Being recession ready: Levering intelligent automation to instil operational resilience

The ‘new normal’. A time where the scale of shift from office working to remoting working has been monumental and technology barriers have been replaced with rapid, scalable digital transformation. Remote working has shown productivity gains; digital transformation is rapidly attained in months or even days and the shift from physical to virtual services can be achieved seamlessly.

Though the pandemic did not trigger these shifts above to virtual domains, it certainly increased the speed of adoption and adaptation so that they became the new normal, and it is clear that businesses need to rethink new ways of working.

Many businesses are experiencing heightened economic uncertainty, business models are disrupted, and the pressure is felt on the bottom line. New economic challenges require innovative solution than previous economic downturns.

This means that businesses will need to increase their market share to have a competitive advantage and achieve profitability. In this downturn, a significant business shift is occurring. Companies that are carefully shaping their operations are capturing this disproportionate share. The race is on for who will be able to meet the changing demands of the consumer, run an effective supply chain and ensure business continuity.

All this will require pragmatic and innovative thinking such as building on Intelligent Automation (IA) capability. IA combines Robotics Process Automation with Data and Machine Learning technologies to identify, visualise, automate non-routine tasks and processes, which require a certain level of thought from the front end to the back end of your business without any human intervention.

Given the changed environment, how can businesses now leverage IA differently?

Automation is an integral part of digital transformation. Not only does it guarantee efficiency but more importantly operational resilience, that is business continuity to ensure survival without compromising on critical services or customer experience. Thus, automation enables transformation of businesses to compete in the new normal whilst minimising financial risk.

Where do I start in my automation journey?

IA begins with businesses being able to understand what their critical services are, customer outcomes, as well as regulatory license obligations. Far too often these necessities are siloed across IT, security, legal, finance, HR, customer service and other lines of businesses functions and need to be joined up.

• SMART Analytics is a product of IA which leverages common data models, advanced analytics and machine learning modelling techniques via throughput (data coming in through the automation tool) to join up these siloes. A business can then identify processes, resource or systems that have a material impact (including identifying unknown relationships) on their organisation, monitor their customer journeys (incl. understanding their behaviours) and trigger automated workflow.

This new data which can be extracted and validated can generate actionable insight with risk-informed decisions and automate triggering capability integrated across business functions to minimise downstream and upstream impact. This will enable the business to:

• Increase agility to respond to an external event within days rather than weeks
• Keep the promise to the customer that it can deliver a product or service the way it set to do
• Continue to provide products and services in the middle of a downturn [through all stages of the economic lifecycle]
• Automate steps that are not additive to the process resiliently as possible
• Minimise operating cost
• Meet industry regulations

Refocus your purpose and responsibility as an organisation or business

You’ve got no time to waste, the pace of change is continuing to increase. Today’s environment grants the ideal conditions to re-focus your digital infrastructure provision to readily leverage automation capability and do more.

Capgemini Invent have strategic partnerships with an ecosystem of leading automation vendors to help our clients utilise the right mix of intelligent and SMART technologies pertinent to specific objectives .

Pardeep Singh Ghuman

Management Consultant, Analytics & AI