By: Swapnil Pitale, Global Head for Automation, Intelligent RPA & Cognitive, LTI

‘Tis the season to be merry, sip on eggnog, eat cookies, and revel in the magic of Christmas. The holiday season is upon us! That time of the year when everyone’s busy going on their escapades or spending quality time with their family. But this “season” also symbolizes a season of awakening. Xmas time is when everything is in a hibernation mode till the new year kicks in. So why not use this time to jumpstart your automation initiative if you’ve not yet joined the “Intelligent Automation” bandwagon, or if you’ve been in an automation slumber for some time now.

Making bots your elves

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can prove to be the perfect starter to your organization’s automation festivities. It all starts with data – rather, the availability of the right kind of data. And herein lies the biggest challenge most of the organizations face: unstructured data = unusable data. So, who better than RPA + Digitization to set the record straight? Throw in some Advanced OCR and there’d be minimal human intervention required for mundane, repetitive tasks such as invoice matching, first-level auditing and so on. Make RPA bots your little elves to get those mundane tasks out of your way and give your employees a chance to focus on more cognitive tasks that involve reasoning and analysis to deliver your customers an unmatched, enhanced experience.

Notorious or nice – Identify the right candidates for automation

Just like Christmas, we don’t get to see the magic of automation overnight. It involves a lot of deliberation, in-depth process discoveries, where organizations go through their end-to-end activities and operations to understand which processes are fit for automation. The idea is to automate processes that are critical in the business value chain, repeatable & extensible, have high TCO and impact on the value chain, and would drastically reduce the turnaround time.

Celebrating the little victories

Starting your automation journey in small pockets, rejoicing your little victories and then replicating them towards bigger areas is the perfect way to automating your organization to glory. Hence, it’s imperative to laud the efforts of everyone who contributed in this entire initiative irrespective of the magnitude of their roles to encourage them to adopt the initiative with open arms.

The CoE dynamic

The augmented role of a Centre of Excellence or a global Automation Hub plays a critical role in driving decision-making and automation charters across multiple locations for an organization. It also proves instrumental in creating a squad of multi-skilled experts with knowledge & understanding in processes as well as various cutting-edge technologies. These prove to be the go-to people or “Automation Champions” who not only drive the initiative, but also help others look at automation as a welcome change.

Unwrapping the cognitive presents

Adding another layer of AI and cognitive technologies can further help you to get the much anticipated RoI out of your automation investment. Organizations use AI for data mining and making decision making easier, smarter and faster by interlacing people, systems and data together. And while you unwrap these cognitive gifts of AI, make sure to keep all the relevant stakeholders from business, IT and Ops in mind just as you would your loved ones during the gifting season.

Be ready in season and out of season: Ho Ho Ho, Automation on!

Everyday innovations and technological advances are fueling this “Automation First” era which is evidently becoming a driving force in enhancing organizations’ operational efficiencies and overall performance. No matter where organizations are in their lifecycle, they must commence and continue with their intelligent automation journey if they want to succeed in this digitally dynamic world. So, Mr.CIO, put that Santa hat on and get ready to ride that bot sleigh to the Digital North Pole!