Why Do Businesses Need to Adopt the Holistic Automation (RPA+AI) Approach in 2021?

Organizations are increasingly relying on advanced automation technologies to cut down operational costs and improve efficiency. The early adopters of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are already enjoying an edge by realizing quick wins such as improved process turnaround time and reduced human errors and interventions. But it has also become evident that when these technologies are applied in silos, businesses cannot achieve a sustainable long-term return.

Siloed automation may deliver immediate benefits, including reduced operational costs, increased productivity, and compliance but fail to deliver the expected return on investment in the long run. A holistic automation approach or Hyperautomation is likely to be the only way forward to achieve sustained long-term value.

Look at what leading industry analysts predict:

"… far more than just robotic process automation (RPA) is needed to deliver resilient operational excellence. Organizations are shifting, or have shifted, to consume more impactful integrated hyperautomation technologies….," as per Gartner, Predicts 2021: Accelerate Results Beyond RPA to Hyperautomation. Gartner has coined the term – Hyperautomation; it is about leveraging a set of complementary automation tools such as RPA, AI, BPM, and other automation tools in conjunction.

Enterprises that adopt a holistic automation approach achieve significantly higher benefits than their peers, based on the inputs collected from several organizations as part of Everest Group's Enterprise Intelligent Automation Pinnacle Model Assessment. The below image presents extremely useful insights on how businesses can benefit from using a holistic automation approach vs. siloed automation.

Join Nividous' webinar featuring Everest Group on "Moving Away from Automation Silos" to discover best practices for adopting a holistic automation approach and success stories.

Key considerations to keep in mind while adapting to a holistic automation approach:

Make automation an integral part of your business goals: A piecemeal approach to embedding automation technologies will not yield the desired outcome. Re-create your business models making automation an integral part of your operations. Tightly aligning your automation goals with your overall digital transformation strategy can go a long way.

Put your human workforce at the core: Invest in automation tools that allow effective work collaboration between your digital and human workforce. Software robots are here to stay but only to augment your human workforce and not replace them. It is also important to train your employees for new skill sets as they try and adapt to automation tools. They are going to be an integral part of your overall digital transformation journey.

Choose the right technology partner:

Collaborate with technology vendors that can offer native automation capabilities vs. those who extensively rely on third-party platforms to deliver advanced intelligent automation capabilities. Reliance on third-party integrations to achieve holistic automation can be comparatively expensive in the long run.

Here is an example of how to effectively leverage a holistic automation approach based on the success story of a leading manufacturer. The company automated its manual and time-intensive invoice process using the Nividous intelligent business automation platform.

• Nividous Bots with native artificial intelligence capabilities read and understand data from different types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents.
• The Bots present the mined data for human review using an intuitive interface allowing effective Human-Bot governance and significantly accelerating approvals.
• Once approved, the Bots key in the data into SAP ERP.

This automation enabled a 90% reduction in process turnaround time, savings of over 1000 staff-hours, and a 100% reduction in manual human errors. Read the complete success story of intelligent invoice automation.

Businesses will continue to evolve rapidly as the adoption of automation technologies accelerate, but those who keep a holistic approach at the center of achieving their automation goals will thrive by achieving a competitive edge. Get in touch with the Nividous team at contactus@nividous.com if you wish to expedite your automation projects.

Author: Shailee Parikh