Bringing Clarity to the Automation World
Blog by Francis Carden, OpenSpan Founder and GM-EMEA
Looking back over the course of my career in the technology industry, I have had great fun in exploring innovative and unconventional ways to use software and applications to address many different business challenges.
I love discussing technology and applying it to solve problems and make life better. I particularly enjoy having conversations with other people who are as passionate as I am about technology, so it’s no surprise that last week when I had the privilege to speak to two people from one of the world’s largest analyst firms about my favorite subjects, I was excited.
Over the last two years, thousands upon thousands of articles, white papers and industry briefs have been written about robotic automation. This topic can take on many forms, which is one of the reasons why there is a tremendous amount of confusion around what this technology is, what it can do and how it should be used. Ultimately and for clarity, in my terms, “automation” is “software that automates other software.”
Robotic Software.
Desktop Automation.
Human Augmented Automation.
Assisted Automation.
Robotic Process Automation (or RPA).
Enterprise Automation.
The list goes on…
I was interested in hearing directly from the analysts about their work with automation and some of their observations about the technology players in this software category. Both analysts had extensive knowledge about how companies are using automation… it was a lively conversation and there was a lot of light shed on the topic. Here are a few points to add some clarity around automation:
One of the biggest takeaways for me was that automation – no matter what the flavor – has become a widely accepted enterprise solution and is being used across the globe to help companies improve employee performance, deliver better customer service and increase efficiencies within the enterprise. Automation technology optimizes the human-to-computer interactions and can increase transaction accuracy while leveraging a company’s existing technology investments.
As far as the competitive landscape of automation technology providers, the spectrum is quite broad. Over the last five years many companies have stepped up to claim their share of the available market, with many different levels of core capabilities. There are providers that only do straight-through processing, taking a fully automatable set of activities and computerizing them so that a human doesn’t have perform this work. And there are others that can offer additional types of automation, typically focused to remedy challenges in specific business units such as accounting, procurement or claims processing.
When I think about automation from a straight-through processing perspective, I raise the question every time: Why automate only fully automatable activities? You see, OpenSpan has been helping companies automate billions of transactions over the last ten years, and in our experience, straight-through processing only gets your company so far down a path of operational efficiency. From our viewpoint, organizations have a much greater opportunity to impact the business when you take a hybrid approach to automation. That means not just using robotic automation to do straight-through processing, but leveraging desktop automation in combination with robotics to fully optimize how work is performed.
Desktop automation offers much richer capabilities for a company that is truly focused on driving efficiency and helping employees work smarter. OpenSpan Desktop Automation enables you to tap into your legacy applications and systems that reside on the employee’s desktop, and automate around the employee’s work. Are there steps in the workflow that can be automated so the employee doesn’t have to go hunt for data manually?
Sure, at some point there comes a time where the employee must make decisions about work – for example whether or not to approve payment for a healthcare claim or determining whether or not someone is approved for a mortgage – but these “decisioning” types of activities are prefaced by the employee performing manual tasks that, if you had desktop automation, you could let the computer does this work up until it comes time for the employee to make a decision about the activity. Automation like this often needs to be this dynamic and very real-time.
We encourage our customers to take a holistic view when considering automation. Having this bigger picture not only helps them see all of the intricate interdependencies across business units, the various technologies used, the process and business logic and so on. At first, it looks like a gigantic endeavor – there’s so much to consider and then they might second guess themselves for a moment.
At OpenSpan, we’ve helped leading FORTUNE 500 companies and FTSE 100 enterprises deploy automations that have led to truly substantial cost savings and operational success. You see, our approach to automation is, well, simpler. Our customers want to SIMPLIFY the way their employees process transactions. So our approach with all of our customers is to start simply. Identify 2-3 key business processes that can be automated. Perfect them so that the automations provide demonstrable value, and continue to build upon their success. This iterative approach has been used within companies that are deploying automations to as small 350 employees and it has been used to deploy in some of our largest implementations in excess of 30,000.
There are a number of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vendors out there who claim to do desktop automation. To some extent they can. While there are specific parts that can be automated using RPA techniques, there are limitations. OpenSpan’s differentiating technology helps you use automation to optimize the employee so that their workflows and required processes are the most efficient that they can be. No longer do they have to manually tab from one application to the next to find customer data. OpenSpan does that for them. All they have to do is follow the automated process and perform the required inputs at the specific time where the automation prompts them.
Sure, there are times when you will have the ability to take a fully automatable work process off the desktop entirely. That’s a good thing – it frees up that employee to perform more value-driven work. But desktop automation lets you architect a more comprehensive work process and streamline workflows that make employees more productive and efficient. With OpenSpan, you can at any time take those same Desktop Automations and move them to an RPA (server) model.
As you can tell, I’m passionate about automation technology. I believe that if every company used desktop automation, to some extent, the world would be a better place. (A much simpler, refined place). We have some great webinars that go into more detail about automation – both robotic and desktop – that can provide you more context. I would recommend starting with this one: http://www.openspan.com/about/knowledge-center/webinars/explore-the-world-of-robotic-automation-understanding-the-potential/
Also, if you’re interested in speaking with an expert about OpenSpan Automation, let us know by signing up here: www.openspan.com/demo.