I was fascinated reading the insights from Capgemini’s new edition of #innovation publication, Data-powered Innovation Review – Wave VI.

Data makes us collaborate to better understand and act on market trends, consumer behavior, and business performance.

AI augments our abilities by helping us analyze vast amounts of data, make better predictions, and automate routine tasks.

Then there’s the continuous quest to activate data for #sustainability and building a better #society.

Download the report now and deep-dive into the fascinating world of data-powered innovation, where the possibilities are as vast and diverse as the coral reefs of the ocean.

Capgemini Ventures was featured in Le Point’s “Palmarès des inventeurs”, as our very own Dany Tello was a member of the jury for the second year.

They selected 100 French startups in quantum, AI, Climate Tech, Cybersecurity, Med/BioTech, AgriTech, SpaceTech, Web3… that are considered promising in 2023 and will change people’s lives for good.

Great to see (again) that Capgemini is collaborating with many in this list (PROMÉTHÉE Earth Intelligence, Ascendance Flight Technologies, WhiteLab Genomics, Yogosha, etc.).
 
We will continue to play our role in identifying tomorrow’s champions and being their growth and co-innovation partners to impact industries and societies at scale.

Telecom operators are looking for a cost-effective operational solution to provide #5G connectivity to enterprises.

Network slicing can deliver the needed QoS & security while providing simplified operations and at the scale of cloud.

Working with Telefonica, we at Capgemini have designed and implemented a proof-of-concept for an end-to-end network slicing solution entirely provisioned and managed from the cloud together with partners like Microsoft.

Intel Corporation provided on-prem infrastructure for virtualized baseband. We worked with Ciena / Blueplanet, Juniper Networks, and Casa Systems, Inc. to build this first of its kind multi-vendor disaggregated network slicing solution that softwarizes the network as much as possible and simplifies the operations, orchestrating the entire solution from cloud.

Together, we’ve shown that it’s possible to build a broad ecosystem that can overcome the challenges of network slicing using end-to-end automation. The goal was to build pre-integrated network blueprints that can significantly reduce the cost of new network planning, design, and test cycles.

Read our point of view, 7 lessons from our network slicing journey.

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The biggest competitive advantage over other insurers? Flexibility.

We define Flexibility of an application as “readily capable to adapt to new, different, or changing requirements.” In a world that is rapidly changing, it’s the key competitive advantage to seize opportunities and overcome challenges. For an organization to be nimble and agile, its technology must be Flexible. Moving core insurance platforms to the cloud can help, and Guidewire Cloud does just that.

The criticality of flexibility

Business is changing, and the insurance industry is not immune to that change. Market dynamics are driving those changes:

• Pressure on profitable growth while overcoming climate change, inflation, increasing supply chain costs, geopolitics, and the aftereffects of the pandemic
• A volatile regulatory landscape around financial solvency requirements, cyber security, data privacy, artificial intelligence, climate change, and consumer protection
• Evolving customer expectations around personalization, human empathy, self-service capabilities, and enhanced digital and omnichannel experiences
• Increased competition and disruption from insurance startups, tech companies, non-insurance competitors, and embedded distribution models

With flexibility in their underlying architecture, insurers can adapt to change. New data sources may emerge to assess and price risk better, to make more informed underwriting decisions, and to increase automation across both underwriting and claims processing. New partnerships may develop where integration of applications, solutions, and technology needs to occur quickly, to add business value through additional capabilities.

Resetting your digital core to enable flexibility

Modernized self-managed core systems are often significant upgrades on legacy systems. However, their inherent architecture coupled with how insurers implemented them inhibits flexibility. Insurers typically implement an on-premises core system that is saddled with customization with limited thought around experience, digital capabilities, data capabilities, and process efficiency. The architecture itself is not nimble enough to add integrations and new functionality at speed and scale. So, how can insurers reset their path to value realization?

The best solution is to work alongside an experienced transformation partner who is able to give the strategic insight necessary to leverage cloud to get the flexibility that legacy and self-managed systems lack. This gives insurers a seamless transformation while receiving the best industry advice available. Consulting with expert opinion also builds collaboration in the market. When considering this transformation, it’s vital to ensure you have the right strategy in place first.

Cloud architecture has several key advantages: scalability, speed to market, and extensibility. It is the latter quality that enables and unlocks business value—the ability to add new capabilities through development on the cloud, regular updates from the software provider, and an ecosystem of strategic partners. The self-managed solution simply doesn’t have the same extensibility as a cloud-architected solution does.

The value proposition of Guidewire Cloud—recentering your transformation

Consequently, the shift to cloud-native services is no longer a question of IF, it’s a question of WHEN. Moving to a service like Guidewire Cloud will enable organizations to invest in differentiating capabilities that add business value instead of putting dollars into the core transactional systems. Guidewire has made massive investments in Guidewire Cloud and continues to push new features around content, application, and infrastructure multiple times a year. These features power a modern, reliable digital core so insurers can focus on capabilities that deliver engaging, efficient, and easy experiences to grow their business.

It’s an often-overused term, but Guidewire Cloud “future-proofs” your core system. It sets the foundation for you to enable future capabilities and answers the following questions:

• How might you enable a leading customer and employee experience?
• How might you reduce underwriting and claims cycle times?
• How might you enable next generation data and insights?
• How might you enable digital capabilities?
• How might you enable an ecosystem?

The way to maximize investment in a cloud service such as Guidewire Cloud is to leverage an experienced partner with not only the skills needed to implement core systems but also the experience in implementing cloud-based platforms using a SaaS model. Capgemini can uniquely transition insurers to Guidewire Cloud and optimize the core platform, all while providing the transformation architecture to ensure customers reach their transformational aspirations. By transitioning to Guidewire Cloud and externalizing custom functionality outside of insurance core systems, insurers will reduce complexity, limit the cost to run their transactional systems, and enable the extensibility needed to remain flexible. Capgemini, with flexibility powered by Guidewire Cloud, can equip insurers with the ability to adapt to change, quickly and nimbly, without the stress of losing focus on other priorities.

So honored to sign this agreement with Antonio Franchi and European Space Agency – ESA, and Capgemini!

The #5GOverSatellite is the convergence of terrestrial and satellite networks in different orbits to ensure a seamless connectivity. This solution extends the coverage of #5G to areas which are not served by terrestrial networks by providing remote access to various used communication technologies and offering:

• low latency,
• high availability,
• enhanced security.

By interconnecting our #5GLab in Paris with the 5G/6G Hub of the @european-space-agency located in the UK, via different types of connections, including satellite connectivity, we’ve created “5G bubbles” of a few kilometers to provide remote access to hosted applications.
This collaboration between our teams on hybrid terrestrial and #spatial connectivity opens up new perspectives and functions for secluded or remote areas.

Seamlessly connecting your people, processes, and data helps to eliminate friction across your organization, breaking down silos to drive frictionless, connected finance operations.

Breaking down silos and integrating your finance and accounting (F&A) processes is crucial for driving enhanced business outcomes.

But what causes this barrier between teams – and how can you eliminate them to drive the Frictionless Enterprise?

A lack of common goals and information flow drives siloization

Different departments within the F&A function and the wider enterprise have always required different resources and levels of expertise. However, this often leads to different teams or departments (e.g., payments or HR) only focusing on their own goals, without considering how they can drive the overarching business strategy of their organization.

On top of this, most organizations suffer from a lack of structure created by the market’s shift towards specialization of role. Departments are often filled with people dedicated to just one role, such as queries management or payments, who are not encouraged to interact with the wider function or organization they operate in.

And the challenges don’t stop here.

Leveraging different supporting tools, technologies, and structures across F&A teams can further fragment an already extremely disconnected finance department. Take the record-to-analyze (R2A) process, for example. Its main task is to ensure all financial transactions and data across the organization are properly reflected in your accounting system, giving you a reliable view of your finances at month end. Your R2A teams will struggle to analyze data coming out of functions such order-to-cash (O2C) and procure-to-pay (P2P) that have their own, specialized tools to manage purchase orders and process invoices.

All of these factors create silos in your organization – but how do you eliminate them?

Eliminating silos through integrating your people and data

The obvious solution is to integrate your people effectively. To do this requires common business goals to be clarified and communicated clearly to your teams. Establishing the use of common collaboration tools across all your departments to exchange messages and data efficiently, transparently, and at speed can significantly improve accelerate your efforts.

Data coming out of your finance function is the foundation for sales, planning, and marketing activities. Breaking down silos requires data to be integrated across your teams and departments, leveraging the right technology to ensure data coming from different sources is orchestrated properly.

In conclusion, silos hinder the flow of information and data between departments. Overcoming this challenge requires you to seamlessly connect your people and processes, while also being able to address and mitigate every point of friction in your operations.

To learn how Capgemini’s AI.Controllership solution integrates with your systems and infuses AI into your processes to break down silos and give you more time to focus on insights, analytics, and your business partners, contact: malgorzata.bateup@capgemini.com

Why connectivity in autonomous vehicles and robots matters

Across industries, big bets are being placed on business models that leverage autonomous vehicles and robots. The trend seems irreversible – from fleets of drones in our skies to deliver goods, autonomous cars on our roads, driverless trains on our railways, and robots in our factories and warehouses.

It is not hard to see why – the potential economic and operational benefits are huge. According to Pedro Pacheco, senior director analyst at Gartner, “Autonomous drones offer a lower cost per mile and higher speed than vans in last-mile deliveries. When they deliver parcels, their operational costs are at least 70% lower than a van delivery service.”

While  most focus is rightly placed on AI to power autonomous decision making, connectivity is often overlooked. Yet connectivity unleashes the potential of autonomous vehicles and robots to receive information about their environment, acting like a second brain. In this blog, I will focus on connectivity’s role in deploying autonomous mobility solutions and explore this in both a non-safety and safety-critical context.

The four dimensions of the engineering challenges of autonomous mobility

While the range of application areas varies, from a technological perspective, four primary dimensions shape the nature of the engineering challenges of autonomous vehicles and robots:  

• Mobility scenarios context: the diversity of mobility scenarios, for example weather conditions, road/premise characteristics, or driving rules
• Vehicle or robot context: the complexity of the architecture and software, the volumes of data generated and managed, and the computing power close to the real-time processing, acceptance, and human interaction with the autonomous system
• Communication context: Interaction with the environment, for instance other vehicles, local infrastructure, edge, cloud; requires executing real-time information from different sources or updating software over the air
• Regulation and standards: A safety-critical system must comply with local regulations and converge on standards to accelerate the deployment of common tools and processes.

Safety-critical applications and connectivity

Imagine an autonomous shuttle crossing a complex intersection. Since the shuttle’s sensors cannot provide coverage of the whole intersection and because the intersection is not a completely controlled environment, random events, such as a cat crossing the intersection, could be missed.

Installing a camera and lidar in areas not covered by the shuttle’s sensors would make it possible to detect unreported work, an accident that has just occurred, or an object falling from a vehicle – The perception system makes it possible to detect and flag such situations.

The question then becomes: “How can we take this into account?” The information must be processed and sent to the shuttle as soon as possible to be considered in the trajectory planning to stop, decelerate, or direct the trajectory toward a safe lane. For this, connectivity is key. In this case, we need an offboard intelligence system installed in the infrastructure with vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

In other complex situations, such as a highway with a high-speed bend, an offboard perception system could be installed on the bend. The perception system comprises sensors, including cameras, lidar, or radar equipped with software breaks. As the embedded perception in the vehicle is not sufficient to interpret all the hidden events, a cloud-based intelligence can serve as a second brain to interpret the scene.

REMOTIS is a remote intelligent autonomous transport system, a real-time self-driving prototype managed by a remote server through 5G communication. Remotis is a disruptive concept for connected vehicles that makes possible the demonstration of new distributed architecture and collaborative services and functions based on 5G technology.

Even better, a fusion of the onboard and offboard perception can help to anticipate dangerous situations or support autonomous vehicles that are unable to stop safely. Here, 5G technology can be useful regarding the latency and volume of data to be transported between the embedded system on the vehicle and the nearby infrastructure / cloud.

Mercedes Benz, at the forefront of technology in the large-scale deployment of the ADAS and AD systems, has recently been granted first authorizations to market ADAS level 3 (semi-autonomous driving) in Europe and the US! Mercedes team said “Car-to-X technologies enable a completely new form of information exchange.”

The E- and S-Class is already equipped for the next step: for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. Use cases are aiming to inform if the crossing is blocked or in case of a poor visibility…the information passes through a secure server before being shared. The volume of information becomes more important when the infrastructure participates in the perception. Thus, the Federal State of Hesse in Germany became the first region to deploy a traffic light and vehicle communication with warning functions, offering services participating in the protection of drivers, pedestrians but also maintenance workers!

Another example of Safety-critical application is Automated Valet Parking, where the connectivity is mandatory to ensure and secure the service. Bosch Said: “Parking your car yourself is a thing of the past!”. The Automated Valet Parking system generally uses a combination of wireless communication based on the vehicle communication standard (DSRC) and cellular communication dedicated to vehicles (C-V2X).

However, parking a car automatically from a drop off zone in the parking garage to a free place require a continuous collaboration between the vehicle and the infrastructure. The complexity of the maneuvers and the distance between the vehicle and a possible obstacle such as a child emerging from an area outside the field of vision of the onboard system implies that the processing and communication chain must be less than 100 ms to allow the vehicle to brake on obstacles at 1 m. The network must be secure and providing uninterrupted service throughout the parking procedure.

Non-safety critical applications and connectivity

Consider the case of a maintenance application. Pipelines transporting all fluid types, such as oil, gas, and water, often degrade over time. Monitoring and repair can be challenging, especially as these pipelines run across large geographies and often remote areas. Imagine a vehicle with shape/dimensions adapted to this context, moving autonomously and equipped with sensors supervising the ducts and detecting anomalies. This information must be communicated in real time, and/or the data must be unloaded from time to time due to limited storage capacities on the vehicle. Connectivity can ensure continuity of service and high performance. The connectivity solution must be adapted to situations where coverage via a 5G network, for example, is unavailable. A road-side unit ensuring local vehicle-to-infrastructure communication can provide the capabilities to upload data and store it in the cloud.

Capgemini’s concept of a miniature autonomous vehicle named TITAN is equipped with sensor fusion and V2X communication. It can access hard-to-reach zones to ensure the control mission of the pipeline.

In the above use cases, safety-critical or not, the objective isn’t to bridge the embedded systems with edge or cloud by the latest generation of connectivity, but rather to do so with an adapted solution that takes usage, network availability, performance, and cost into account. Designing systems to onboard a technology isn’t the best approach.

The right approach is to select a technology solution from that wide range available today that makes it possible to deploy the right communication system for each use case. Connecting the world becomes a real scaling accelerator.

TelcoInsights is a series of posts about the latest trends and opportunities in the telecommunications industry – powered by a community of global industry experts and thought leaders.

Capgemini’s award-winning Automated Finance Code tool leverages AI to create and track codes quickly and easily to drive rapid, accurate, and scalable transaction processing.

Project codes are a critical part of an organization’s finance and accounting operations, enabling the finance function to process transactions quickly and efficiently. They consolidate transactions across multiple organizations and accounts, enabling the total costs associated with a project to be calculated.

Generating these codes, however, can be challenging.

Finance teams often receive information manually from many sources in non-standardized formats (email, Excel etc.), and also send code creation instructions, error reports, and maintenance requests to requesters manually, making the code creation process extremely time consuming.

Couple this with the need to create thousands of codes annually, is it surprising finance teams experience high turnaround times and a variety of accuracy issues in creating project codes during the month-end close period?

Leveraging RPA to automate and accelerate the code creation process

Capgemini saw this as an opportunity to develop an Automated Finance Code tool that enables codes to be created and tracked in real time. This simplifies and significantly accelerates the finance project code creation process, driving rapid, accurate, and scalable finance transaction processing.

The tool leverages a project maintenance form (PMF) to standardize information sources and formats, and highlight errors before they reach finance teams. It also uses UiPath’s robotic process automation (RPA) technology to create and maintain codes and their related master data. And by replicating bots across multiple channels and dividing the workload between them, the tool helps finance teams to address and resolve code creation volumes in real time.

Award-winning code creation technology

All of this is why Capgemini’s highly scalable RPA-based tool recently won an AI Breakthrough Award, 2023 in the “Best Robotic Process Automation Solution” category.

And for Capgemini, the tool has led to a range of tangible business outcomes, including up to 70% reduction in finance project code creation and maintenance time. No wonder it is looking to rollout the tool to its finance teams across the globe in the near future.

To learn how Capgemini helps finance teams unlock value from their finance function through next-generation, AI-augmented finance operations, contact: abhinanda.roy-chowdhury@capgemini.com