Cognitive RPA is essential for a continuous automation framework

Add bookmark

Sudhir Sen
04/13/2018

Sudhir Sen, Products Head of JiffyRPA explains about Option3’s Automate, Analyze, Accelerate method to implement a continuous automation framework through Cognitive RPA

After spending the last few years having been heavily involved in RPA, we wanted to ensure that automation is not reliant on just rules and could transform the way we approach it. We wanted to make it as human-like as possible by adding intelligence and decision-making capabilities. The reason was that commonly used automation platforms were still reliant on manual effort or intervention at some stage, which made it limit what we could achieve with it. Mistakes were often made while setting up automation, and with mistakes comes lost opportunities and lost results. Automation was expected to be the magic pill, but this was never going to be the case unless automation could evolve beyond what it could merely achieve. And thus, our approach towards Intelligent Automation was born – Automate, Analyze, Accelerate.

Automate more with less

Common approaches to automation mostly lead to automating for the sake of automation. It was all about reducing time and manual effort while speeding up the process. But where does it tie in with the business objectives and goals of an organization? Most automation solutions were approached from a short-term solution angle, a somewhat tactical necessity. In doing so, they were failing to leverage the actual improvements to be brought about in business. We proved through our customers how it could be a strategic asset. Jiffy’s cognitive capabilities allowed them to get more out of automation with very little effort. Automating complicated process that were previously considered as too ineffective to be automated became a possibility—with self-learning cognitive bots that could apply machine learning and artificial intelligence along with natural language processing. It resulted in being able to capture unstructured data, deeper understanding of processes being automated and the ability to take human-like decisions.

Intelligent automation

Rather than spending large volumes on bot licenses, and investing in complicated infrastructure to run the bots, we also concentrated on the ability to scale according to the load requirements where the bot is smart enough to understand by itself how to operate without affecting the end result. The cognitive capabilities also afforded our customers to reduce manual intervention that came out of rule-based automation—where each change or exception in the process required manual effort to give more training data to the bot. Another challenge in automation was the need to draw custom frameworks based on the industry or the domain or the vertical. This meant most automation tools were never really cut out to be applied seamlessly across any workflow. By providing domain-specific components, the Jiffy platform could be readily leveraged across any domains—Finance and Accounting, Human Resources, IT Services, Business Process Management and more. It eased a major pain point for businesses looking to automate multiple processes across different verticals.

Analyzing opportunities

A key driver of business growth is analytics slowly increasing in adoption by organizations invested in RPA. Reporting and providing metrics of automated processes is just one part. It still requires manual effort to take intelligent decisions and optimize processes based on available data. We believed that by adding a cognitive engine that can provide reporting and analytics and suggest relevant optimizations to improve further—enterprises could easily implement a continuous automation framework with Process Automation, Reporting Automation, and Analytics. The Jiffy Analytics engine calls out bottlenecks in the process and further highlights opportunities that could enhance the outcome of automation.

This meant our customers could react faster and scale as required, taking advantage of more opportunities.

Accelerating outcomes

Providing a continuous automation framework—with cognitive RPA and analytics is allowing enterprises to take automation to the next level. As businesses grow and expand, the volumes of processes vary and become dynamic in nature. Business transformation in Industry 4.0 needs to be very agile so as to not get caught behind times and waiting for your competition to slip. In such a demanding environment, automation needs to be able to set the pace in which it seamlessly fits into your business—right from reducing turn-around-times and increasing productivity, to becoming a strategic value addition by complementing your business objectives.