Everything you need to know about Intelligent Automation in 30 Minutes

Hello everyone, thank you very much for joining me here today for the Combate webinar, Everything You Need to Know About Intelligent Automation. This webinar is a part of our ongoing Coffee Break webinar series where we take a closer look into each area of intelligent automation and more. I hope you and your families are well during these very difficult times. So before we get started, I would like to give you a very brief introduction about myself and why I'm here today with you talking about intelligent automation. My name is Sascha Guttura, and I'm the CEO of Conveydo, and we are intelligent automation experts serving clients from our offices in London, Frankfurt, and Sydney. I am very passionate about automation and technology and how it can help businesses run better. I'm now working in the field of workflow and process automation for around 13 years. I keep being amazed about these results businesses all over the place achieve with automation. To start off the webinar, I have a question for you. Is there a big push in your organization to explore these automation technologies already? Feel free to share your projects, experiences, and ideas in the chat panel with other delegates, and please feel free to ask questions in the Q&A section during the webinar. We will have time towards the end of today's webinar to go through all of your questions. One more note on housekeeping: we're recording the webinar, and we will be sharing a link to recording shortly after. So now, without further delay, let's see what's on our agenda for today. We will go through the basics of what intelligent automation is, see what tasks in your business might be most suitable for automation and where you could get started. Then we look at the few use cases and benefits of automation. Before we close today's session, we'll go through a quick demo combining a couple of intelligent automation capabilities to free up time for your workforce. And at the end of the webinar, we will have the chance to go through all the questions you might have. Okay, here at Convedo, we help companies all over the UK, in Europe, and since recently also in Australia to get the most from process automation, artificial intelligence, software robotics, and more, all with the goal to improve business processes and business outcomes. Convato has been started more than 10 years ago after I experienced firsthand the impressive benefits workflow and automation had at a global law firm I was working at that time. And to today at Convato, we are very passionate about business process management and process automation and what positive impact it can provide for organizations and communities. Therefore, we are working with market-leading technology vendors: Appian, Blue Prism, Celonis, OpenText, and IRIS to build innovative solutions. And just a bit of who we work with. We are proud to work with some of the most well-known companies. To mention a few, one is DHL, Swiss Airlines, Deutsche Bank, and of course many, many more. So, okay, let's get started. What is intelligent automation? It is without doubt one of the really big buzzwords of the current time. Companies are taking a strategic approach to intelligent automation and using it as an engine to power their business process in a number of areas. One definition I particularly like for intelligent automation is Automation is the interaction of people, AI, and RPA bots and other automation capabilities in the business process or workflow. So intelligent automation refers to a mix of technologies that allow companies to automate complex tasks at scale, which makes it very interesting for growing businesses and where businesses, as recently, have to restructure or have to operate suddenly with a reduced workforce. Course. It typically involves a combination of robotic process automation, uh, also called RPA, which are software robots mimicking repetitive tasks of, um, human and people, uh, such as entering data from spreadsheets to another, and, uh, artificial intelligence. The addition of advanced cognitive technologies like visual recognition, Natural Language Processing and semantic understanding enables intelligent automation to understand document content like customer information in email or contracts. When I speak with managers of large organizations, business owners, local government staff, healthcare decision-makers, and people in my private network, I hear a very mixed view on automation and AI. One common theme is actually fear and huge concern that automation is changing society too fast, the impact it has on jobs and potential loss of control of systems and data. And there are also people who do not like change in general. There's plenty of resistance with companies. Some of that has to do a lot with the first point I mentioned, but very often it has to do was a lack of knowledge what intelligent automation is and process optimization, all those things, and how it can be applied and used. But on the other side, I also hear a lot of optimism. People can see the opportunity of what automation as a whole, or just a few elements of automation, can bring to the organization and to them personally. And especially in recent weeks, we see very good news about lots of projects helping the NHS and financial services with RPA, which helps a lot to portray a better image going forward. And there are plenty of reasons why companies small and large are looking into automation in the first place. And when reflecting on the current global coronavirus crisis, which had an impact on almost every business globally, I think we have to look at it from 3 different sides. Pre-COVID, I see the following— over the years, actually, already— customer expectations are constantly expanding. Today's very connected customers expect very accurate, instant responses on their preferred channels. And really all that 24/7. They increasingly prefer natural unstructured communication types like email, messaging, or social media. We all know that we, we can't really stop using our little devices. High on the agenda has been very much on improving customer experience, implementation of modern platforms and systems that can cope with huge volumes of physical and digital data and communication and can process customer queries quickly and accurately. Now, with the global pandemic on us, which has changed many industries completely, businesses are now looking into ways to change their business model quickly. Time to market for new business ideas becomes very important. So lots of businesses are pivoting at the moment. Cope was a surge in requests due to the crisis. We all know about the demand on health services, financial services, and regional and local governments, all these loans processing and administration, administrative overhead, or just keep the business operations in motion and cope with the reduced workforce. Lots of people are on, on furlough, for example. And business have to keep, keep going as much as possible. And looking into the future, post-COVID, we'll see a continued need and desire to get more done with less resources, less budget, and less time, and do things much better within the business to keep up with competition, maybe emerging with crazy speed from the current crisis. So we will see more automation projects getting started, implement Building structures to overcome the next crisis and build a culture for fundamental change in agility. So these are very, very important points going forward. I personally believe that everyone should do meaningful work, and we set out to help companies succeed with process automation by getting rid of the inefficiencies and repetitive tasks in mainly the back offices. So in a nutshell, when we talk about intelligent automation, we are combining business process management, chatbots and workflow, AI, machine learning and optical character recognition, and a powerful digital robotic workforce to help us out in many, many places. So all that to automate all the manual inefficient tasks of employees and connect all the different systems you might have in your organization. We do that with very powerful integration capabilities. I will go into a bit of depth into each of these areas so you can see what might relate the most to your current needs and pains in your department or your organization. So first up is workflow and task automation. We see a wider adoption of workflow and task automation tools already, as it's the first step in the digitalization of processes for most companies. But it goes much further, orchestrating actions across users like incidents, service requests, etc. The power of modern platforms allows us to build enterprise-grade workflow and task automation solutions with low-code, so we can get things done much quicker than with traditional development of business applications. So next up is Robotic Process Automation. RPA is getting plenty of attention right now. There's a huge surge in requests to in some areas. For example, the automation of coronavirus loans to businesses globally, and even to a point that the US government is even banning RPA because it performs too fast, too well for the backend systems on the government side. Anyway, robotic process automation is the automation of business processes in which software performs tasks usually done by your staff and all the tasks that can be codified by computers. And therefore, RPA supports staff with a lot of their repetitive tasks: creating reports, uploading data, or for example, doing high-volume manual work in SAP. So there's plenty of use cases you can you can benefit from RPA within your organization. Process Mining. What is Process Mining? Process Mining is an analytical discipline for discovering and monitoring and improving all your processes by extracting that knowledge from your processes from event logs, which are already stored in all your information systems. For example, your workflow system where you have data stored, who has done what with your specific processes. So that can apply to all different systems in your organization. So where can it help you specifically? In our modern digital economy, companies require flexible processes to be competitive. So that flexibility only comes through a deep understanding of how things are working and where shifts are possible. So once you have connected all your data sources, Process Mining will tell you exactly how your processes are running. And as we covered earlier, so that's really based on the facts, based on the data in your, in your logs. Next up, are API Gateway and integrations. We covered earlier that intelligent automation is most useful when combining different intelligent technologies together. So, so that will allow you get the biggest benefit, and that also means that you have to make sure you can connect to your existing enterprise data, your systems, and your web services. And for all of this, it requires a very powerful modern platform with integration capabilities. So when you look out for a new system, make sure that is covered very, very well. When you think of robots and process systems, they are running pretty much based on rules, and they need to use use good data to determine what to do next. How does a robot in your process systems get that information? That is the time when Intelligent Document Processing comes into play. Intelligent Document Processing automates the processing of data contained in documents, for example, invoices and contracts, emails, all sorts of documents, understanding what the document is about, what information it contains, extracting that information, and turns unstructured data into structured data, which is what we can then work with in our processes or in our automation systems. Last year, we have launched our Convido Intelligent Capture Cloud, which is a fully cloud-based intelligent capture platform which extracts that valuable information within these documents and presents it back to any system in a structured format. As a SaaS platform, it can connect in any system, any platform, with connectors already available for Appian and Blue Prism, and as well as many are work in progress. And then there's decision management. Decision Management or Business Rules capabilities help you formalize business policies, requirements, terms and conditions, and then execute them in an automated fashion. Decision Management usually sits separate to your workflow system, so it allows your business users to own and manage these rules. So for faster development and easier maintenance. It enables your teams in your organization to respond more rapidly to changing conditions like we see, for example, currently with COVID-19. So now we are coming to AI machine learning. We mentioned very early on, this is one of the key parts of intelligent automation. AI, as you can imagine, has a very wide spectrum of capabilities, but in a nutshell, all these Capabilities and technologies perform tasks that previously required human intelligence, and those things are, for example, extracting meaning from images, text, or speech, or looking at full documents, detecting patterns, and then based on that, making recommendations, or looking at data and making predictions and deriving meaningful decisions from that. So AI also includes all the areas of machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing, where we then already talking about as well about chatbots making customer communication much, much easier. So combining that with AI and machine learning will improve processes in those areas, for example. So let's move on to analytics and process intelligence. It is a bit related to process mining, what we have covered earlier, but instead of looking at the overall event data of your processes, we're looking mainly here into specific processes and applications within an organization. So it will tell us the specific process-related metrics which are important to our team, important to our people, and then we can take some insights and information from that and maybe improve these processes. So it will help us immediately if we are not meeting specific process SLAs. And why a specific customer needs assistance. And it also helps us to identify immediate bottlenecks in specific processes, not in the bigger organizational sense. And helps us to not miss any deadlines and all that stuff. So if we have that analytics component and Process Intelligence in place, so we have a much better visibility of what is going on in our processes and applications. After the webinar, you might think, great, sounds all very good, let's get started. So what process can we look at and look out for in our organizations? For example, in the IT departments or business departments, in the, in the back offices. One question I always like to start an automation conversation with is basically what sort of tasks and steps in the processes are users spending the time doing manually. A key part for automation is also to free up your workers to do more valuable activities in the business. And there are lots of things in the business you can look at, and you, you probably think about already thousands of things you're doing again and again and you don't really like. So, so those Little things are very often a good starting point for discussion. And also look out for tasks that are done in huge volumes and of a very repetitive nature. So how can you really increase your efficiency, and in some cases even up to 90%? So there are plenty of benefits in automation. So here are a few benefits I have listed, and it's not just for efficiency gains. So one big part is the greater accuracy by automating manual error-prone processes. So you can— you don't have any round trips within your organization to to fix things. So the other big thing is cost reduction. By automating repetitive and manual tasks can result in a huge cost saving, allowing companies to concentrate their spending more on their, on their human talent instead of spending it into some of the really boring and mundane tasks. So yeah, looking after your talent will give you certainly bigger value. So you can benefit from faster response time. So if you process information much quicker in your systems, it will result in happier customers. So just thinking about processing all these loans currently, time is of an essence. So you will definitely produce more satisfied customers if you get stuff through the system. So yeah, that also involves in a better customer experience. And by adding more intelligent automation capabilities, it can even allow you to communicate with your customers 24/7. We just mentioned very briefly chatbots. By bringing all these things in, you can definitely improve customer experience. By applying all these intelligent document processing capabilities, you can unlock huge value from your data. You can understand that data better, you can use it, and therefore improve your processes overall. You can make predictions with machine learning and Yeah, if you combine all these things, you will achieve huge efficiency gains. So as we have earlier covered, best results in intelligent automation are achieved by combining or connecting with these multiple intelligent automation disciplines. In the upcoming demonstration, we connect RPA with AI and more so with a bit of computer vision capability which extracts valuable information from unstructured data sources. So this is actually our Intelligent Capture Cloud I mentioned earlier. So in this case, an invoice, a very regular use case for automation in finance departments, will be, will be automated and will be put into a legacy finance system. So only with structured data, the robot or the digital workforce can work very well with the information provided in the subsequent steps. So let's have a look.

Here we have a very typical scenario. We will receive invoices as usual in our email inbox. Here you can see it is a standard invoice you might receive on a daily basis. In your organization. In the background, you can see the RPA tool Blue Prism. Blue Prism is a market leader in robotic process automation, and we use it for many of our client projects. It runs through some steps to open and log into a simple finance system to demonstrate a dedicated or legacy finance application. Credentials will be automatically passed in from a secure credential store. In Blue Prism, we have defined the steps the robot needs to run to process the invoices automatically like a person would do, from receiving it into Outlook to storing the information in the finance system. So you see the robot turns back to processing emails in Outlook. You can see it picks up one email after another and reads in the PDF. And all this is happening directly in Outlook and the finance system, and not via any APIs or some form of integration. I usually try to talk about robots as digital workers. It is, yeah, it's how we call it. The phrase "bot" alienates people a bit too much. So here the robot enters information into our sample finance application related to the the first invoices. So the bot keeps running through it until it has completed all the invoices, a process which took over just a few seconds instead of minutes. And yeah, so this is basically how it works. Thank you for watching the little demo.