.

At Isolocity, we are mindful that a quality management software should communicate with other business software. We are currently turning our focus to integrating with accounting and retail software but the broader vision is to allow clientmade integrations through services like Zapier or an open sourced API. Of course this is treacherous, how do we manage the quality of the service once we’ve handed it’s development out to the masses? Ÿ Augmented Reality

Imagine you could take a photo of a product prototype and its specifications are automatically uploaded to the quality management software. Imagine if inspection was done entirely by camera and the inspection data was uploaded automatically. Complete a 5S audit at the click of a camera… Technology is not far from this reality.

Join the Technological Journey of Quality Management We live and breath technology because we love the idea of passive production, we want to enable our clients to produce top quality outputs while minimizing the time they have to spend on production. There is so much the quality management software industry has already accomplished to that end, the earlier your company jumps on this wave, the more you will get out of it.

• e-Signatures

When moving to online, how do you maintain the accountability the way a written signature does on paper?

Some standards (for instance Part 11 22

Ÿ Open Source API’s and Webhooks

Products like Zapier and IFTTT have made webhooking popular and easy. | November 2018 |

Editor’s Pick

O

nce there was a time when the question was “Will the media industry get digitally transformed?”, but the scenario has changed now. The question today is “How will the transformation take place?” and “How will the media companies respond to this change?” Seeing these opportunities presented by the digital video systems, new players are joining the market, hence, capturing consumer’s mind with new initiatives and grabbing their wallets. These changes are bringing in aggressive modification in the industry along with new business models, partnerships and also acquisitions.

Whether one is a movie freak or a mad TV watcher, it is quite known to them that the technology today is not what they have seen few years back. The media and entertainment industry has seen rapid changes and modification in the recent years. The most observing changes that the world of technology has witnessed are as follows: Multi-tasking and Multi-Channel Experiences Time has changed now. Those days are gone when people used to see the advertisement of a film on the road-side billboard or on their newspaper and then go to a movie hall to watch the movie. Today, people are multitasking and they are more into multi-channel experiencing. People now are not just into watching a movie or Television show with all their concentration. They are watching a movie, uploading status on their Facebook wall and tweeting about the movie, all at the same time. They are sharing their views and opinions about whatever they are watching on their social media platforms. It clearly indicates that marketing is no more a one-media thing; rather it’s an event of all channels.

An extensive research clearly proved that most people watch clips and user-generated content on their phones and simultaneously they prefer watching movies on a device with larger screen like computer or television set. This is something of which entertainment companies must take 24

advantage of by prompting the viewers to use hashtag (#) and share using branded content to bring more traffic to their content. Those days are no more when the writers and marketers used to be focused about only the writing of the content, rather they are now focusing a lot on how their promotional content on social media platforms should look like and how they can gain more attraction.

Curated Content is more in demand The audience has changed a lot and so is their demand.

People are now demanding more curated content. And the trend is already growing at a very successful pace. It has been observed that media giants like Netflix and Amazon have already been effectively using the curated content for about four years. It is a procedure where the platform suggests what the audience would like to watch or subscribe. When these are used effectively, it can create new audiences instantly for the provider’s new shows and products. This is a better way to advertise products than other means of advertisements.

Getting more creative with Artificial Intelligence It sounds crazy to hear that the projected amount of spending for AI (Artificial Intelligence) for 2025 is $30 billion which was earlier observed to be $300-350 million in the year 2015. But the main reason behind such a huge projection is that AI is changing the way completely in which creativity was expressed earlier. There are already various companies which are using the AI technology to create interesting movie plot points based on the performance of box office results.

Recent reports informed that McCann Erickson in Japan owns an AI creative director which can actually analyze briefings from clients before pitching a story. From image recognition and language processing to speech recognition and deep learning, AI is analyzing everything to create new levels of impactful pitches through creative process in the entertainment and media industry. | November 2018 |

Wireless media is the new upcoming trend Gone are those days when people had to pay for all 300 channels which their satellite or cable TV channel providers used to give though the viewer actually watches only four to five channels. Now the definition of the entire media and entertainment industry has changed. The companies like Netflix and Hulu has brought in the new generation of wireless entertainment. The new users are going online. From YouTube, Netflix, Hulu to Amazon and even the cable companies are going to wireless and replacing traditional offerings with special and customized packages to attract more consumers.

Smarter Advertisements is the future The present day technological advancements have brought an analytical approach in machine learning and have opened doors to combine AI and reality. This is which is making advertisements much smarter. The pundits say traditional product placement will be soon replaced by the just a click on the dress of one’s favorite actor or actress, that too just when it appears.

Experts mentioned that marketing agencies with the help of big data, will be soon able to switch out specific product placement to the one the viewer will most likely buy. The advertisement is soon going to be another mode of entertainment.

After the new digital transformations taking place, certain changes are observed in the media and entertainment industry.

Traditional revenue models are decreasing in their growth as the new models are emerging. Digital enterprises are gaining much prominence as their ability to deliver multi-channel experience and individual business models are replaced by the modern day complex ecosystem of the new comers including new startups and super-platforms. The concept of generalization is fading away and the personalized content is taking stand.

| November 2018 |

25

A Unique Platform Creating Forms to Collect and Manage Data

F

ounded in 2015, Formplus is a cloud-based, enterprise-focused form building solution which helps SMEs, Educators, Nonprofits, etc. efficiently collect, manage, and store data using multiple endpoints, including their cloud storage service.

Global businesses are always in the search of the ways to streamline their processes and be more productive.

Formplus helps to solve their concerns, by providing Comms, one affordable tool that can be used across various departments in the organization. This one tool is so simple, yet so versatile Comms uses forms to plan events. By utilizing Comms, HR and Admin can simplify onboarding; Marketing can capture better leads while the Finance team can handle complex processes like tax filing and reimbursements.

Users are expected to simply sign up or sign in to create online forms and Formplus enables them to collect data from anywhere in the world. These forms can be used to register event attendees, receive resumes for a job application, collect customer feedback, gather marketing leads, and manage contract approvals.

Remarkable Achievements Formplus has participated in a very insightful event named Startup Battlefield Africa last year, where it launched its SMS forms feature and it

26

was well received by both current and new users at the time. Formplus releases new features every month and are constantly iterating to ensure that Formplus is meeting its users’ needs.

In addition to this, the second cohort for the Google Launchpad Accelerator Africa is currently on the floor, and Formplus is one among the 11 participating startups. It’s a learning process and the Formplus’s team hopes that the resources earned from this would help to boost its infrastructure.

Priority to Clients Formplus strives to provide its clients best services in minimal cost. It constantly ask for feedback whenever it makes feature additions and improvements, at the same time, its customers are also very receptive in sharing their queries regarding data collection and online forms in general, The firm looks for ways to adapt customer needs and strives to create the tool which is capable of solving their problem in real time.

Formplus has clients serving in all type of sectors including Education, Real Estate, Ecommerce, Accounting, Construction, Security and many more.

Its clients always appreciates the solutions provided by the company and share their views about how using Formplus helped to cut out a number of redundant processes and made them

more productive. Over the years, Formplus has helped hundreds of companies working in respective sectors to improve processes including manual data entry, job applications, online fundraising, event planning, team reports, online petitions, etc.

An Enthusiastic Leader Busayo Longe, CEO of Formplus, has a proven record of building exceptional SaaS products and online marketing.

He is a strong product management professional with a master’s degree specializing in Engineering, Technology and Business Management from the University of Leeds.

Busayo has a strong can-do spirit which reflects in the work that Formplus’s team put in. Rather than thinking of what can’t be done, he pushes each of Formplus to stretch the boundaries of what can be done.

Busayo’s favorite quote is “We can always can” and Formplus is the epitome of that. When customers ask for features that Formplus doesn’t currently have, until the team implements that feature, Busayo always find a workaround for clients to use in the meantime and he holds his client’s hands at every step of the way.

Ahead of the Competition According to Formplus, Competition is the very key and an organization needs

| November 2018 |

to be the best at what it does. Formplus learns from its competition but most importantly it focuses on its users and delivers them a product they expect.

Progressive Insights Formplus always tries and makes things easier for businesses in terms of data collection, analysis and management. But still it believes that there is still so much to be done at the global level, and it needs to push harder and faster.

‘‘

Formplus is a service that helps businesses gather and process data from their online and ofine customers.

‘‘

The reason for which users love the Formplus is the simplicity it provides: anybody can sign up and start using the tool immediately without having any prior knowledge or training. While describing the efficiency Busayo states, “That remains core to us, even when adding features, we don’t lose sight of that simplicity is what appeals to our users.”

Most of the team of Formplus works from Nigerian office and the organization also aims to let everyone know that this amazing global software can come out of Nigeria. The company envisions expanding its business, and desires to dominate the global market with its unique solutions.

Notable Appreciation from Clients “Formplus has made our testing and scoring process smoother. Their customer service team has been very prompt in resolving any issues that we have faced.” – Pritesh, Avanti Learning Centres “Our experience with Formplus has been transparent and inextricably important to the work that we achieve.

Our users find it secure and easy to use, and we find it very easy to put together! The customer service is prompt and very thorough.” – Earlene, Kitchen Connection

Busayo Longe CEO

| November 2018 |

27

Maestros Insights About the Author Mr. Jay Klein drives Voyager Lab’s technology strategy and core intellectual property. He brings more than 25 years of experience in data analytics, networking and telecommunications to the Company.

Before joining Voyager Labs, he served as CTO at Allot Communications where he steered Allot’s data inspection and analytics core technology offerings, and as VP Strategic Business Development at DSPG, where he was responsible for strategic technology acquisitions. He also co-founded and held the CTO position at Ensemble Communications while founding and creating WiMAX and IEEE 802.16. He also served as the CTO and VP of R&D at CTP Systems, acquired rst by DSP Communications and later by Intel. Jay Klein holds a BSc in Electronics & Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University as well as numerous patents in various technology elds.

AI: Artificial From

W

ith so much attention focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI), it’s worth remembering that one size does not fit all. There are specific business-related pain points in mind when a company decides to deploy AI technology, so making the right choices can be a tricky task.

For example, several months ago, an AI related breakthrough was announced – a robot learned and demonstrated the ability to perform a perfect backflip.

While it is well acknowledged that the invested research and development for this mission was huge and the commercial potential for some applications is enormous, it is somewhat unclear how this specific innovation or the core models and algorithms of it, can serve other industries and verticals. Herein lies the problem.

28

to Authentic

Gauging AI success in one field in many cases can be meaningless for another. To make things worse, even when trying to go deeper into the technology and attempting to evaluate, for example, which Machine Learning algorithms are utilized by the product, or what are the number of layers in the Deep Neural Network models mentioned by specific vendors, in the end it will be possibly pointless as it does not directly reflect the solution deployment ‘success’ implications.

Nevertheless, it seems that the market ignores this reality and continues to evaluate AI-based products by buzzword checklists using familiar and related AI terminology (e.g.,

| November 2018 |

Supervised, Unsupervised, Deep Learning etc.). While checklists are an effective tool for comparative analysis it still requires the ‘right’ items to be included.

Unfortunately, what typically is absent are the items which are important to the customer, from a problem-solution perspective.

Introducing Authentic AI Given all of this, there is a need to change the narrative around AI technology and solutions to something meaningful and authentic that reflects the real-life challenges and opportunities that businesses are facing.

This is the time to introduce Authentic AI. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘Authentic’ as both ‘worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact’ and ‘conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features’. This is not about ‘Fake’ to be contrasted with ‘Real’. It’s about the essential features of AI which need to be acknowledged, and hence, redefine the ‘checklist’. Often, these essential ‘authentic’ features are hidden and only surface when a CIO/CDO is faced with a new problem to be solved. This is seen especially when the AI aspects of a proposed product or solution are fully explored by asking questions such as: - Is the AI technology utilized by the product aimed specifically for my problem, optimally (e.g., performance, cost, etc.)?

- Is it capable of addressing the complete problem or only a part of it?

- Can it be assimilated into the existing ecosystem without imposing new demands?

- Can it address the compelling environmental conditions of the problem space?

These issues can be grouped into three different ‘classes’ ‘Original’, ‘Holistic’ and ‘Pragmatic’: Original – How innovative is the solution? This can be quantified by assessing the following: - the invention of new algorithms or even new models and - the use of complex orchestration techniques or - through the capability to handle complex data formats and structures.

| November 2018 |

While there is no need to re-invent the wheel repetitively for any problem, there are distinctive characteristics which require optimizing.

Holistic – How complete is the proposed AI technology? It takes into account the capability of handling the end-to-end aspects of the solution, the competence of harmonizing the operation of the various AI components of the solution and the ability to adapt to ever changing conditions of the AI application.

Pragmatic – Can the technology solve real world problems in their actual and natural space in a commercially viable way? This means that for example the data sources can be processed in their most native format (both unstructured or structured) as well as provide insights or results matching the pragmatic needs of the specific market expectations. In addition, the ability to be quickly deployed and rapid to act are assessed.

All of these elements should be used to systematically assess and evaluate AI-based products and solutions to assess their authenticity and therefore effectiveness in specific use cases.

For example, many home-loan mortgage evaluation and recommendation systems utilize a somewhat isolated machine learning based applicant classification method, one of many other processes included within the solution.

The AI in this solution cannot be considered Authentic AI to a high degree as it ‘scores’ low on the ‘Original’ and ‘Holistic’ classes as it isn’t innovative ‘enough’ (from an AI sense). In addition, the AI component itself does not cover on its own the end-to-end aspects of the solution (hence affecting the overall performance and precision). It could be considered to be ‘Pragmatic’ to some level if it can handle the required data sources of financial institutions or the customer applications natively, and if the solution ‘output’ are the explicit results required as a specific recommendation (e.g., loan conditions). However, the deployment timeline (time-to-market) and commercial aspects need to be evaluated as well. This is just one example of many others, covering all kinds of variations.

Perfect backflips may grant you a gold medal if you are a gymnast but if you are a master chess player don’t expect a winning move.

29

A Cloud-based Forms Automation Solution Provider

P

resently, every organization has different requirements and needs an application or software that can customize thousands of business documents, presentations and emails which are produced daily.

Hence Forms On Fire, headquartered at Bellevue, WA offers cloud-based software that can be used on tablets and smartphones to replace the paper forms with digital forms which keeps its customers and employees happy. It also provides secure cloud dashboard features such as simple drag-and-drop mobile form design, workflow task management, and broad integration with an easy-to-use display.

Kendall Kunz Founder & CEO

32

Forms On Fire is a leading provider of mobile data collection capabilities with advanced experience in form design, integration, workflow, and form analytics for nearly every industry. The company’s mobile app that’s built for on-the-go data collection is convenient for iOS, Android, and Windows users to access the software offline for collecting data in forms, which can later be synchronized with the database when internet access is available.

Additionally, Forms On Fire allows its customers to go beyond forms and reward their people with the most advanced, rich mobile data collection and mobile workflow system on the planet. | November 2018 |

A Dynamic and Charismatic Leader

‘‘

We Seek The Good, We Do Great Work, We Are Ridiculously Helpful And We Keep Getting Better.

‘‘

Kendall Kunz is the Founder and CEO of Forms On Fire.

He holds a BS degree in management with distinction from Purdue University. His early career was influenced heavily during his time at Oracle Corporation where he learned principles of software development and project management. In the early 90s, Kendall joined the basementlocated startup company Aris Corporation. In the next five years, Aris went public on the NASDAQ and Kendall became the CEO of Aris Corporation, where he found his passion for early-stage software companies. Further, as a result of years of research into the fields of cloud computing, mobile computing and social media, Kendall founded Forms On Fire in 2012 as a spin-off from the management consultancy, Bellevue Technology Partners.

Under his leadership, the industrial experts began their research by apply the concepts of The Lean Start-up Movement discovered by Eric Ries. In so doing, they have uncovered more than 50 platforms for deploying mobile forms on iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile. Further, while talking to Kendall about the company, he states “Today our flagship product encompasses the best of what clients need and at the same time, eliminates the complexity we found in so many solutions – giving you a mobile forms product that works; Beautifully!”

providing them with continuous functionality and features updates. In addition to this, Kendall asserts “We hope to keep reaching out to clients of all industries to ensure they are getting the most out of their businesses and processes.

We strive to be the best in the industry and provide the most useful features and tools for our users.”

Delivering Convenient Management Software

Words of Trust

Since its inception, Forms On Fire focuses on customer service as its priority and will always continue in the same way. The industrial experts have learned as they grew from serving just a few users to thousands of companies. Due to their understanding of the field that every client has different needs and use cases, they have shaped their creative thinking on what would be the best way to approach a project. Today as a leading SaaS company in the market, Forms on Fire not only gives its customers the ability to create dynamic mobile forms, but also allows them to create endless integrations and workflows for reporting and analytics. Hence, numerous companies of all sizes rely on the company’s product and expertise to design their own solutions and to customize their entire system.

“When my business needed a form built and I was tired of waiting for programmers to build stuff for us that cost a lot of money and our time trying to explain to them what we needed, then wasn’t quite right because they still don’t really understand our business, I decided to build one myself. I then spent a lot of time looking at different products, and most of the ones that had the core functionality I needed (the ability to automatically create PDFs) were either too annoyingly simple and couldn’t make the calculations I needed or they were so complex I would have to learn a lot of programming. Thank goodness I found Forms on Fire! It’s the perfect middle ground that lets me do amazing things with a little work and playing around but takes care of the basics in the background.” – Joanna W; Director of Marketing

Strive to be the Best The future of the company depends on its ability to efficiently deliver successful mobile applications that add meaningful value in time, cost savings, and revenue opportunities for its clients present at any industry. Forms On Fire aims to keep its customers satisfied and happy by | November 2018 |

33

Editor’s Desk

CHATBOTS A Dynamic Digital Gesture for Creative Entrepreneurs

34

| November 2018 |

T

he arrival of Chatbots is considered to be an incredible breakthrough in the realm of business or any kind of entrepreneurships. It is one of the smartest innovations by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that businesses can count on. The Chatbot is a software that can be programmed to carry out a certain set of actions all by itself, like a wind-up toy, in text or spoken formats. The capability of the bots to learn from the past interactions and grow in itself, makes it more attractive and interesting.

Chatbots work in two different ways. Firstly, predefined responses are given from an existing database, based on the keywords searched by customers. The smart machine based bots attract their knowledge from Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing and adapt their behavior based on the customer interactions.

Applicability of Chatbots in Business: The applicability of these chatting bots is quite relevant in this era of digital glory. As the new tech-savvy generation of customers is always connected to the social platforms, they definitely expect a seamless and less time consuming customer experience with the brands they love.

Econsultancy found in a research that 57% of customers prefer live chat to email or a phone call. There’s no surprise that consumers today are appreciating chatting or texting more than any other forms of communication. To address this priority of the customers and outgrow in this competitive business world, many business giants are adopting these virtual agents.

It’s a Smart Trend for Entrepreneurial Venture: With the widespread adoption of the artificial intelligence, the human interaction and connectivity has taken a fascinating turn. This extremely sophisticated and versatile tool can be helpful in crafting any small or big business plan. Apart from being awesome in resolving customer care queries, Chatbots can be a part of an entrepreneurial strategy in many ways. That’s where the appeal of Chatbots lies. There are many different approaches to navigate this connectivity tool throughout the business venture. Let’s have a look at some of these approaches: • As every organization has a unique set of customers, the Chatbots must be programmed in accordance with

| November 2018 |

customer journey. Knowing the finer details of the customer journey from A-Z, might be proved as the foundation for success. As AI is enacting a larger role in business reforms, having accurate foresight and experience is the most needed prerequisite to program the bot.

• After programming the bot, it should be designed in a way that would enhance customer success by advancing them down the sales funnel. A microscopic view of the customer service and sales data always helps in this regard. One should have a good grasp on: • Which patterns and questions are asked the most?

• How the responses can be programmed to answer all of them?

• And most importantly, in what way all the necessary information can be provided to bring people from awareness stage to a decision?

• In order to guide the customer seamlessly through the sales funnel with the help of the intelligent bot, an entrepreneur needs to put himself/herself in the shoes of the average customer and develop the bot around their path to success.

• To build strong relationships with customers, another smarter way is to “humanize” the Chatbot. People generally want to buy something from other people, not from a robot. Therefore, programming responses needs to be done in a way that reflects the character and personality of the brand. The Chatbot need to be designed with a tinge of human empathy with the authentic brand voice.

• Lastly, with the changing digital landscape, customer mindsets are also always in the verge of change. To stay on the top of the game, one must have to consistently analyze the data and evolve the bot accordingly.

Future of Chatbots: Chatbots are currently being utilized as easy and fun ways on websites, social platforms and smartphones to assist customers in their interactions with a brand. Even if the Chatbots are still in rudimentary stage, we can expect a lot more progressions in this trend. With the gradual evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, the Chatbots will become more empowered to edify the conversational interface of businesses. Chatbots are going to get a lot

35

smarter, more intelligent and indistinguishable from a human being with the advancement of AI. However, it will deďŹ nitely take some trials and errors before the chatting robots master and adopt the delicacies of polite conversation.

Also, it’s quite predictable that the cost of Chatbots will eventually get cheaper as the adoption of it increases across multiple domains. An example is Facebook’s decision to let third-party applications build Chatbots in their platform has drastically lowered the price.

Conclusion: It really amazes us how far technology has come up in the last several years in the digital marketing arena. However, some things will always remain the same. Even if everything gets automated in the future, nothing will minimize the appeal of optimal user experience. The bots can be used to automate a huge chunk of the marketing process, but without making the process dull and impersonal. Only then these marvels of technology will be able to make wonders.

36

| November 2018 |

frevvo: D

igital transformation is the biggest opportunity of the next three years and process automation is at its heart. However, it’s not easy and accurate every time. Real business processes are complex and I.T talent is quite hard to find. Thus, enters frevvo, through which anyone can build and manage secure automated workflows, drag-and-drop fields and use its visual rule builder to create dynamic forms, automatically deploy on mobile devices and take advantage of e-signatures, PDF generation and a host of business-friendly capabilities. 800+ customers are benefiting as their organization runs more efficiently, business users do more, and programmers code less.

Helping Clients to Transform Digitally frevvo’s customers often start their digital transformation journey in specific departments like Finance or HR by automating processes such as Purchase Orders or Employee On-Boarding. But, true digital transformation transcends departments and integrates information across silos in the organization so it functions more efficiently. So the company offers pre-built templates, training and other resources across domains like Finance and HR with specific solutions for common processes like Purchase Orders, Travel Authorization, Leave Approval etc. that helps its

38

“

“

Trust us – your pricey developers would much rather be doing something more interesting and productive than debugging CSS and JavaScript for web forms.

Helping Organizations with Visual Workow Automation customers broaden their use of frevvo’s solutions across departments and functional areas in the organization.

When Employees Come First From the beginning, frevvo has always put employees first.

It’s a key aspect of what has made frevvo what it is today – a vibrant organization with loyal, dedicated employees who genuinely enjoy working here and truly care about customer success. frevvo’s employees have stepped up during tough times and customers sense their commitment and willingness to go the extra mile to ensure satisfaction. frevvo was founded by serial entrepreneurs with extensive experience in Business Process Automation in the insurance industry. They received first-hand experience with the tedium of building large, complex forms by hand and saw how important the user interface is to get people to actually use business applications. That experience has been channeled into every aspect of frevvo’s products – the result is that customers’ online forms and business processes look great,are easy to use and don’t cut corners on the user experience.

Personifying Leadership With a combined experience of more than 20 years in the forms and business process management space, Ashish Deshpande, CEO of frevvo Inc. and his co-founders have extensive expertise in all aspects of the business process management space. To date, he has written numerous articles, spoken at events and, most important of all, worked with dozens of clients from giant Fortune-500 organizations to small businesses with barely 20 employees.

Ashish has always prioritized the well-being of the organization’s employees even at the cost of revenue. frevvo doesn’t aim to be the biggest; but it wants to be the best. This dedication towards employees flows from the top and has been a hallmark of the company since day one. It has paid off in spades with happy, dedicated employees who stay with the company for a long-term.

| November 2018 |

Ashish Deshpande CEO

A Distinctive Organization and its Future Roadmap frevvo believes the market is indeed crowded but, currently, that’s quite natural for any domain. Thanks to frevvo’s founders’ prior experience with process automation at Fortune 500 companies, the organization’s products are unique and easy to use, yet meet real-world business requirements both for customers and partners. For instance, frevvo is the only company whose products can be branded and integrated with a partner’s software offering. As a result, it has numerous ECM vendors who do exactly that. frevvo is the only solution that offers incredibly simple, 100% visual form and workflow design yet allows customers to create sophisticated forms with dynamic behavior, calculations, integrations, signatures, PDF generation and a host of other features.

affordable that there will be no reason to ever use paper- or email-based processes in the organization.

That being said, frevvo has no intention of standing still.

The organization comprehends that the market is always evolving and frevvo will continue to improve its products with new capabilities based on customer feedback and market analysis. Recently the organization has celebrated its 10th anniversary. Through its long-running partnerships with major industry vendors, frevvo’s continued success with customers as well as its dedication to employees, it plans to continue growing robustly.

“If you’re serious about eliminating your paper documents, no matter the size of your company or organization, then frevvo is the answer.” William Cooper, Director of Technology, OESJ School District

A Satisfied Clientele “We created an account for them on the Live Forms server and showed them the tutorials. They’re creating their own forms and exporting submissions to Excel. It took less than 5 minutes of an ITS developer’s time.” James Bort, Technical Lead, Online Platforms, Syracuse University “We needed an affordable solution that worked with our existing PeopleSoft and HR Portal. Live Forms has the best combination of usability, price, support and business capabilities on the market today.” Roger Rudenstein, ERP Manager, OSRAM

Obviously, frevvo plans to keep advancing its products in order to keep pace with technological and business changes with a laser focus on user experience – the company’s mission is to make process automation so easy and | November 2018 |

39

Knowledge Keys

Human Capital Management: AI Can’t Replace the Human Side of Recruiting

W

hat happened to coal miners is not going to happen to recruiters.

Automated and autonomous technologies have forever changed mining globally, and no amount of tariffs or corporate handouts will alter the reality that coal extraction requires fewer and fewer people. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign blamed the sharp decline in coal mining jobs on Democrats and coastal liberals, yet overlooked technology’s role in eliminating them for good.

Recruiting is another industry in which the introduction and adoption of new technologies has become commonplace. An important difference is that recruiters are not—despite working in an industry hungry for efficiency gains—facing the same fate as miners or those who used in work in offices such as bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries and admin staff. The demise of those positions was due to software and hardware innovation; QuickBooks eliminated hundreds of thousands of bookkeeping jobs, while word processing and other desktop software apps made secretaries almost extinct.

Recruiting is Different The principal reason why recruiting will avoid the same fate as the West Virginia coal miner or Southern California bookkeeper is because it’s fundamentally different. Recruiting isn’t just a sequence of tasks; it’s a 40

sequence of tasks with a necessarily heavy human component. Recruiting comprises engagement and communication with other HR team members, hiring managers, executives, other employees on hiring teams, along with external contacts such as job sources and agencies. To that list we can also add the most important cohorts, prospective employees, applicants and candidates.

The Rise of the Machines that Learn In referring to technology, I’m not referring to software programs like Applicant Tracking Systems that have existed for over 20 years. I’m referring instead to advances in Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning algorithms that are both promising to some and frightening to others. For reference, Machine Learning is the idea that we can feed large amounts of data into a computer that will identify patterns and uristics almost by itself. Once identified, it will apply the “conclusions” to new sets of data. AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a manner that we consider to be “smart.”

Much of the promise of AI/Machine Learning lies with introducing more objectivity into recruiting, handling more data and automating as many processes as possible.

AI and Machine Learning are great for all of those. What they’re not great at, and will not become so in the foreseeable future, is replacing face-to-face human interaction.

| November 2018 |

About the Author Omer Tadjer is the CEO and Co-founder of Comeet. He has been involved in high-tech companies for more than 15 years, a decade of which was devoted to software development and managing development teams. A technologist and philosopher by training, he is a business entrepreneur at heart. He is passionate about applying his practical IT and management experience to creating valuable products and transforming the way the HR industry operates.

Let’s face it, most candidates want personal interaction when seeking a new opportunity. New employees are not just filling an anonymous opening on an org chart; they’re seeking opportunity, challenge and a work environment where it’s not all about work. There’s a selection process on both sides before it leads to buy-in, | November 2018 |

Omer Tadjer CEO & Co-founder Comeet

and there’s only so much application of technology you can make when candidate courting becomes conversations across tables in boardrooms and restaurants.

Improving a Recruiter’s Favorite Metric - Time-toHire I think it’s important to understand that adoption of AI in recruiting is not an either/or reality; It’s still early days but recruiters are already benefiting. By observing how managers and recruiters make screening decisions, AIbased systems can predict the match between a job, a candidate, and a team: Ÿ

Submitting an application will become much easier for candidates.

41

Ÿ

Recruiters can evaluate resumes and candidates faster.

Ÿ

Ensuring position fit is more precise.

Ÿ

Identifying the best candidates in a candidate pool takes less time.

The cumulative effect of AI in these areas is that time-tohire is significantly reduced. Recruiting teams can make internal decisions, close job requisitions faster and reduce the potentiality of poor hiring decisions, all of which happens in a manner that fully respects candidates.

notifications about their candidate status. Ÿ

Matching an application to a job description, a candidate to the company culture, or a hiring manager preference to an existing profile in your candidate database can deliver huge value.

Ÿ

Making these promising matches, pushing the right candidate to the top of the list, and automatically handling interview scheduling deliver important topof-funnel returns.

Ÿ

Enabling interviewers to become more professional by surfacing the right type of questions according to the position and job. Process-driven interviewing like this will enable companies to avoid expensive hiring mistakes.

Ÿ

Following the process and suggesting follow-up actions to the hiring team.

Enhancing the Candidate Experience The other side of AI-enabled recruiting is the candidate experience. From seeing what our customers are doing, we know that a great candidate experience equals an 80% greater chance that the candidate will accept an offer. What’s the secret of delivering this kind of experience? Respect the candidate, be transparent and don’t keep them in the dark. For example, don’t ask candidates the same questions multiple times in interviews. Keep recruiting stages short, precise and respectful. Our customer data show that these characteristics increase job acceptance.

Driving Improvement Using AI and Machine Learning Whether you have a lot of AI and Machine Learning experience or your education is starting with this article, here are a few specific source-to-hire applications where smart systems deliver empirical value: Ÿ

Helping you optimize your marketing budget and how you allocate the money and collect resumes.

Analyzing your and other companies’ data will allow smart systems to understand where and when the budget should be invested, significantly reducing the cost-per-hire and increasing candidate quality in your pipeline.

Ÿ

Ensuring that candidates who are not a fit are treated respectfully and receive professional and courteous

42

These applications and others will make AI tremendously useful to recruiters in the next several years. From collecting applications, evaluating resumes and making decisions, its impact will be massive. By applying automation and semi-automation to so many different recruiting tasks, recruiters will gain many more hours for the kind of human-to-human interaction that reveals the type of information and learnings that software and data can’t discover. And, depending on the region where they’re working, recruiters may be able to help ex-coal miners find new career paths with more long-term upside.

| November 2018 |

Employees’ Diary

A CONTENTED

EMPLOYEE IS A KEY TO SUCCESSFUL

BUSINESS OPERATIONS

44

| November 2018 |

T

he growth in a successful business enterprise is due to its working personnel. Currently, the employees are being the pillar of the development of the business practices. Besides, they are concerned about the challenges they have to face with the emerging layoffs and restructuring. The employees need a workplace where they get the satisfaction of their work in addition to the provided opportunities for their self-growth and bliss. At present, the companies are ramping up to take necessary measures to keep its staff enthusiastic and with fewer discontents. For a business to flourish, the integration of employees with the surge of giant steps towards staff pleasure is needed.

companies need to make the limited number of rules and regulations for an employee that will build a sense of trust in them prominently uplifting their dedication in their respective work. Proper counseling and motivation can result in drastic changes in the abilities and flexibility of a worker, playing a vital role in the development of a business enterprise.

The companies should also focus on motivating the employees to always keep on learning the new things, benefits of which will be received by the business organizations itself.

Dress Codes are the Past Entities Nowadays, companies are liberal about the dress codes that once were a compulsion in the traditional business practices. Allowing individuality in the dress codes can back hold the extremity of professionalism. This compatible environment at the workplace keeps a worker happy, reflection of which is/ can be seen on the operations carried out by them with an approach positively affecting the company in high grounds. Basically, companies need to focus on the work performance of an individual rather than judging them on the basis of their appearance. This measure will attract the employees to work hard which will lead to the growth and development of business.

Small Appreciations Make Big Differences The employees are the backbone of a business organization as they dedicate all their hard work and perseverance to it. For these acute commitments, the company must take the measures to acknowledge all employee profiles for their work and offerings on regular intervals. Verbal thanks to an employee can make a colossal transformation in his/her personality and thereby support the work ethics. Besides, a kind memo can help the company workers to be pleased, explicitly surge the development of the business organization. Appreciations in the form of an email can inculcate more positivity among the workers that would highlight the company’s development and lead to smooth employer-employee operations. The staff will be happy with this small act of gratitude making the pillars of the business enterprise more strong.

Motivation is Much Needed It’s the duty of an employer to motivate their employees on regular basis to attain stability at the workplace. The employees are sometimes under stress and pressure due to the excess workload which can be soothed by activation of workshops related to managing the burden and stimulating the improvement in an individual performance. The

Flexible and Pleasant Workspace The employees can only contribute to the development of a business if the environment around them makes them happy. The people around them and the people with whom they work play a vibrant part to concentrate and maintain their focus. The flexible operations occurring in a company can uplift the self-development of a worker thereby being the catalyst for

| November 2018 |

company’s success. A company should carry out necessary operations to keep its business environment majorly satisfying and free from manipulation.

Pleasant workspace helps the employees to properly focus on its targets. The workspace should be designed in such a way that its personnel would admire it always, work with full enthusiasm in the pink of their health.

Patience is the Need of the Hour A company can never be successful overnight. It has to strive hard for certain achievements. The company needs be patient with its employees, in situations dealing with profit and loss.

The employers should believe in their employees and make them realize that they matter to the company. The business organizations needs to tolerate the staff in terms of serious damage to the productivity of the company and be open and available to them in all sorts of discussions and activities. Stability among the workers can be achieved if the companies remain calm with them.

This will lead to constant and secure operations between the employees and the respective organizations. Dealing with the workers patiently will make a bigger difference in the bond of the trust and build a greater sense of satisfaction amongst them.

The employment sector has to face critical layoffs in the private as well as the government sector. But the technology is emerging with big solutions and opportunities for the employees helping them to become a leader in the near future. Besides, new generation employment masses are truly getting influenced by the use of the smartphones that will surely demonstrate them with new skills and knowledge. The upcoming scenario of employment sector will be an integration of the business organizations and the technology.

45

:

Empowering Users with Customized Digital Forms

I

n this day and age there are a variety of organizations that have developed applications across multiple sectors to help reduce paper usage and increase efficiency via digital data collection. Among these companies is iPEGS - an innovative mobile application and web form company that enables its customers to build customized digital forms.

With their headquartered based in Chester, UK, iPEGS aims to help businesses and organisations to Go Paperless. Customers and employees can easily access, complete and submit forms via the iPEGS Mobile Form Apps or as Web Forms. They can also create and send forms remotely or complete forms face-to-face. The iPEGS Form Apps also work offline so an internet connection is not always essential. The iPEGS products help its customers reduce paper, improve efficiency and save time across a wide variety of industries including education, construction and recruitment.

Expertise Personified Adam Leese, Co-founder and CEO of iPEGS describes doing good business is a key part of the company’s ethics along with world class customer

Adam Leese Co-founder & CEO

46

We help businesses and organisations to Go Paperless. | November 2018 |

service. In the late 90s, Adam completed his graduation from Glyndwr University and holds a HND degree in sound engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Multimedia computing. Soon after his graduation Adam won the Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award 1999.

Adam then went on and started his corporate career at Unilever PLC and has since worked for a variety of successful companies in roles such as e-Consultant, Web & Marketing Manager, Operations Director and Managing Director. Adam’s future plans include growing the business with a focus on emerging technologies including video, voice and blockchain. Adam also plans to use his experience and knowledge of paperless technologies to help educate others via a new YouTube channel which will be launching in the coming months.

More importantly, all of the new features that are developed are made available which results in a direct benefit to all of its users, enhancing the offering for new sectors and of course new customers.

Future Endeavors iPEGS goal is to help as many businesses and organisations as possible to go paperless so that they can benefit from the massive savings in time, paper, expenses and costs all of which can help them to succeed in the future. iPEGS aims to become a world leader in providing paperless solutions and continues to expand its products with the support of the latest technologies.

Words of Trust

Delivering Innovation iPEGS was originally created to solve the issues associated with government funded paperwork relating to work based learning such as apprenticeships delivered by UK Colleges and Training providers. The iPEGS team believes in sharing best practice with all of their customers and partners. All new product features and improved processes are shared with all. The iPEGS team also believes that working in partnership with other solutions providers is a good business strategy because they recognize that there is no such thing as a single solution and that utilizing specialist providers in partnership is the most effect option.

In the early stages of the company, iPEGS faced challenges while trying to implement the iPEGS paperless solutions into companies which were resistant to change and had unrealistic expectations. To solve this issue iPEGS the team helped customers to focus on the quick wins that would lead to immediate cost savings and benefits to the organization. By successfully doing this, the resistance to change was overcome and the customers could then focus on implementing the solution to other parts of the business thus increasing the benefits and savings.

“If you want outstanding support, professional communications and flexibility then iPEGS is the right choice. It is always going the extra mile to provide exceptional customer service and a seamless product. The team has been very proactive and innovative in helping us to develop a new way of working within our apprenticeship division.” - Eileen Ball, People Plus Group Ltd. “The feedback from learners and employers has been excellent. They view the use of the iPads in gathering data both more professional and more efficient than the traditional pen and paper approach, and the quality and consistency of the data we gather has also improved too due to features within the product. The training and ongoing support from the team at iPEGS has been really impressive.

The system is so easy to use and we were very quickly able to create new forms ourselves as we needed them, as well as editing the existing suite of forms we have created. The team at iPEGS is always available if we need to speak to them and to share ideas and suggestions for future development, and we see the relationship very much as a partnership.” - Phil Stittle, West Suffolk College

Currently the company is utilizing the latest technologies to solve the numerous issues associated with paper based forms within the education, construction, recruitment, beauty and cosmetic sectors to name a few and is constantly looking to break into new industries. The company states “that no matter what the size or type of the organisation, we all experience the same issues when it comes to paper.”

Additionally, iPEGS is constantly developing and evolving its products based on customer needs and requirements. | November 2018 |

47