Transformation, Digital Transformation | 2 min read
Transforming your organization towards being more efficient and effective is the main drive for improving how you run your business. If we assess how well an organization is running its business, we’ll see that there’s always room for improvement, especially in this day and age of technological advancements where we rely on systems and apps to do things in a more natural and much better way.
Automation is critical towards achieving effective transformation, and the benefits are noticed immediately because, with automation, you will:
So now that we’ve established the importance and benefits of automation, the next question is: What are we supposed to automate? This would widely differ from one or organization to the next, and in this blog, I will be highlighting three essential functions that need to be automated in organizations:
The amount of time spent by HR employees in filling forms, updating employee information in databases, processing requests received and handling onboarding/offboarding tasks makes it difficult for them to focus on what’s essential; serving employees efficiently, promptly, and with little to no errors.
Therefore, automating HR processes is imperative to the satisfaction of employees in an organization, as well as HR employee improved performance and productivity. Some of the HR activities that should be automated are Payroll, Onboarding/Offboarding, Time and Attendance Reporting, Personnel, and Benefits Administration.
The Finance and Accounting teams should be spending their time managing vendors and customers, as well as analyzing data. But instead, you find that they are drowning in invoices, papers, and calls from suppliers and vendors following up with them on payments. A bigger problem faced with lack of automation is no visibility on cash flow, spending trends, and overall financial health of an organization.
So if processes such as sales orders, collection, procure-to-pay, incentive claims and vendor payments are automated the Finance and Accounting team will reduce the overall time it takes to process something such as invoices by at least 60%.
Nowadays, it’s effortless to know which organization provides customers with a positive experience. Customers are becoming tech-savvy and very demanding so they have almost no tolerance for waiting in long queues to be served or staying on the line to speak to a customer representative (who will most probably put them on hold for a few minutes). Memorable customer experience is one that is accurate and fast.
Automating customer services through the use of Interactive Voice Recognition, helpdesk ticketing systems as well as FAQ pages on your website will reduce the effort expended by employees to handle customer requests, and provide the quality of service that would make your organization the customer’s preferred choice of a service provider.
We’re all in a race to be the best, and to be more efficient and effective. So if you’re an organization that has already automated a good portion of your functions, then you’re on the right track and will reap the benefits of this transformation. And if you’re an organization that is working towards that goal to succeed in this competitive era, then here are some ideas to keep in mind when embarking on the automation journey:
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Originally published Feb 4, 2019 12:39:47 PM, updated July 24, 2019
Topics: Transformation Digital Transformation
Less than a minute read
The Enterprise Digital Canvas is a comprehensive and structured blueprint of your Digital Enterprise. This article summarises learnings from effective Digital Workspace design for COVID-19 response, using the Digital Canvas model.
See how it works here:
Architecture Is The Foundation Digital Workspace
A successful workspace for recovery and growth requires you to have a 360-view of your operating capabilities. This is only possible by effectively leveraging The Digital Canvas (World’s leading framework for Digital Design).
For more information, visit our Partner Arqitek.
2 min read
We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
In light of that, it is imperative to always look forward in anticipation and not just wait for a trend to start “trending”. We have created a list of what we speculate to be the major technology trends of 2020 that everyone should keep an eye out for.
No matter how much technology advances, it is agreed that no single tool can replace humans. Most organisations out there are already familiar with automation, which involves automating simple tasks that require processes with predefined rules and structured data. The idea of HyperAutomation, on the other hand, involves a combination of tools that together result in the creation of an organisation’s digital twin, which allows for the automation of more complex work.
According to Gartner, combining robotic process automation, intelligent business management software, and AI enables organisations to visualise how functions, processes, and key performance indicators interact to drive value.
Allowing this digital twin to become an integral part of the HyperAutomation process as it provides real-time continuous intelligence about the organisation will enable more informed decision making. Successful automation involves several key factors: discover, analyse, design, automate, measure, monitor, & reassess.
An example of a tool that is designed based on these factors would be Exceed’s ESP.
While Blockchain was first developed back in 1991, it came to life with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. The idea of bitcoin mimics printed currency in the transactional sense, but instead of being regulated by a central bank or government, bitcoin is regulated by a network of computers. Blockchain is the protocol on which bitcoin is built.
In the simplest terms, Investopedia defines Blockchain as “a distributed, decentralised, public ledger”, which translates to digital information (blocks) that are stored in a public database (chain). While blockchain is beneficial in peer to peer transactions and small-scope projects, it remains immature for enterprise deployments due to technical issues.
However, market speculations anticipate it to be fully scalable by 2023. According to research conducted by Gartner, “true blockchain will have the potential to transform industries, and eventually the economy, as complementary technologies such as AI begin to integrate alongside blockchain.”
Can Machines Think?
AI involves designing “human-like” machines that are able to perform tasks requiring intelligence. Machines are built to mimic processes and tasks that involve recognition of images, speech, or patterns & decision making. Those processes include acquiring information and rules, using those rules to reach conclusions, & self-correction.
Unlike traditional coding, the computer creates instructions for itself using machine learning algorithms rather than having humans write those instructions. To demonstrate the effect of AI, take google translate for an example.
When it first went live, google translate used to have more than a million lines of code (human-created instructions). Currently, google translate has 500 lines of code due to machine learning. However, while it is expected to overtake every industry, one must understand its limitations.
Knowledge in AI comes from data, and for the machine to be accurate, it must read from accurate data. While businesses have been understanding what AI can and can't achieve for the past few years, it expected that the future points towards a time where machines are appointed not only all of the physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution, but also the mental work involving planning, strategising, and making decisions.
Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/
https://www.simplilearn.com/top-technology-trends-and-jobs-article
1 min read
You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it !
Among our recent partnerships, we joined forces with Ubility.
To bring the service provider closer to YOU, we sat down with their CEO Khaled Dassouki, to gain firsthand insight on the things they do and the types of human capital profiles that drive their success.
Khaled is a Lebanese national with an engineering background and PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Security obtained at Université de Technologie de Troyes, France.
As a result of over 20 years in the field, Khaled decided to establish Ubility in France and build it on a base of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience, which was considered to be highly innovative as it was a niche field.
Khaled was quick to notice that there had been a shift in the way business was carried out, the shift had been made to be more customer-focused. With that came new challenges, the ease with which customers can connect with the business led to a huge influx of queries and requests for support, which was very time consuming, tedious, and required businesses to grow their customer support teams leading to higher costs.
While growing their teams did solve some challenges momentarily, organisations were quick to realise that the complexity and average time required to resolve customer challenges was growing which eventually led to dissatisfied customers. Not only that, customer service agents were quickly burning out as they were answering an ever-growing list of routine questions rather than helping solve complex problems and offering innovative solutions.
Taking all that into account, Ubility offered an AI-powered platform that learns from interactions between an organisation’s customers & their customer care team to enable quick suggestions of appropriate solutions that could solve a customer’s challenge in seconds rather than minutes.
In addition to that, Ubility also offers AI training for professionals in the IT industry, a sales chatbot that is based on a recommender system and knows the sales cycle, and AI Consultancy in which they are recruited to build and implement AI services in response to an assessment of an organisation’s processes.
Success Story
Ubility was commissioned by a Telecom operator in the gulf to assess and analyse their IT processes. After a thorough analysis done by their team of experts, it was concluded that a huge portion of their IT processes had an opportunity for automation.
After studying the best ways in which they could automate their processes, they determined that incorporating AI would allow the elimination of a manual process by looking at historical data. Instead of their operational costs raking up to 50,000 USD a month, they were now cut by 80% to be only 10,000 USD.
Intrigued and want to learn more?
We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
So you have invested in a cool new IT technology for your business. All is going great, except...your employees are not using it yet. 😥
Solely looking at digital transformation spending by organisations around the world should make it clear that it’s here to stay. A forecast by IDC states that worldwide spending on digital transformation technology and services may reach $1.97 trillion by 2022. The manufacturing industry is expected to invest the most, followed by transportation and retail. An organization’s transition can feel overwhelming as today’s customers expect a lot. So where can technology leaders go to stay knowledgeable and up to speed?
