The proliferation of social media, email, mobile technologies and so much more has massively disrupted the marketing, PR & advertising sector. While the creative-driven era of advertising and marketing, so ardently brought to life by cultural touchstone Mad Men, may be long gone, a new technology-driven one has emerged. In order to ensure they are prepared to guide clients through an increasingly complex and challenging economic environment, marketing agencies are eagerly embracing digital transformation as a path towards continued growth and longevity. 

Industry titan Dentsu is no different. In a 2019 internal report, Head of the Japanese Business, Hiroshi Igarashi and Head of the International Business, DAN CEO, Tim Andree shared how digital transformation was enabling the companies transition from “Advertising Agency” to a “business producing company.”

“The DAN executive team recognize that continual innovation will strengthen our specialties, allowing us to become a high performing organization that is focused on relentlessly delivering value for our clients,” Tim Andree explained.

Over the past 4-5 years, Dentsu has deployed a constellation of robotic process automation (RPA), Intelligent Automation (IA) and other cutting-edge digital technologies to drive transformational efforts. In 2017, it formalized this approach by creating an eight-year road map (2017 to 2025) to infuse automation into Dentsu’s business DNA. 

To spearhead these efforts, the company launched the Dentsu Aegis Automation Centre of Expertise (CoE). According to a recent Forbes article, this COE has embraced 2 major goals”

• Identify and build bots for enterprise-level automation opportunities
• Create and champion an army of citizen developers to accelerate front line innovation  

As Max Cheprasov, Chief Automation Officer for Dentsu Aegis Americas, commented in a 2020 Business Chief piece, “today, we have over 400 people engaged with the CoE as part of our global community of automation champions and experts. But, as far as I'm concerned, this is still only the beginning; the future of automation should be placed in the hands of every single employee.”

Scalable RPA in Action

In early 2020, the Denstu’s automation CoE was presented with a massive challenge. The business needed to extract and migrate data from upwards of 2.8 million invoices and other financial records in just six weeks, a project that would normally take at least 67 full-time employees a year to do. 

Instead of hiring 400 temporary workers and hoping for the best, Dentsu partnered with UiPath to automate 17 different workflows and deploy 60 unattended robots to handle the leg work. As a result, they not only completed the project on time and on budget, but also reduced processing time for each transaction by 90% from 3 minutes to just 18 seconds. 

An AI-Powered Virtual Assistant for Every Worker

Compared to many others in the industry, Dentsu has been quite open about its future automation plans: an RPA bot for every worker. As  Max Cheprasov summarized later on in the aforementioned Business Chief article, “Traditional operational workflows are no longer sustainable; the workforce is changing rapidly, yet very few global companies are ready to manage their workforce with people, bots and AI working side by side.”

In the near-future, artificial intelligence (AI) can’t come close to replicating or competing with human intelligence. However, what it can do is make our lives easier, especially in the workplace, by automating burdensome, administrative tasks. By striving to equip all  60K+ employees with their own virtual assistant, Dentsu will not only increase operational efficiency and effectiveness, but usher in a new era of user-driven innovation. 

Scalable RPA & Intelligent Automation Live

The key for global corporate enterprise is to benefit from the collective intelligence presented by RPA and cognitive technologies along with human workers. Only by having technology combine with human talent can global corporate enterprise achieve scalable intelligent automation. And only with scalable intelligent automation enterprise resiliency be realized.

 

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Accelerating the RFP Process

Another formerly manual undertaking the automation CoE reimagined was the request for proposal (RFP). In the past, teams could spend weeks completing these 50+ page documents despite the fact that the questions on each are fairly standard and often overlap. 

In an effort to reduce the time it takes to complete RFPs, they partnered with workflow automation platform Catalytic to develop and deploy a new AI application to automatically fill out standard questions. As a result, the RFP completion process only takes a matter of minutes vs. weeks.