Work Reimagined: Intelligent Automation Is Key to Improving Business Performance

Blue Prism is a Business Reporter client.

Long before Covid-19, scaling businesses and enterprises faced common challenges such as lagging productivity, increased customer expectations and the complexities of business transformation. Then the pandemic hit and delivered an abrupt end to business as usual. Organizations were forced into dramatic operational transformation and had to rethink customer and supplier engagement. Transformation became not just about improving business performance, but also about surviving in a new climate of uncertainty.

The pandemic has highlighted flaws, but it has also shown how digital agility can help overcome the hardest challenges. You only have to look at how Britain’s National Health Service leveraged intelligent automation to roll out one of the fastest Covid vaccination programs in the world to see the true benefits of digital transformation.

With intelligent automation proven and available to every business leader, it’s time to use this technology to strategically and significantly improve overall business performance. In fact, research suggests that companies that invested heavily in intelligent automation in the years prior to the pandemic have been able to exponentially improve their operations and business performance. Without strategic investment in automation and a clear digitalization roadmap, a business’s competitiveness will inevitably degrade over the next five years as the gap widens between it and enterprises that have embraced these technologies.

Automation programs succeed best when executed within a strategic context; simply aiming for tactical efficiency gains is not enough and can limit overall performance. Companies that invest strategically in smart technologies deliver value best by planning automation holistically across the organization. Automation should be focused on clear, well-defined value creation via productivity, employee engagement, better customer experience, cost savings, competitive edge or other specific values tied directly to core strategic initiatives.

A digital workforce of software robots

Blue Prism is pioneering enterprise-scale automation that will see much greater adoption of automation across organizations—evolving from single “digital worker” process-focused robotic process automation (RPA) to organizational-scale automation via a digital workforce that is AI-infused and fully integrated with human workers. This vision of the future workforce—a seamless blend of human and digital workers—can be realized now, and brings with it the ability to execute automation programs at scale to drive competitiveness, increase productivity, improve customer experience and work smarter and faster while encouraging growth, agility and creativity.

Choosing the right digital workers to populate your digital workforce is key to achieving optimum level of business performance. However, not all software robots are created equal. Businesses need to choose wisely, as the wrong automation platform can significantly limit the amount of value gained. Blue Prism encourages businesses to choose a platform designed for enterprise-scale automation operations based on security, robustness and access to a wide and deep ecosystem of companion technologies.

Blue Prism’s digital workers are a dependable choice for building digital workforces for enterprise-scale transformations. The company has a long track record of creating large-scale automation and digital transformation programs for major organizations, including those in complex and sensitive industries such as financial services, health care and mobile communications. The latest artificial intelligence capabilities—cognitive technologies that act as the eyes, ears, voices and brains needed for complex tasks—enrich and add serious power to a Blue Prism digital workforce.

Digital workforces deliver strategic value

Implementing intelligent automation via a digital workforce platform has enabled organizations to scale their use of digital workers according to changes in demand, putting them ahead of their competitors and enabling them to focus precious human resources where they are needed most.

A major bank, for example, was able to revolutionize its trade finance operations via a digital workforce, reducing the wait time for trade finance by 94% and giving the bank a major comparative advantage over its competitors. What at first glance looks like an efficiency play is actually a strategic business competitiveness improver. Multiply that across departments, and you’re talking about true digital transformation.

In health care, the outcomes from implementation of digital workforces have been critical in some of the most demanding areas of the health system, including equipment supply, recruitment, vaccine management and more. Intelligent automation that operates seamlessly with existing systems and human employees is helping to save lives by freeing up human and other resources to focus on patient care, as opposed to administration.

Achieve company-wide buy-in

Investment is not the only issue; senior management must prioritize and align their automation strategies.

Automating current processes piecemeal will not deliver considerable, enterprise-wide improvement of business performance. Leaders must take a step back and redesign with a blank slate, as true transformation comes from revolutionizing operations holistically, not just improving isolated elements of existing ones.

For senior management, automation shouldn’t just be about cost and efficiency improvements (although these quick wins are important). Instead, they should approach intelligent automation with their eyes on the bigger prize: reimagining their operating models with a digital-first approach in alignment with and as an enabler of core strategic initiatives.

It is imperative that companies choose a vendor that can facilitate change at scale across the enterprise. When businesses approach automation with this strategic mindset, they can improve their business performance on a profound scale.

The time is now

As we look to the future to build resilience and success post-pandemic, leaders must frame the benefits of intelligent automation at a big-picture level, with the goal of achieving new levels of business performance through digital workforces that combine automation and direct cooperation with human workers.

With intelligent automation, every facet and department of an organization can realize improvements, with much lower capital investment than traditional digitalization approaches. The potential for intelligent automation is vast and well past the early adoption stage, and an enormous amount of business value has yet to be discovered. Digital workforces are the new strategic tool for vastly improved business performance.

To find out how to get there, businesses need only to begin their intelligent automation transformation.

— Eric Tyree, Head of Research & AI, Blue Prism

_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credits: iStock- 1224643161}