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Self Serve Operational Agility Software, tackling the Long Tail of process automation
About
This client enables the business functions to' self-serve', to quickly develop a new business capability within a governance structure set up by IT and deliver real operational agility. It complements existing BPM suites, acts as a kind of pontoon bridge getting to where to you want to be that little bit quicker, encourages the business functions to be involved without adding to IT's workload. As a result it offers a new dimension to the way in which business functions and IT can work together and support each other leaving IT to focus on the delivery of major change programs whilst serving the needs of the wider business community. This self serve automation has other benefits besides reducing implementation times and not detracting from IT's focus, it's much more cost effective than off-shoring or outsourcing those repetitive manual tasks carried out by FTE's. Automated or robotic FTE's are always going to be cheaper, faster at the process, more accurate and instantly scalable and of course available 24/7. Its lightweight approach often enables tasks to be automated that were previously considered not economically possible with an existing IT approach. The solution replaces people doing repetitive rules based work across multiple systems with robots or “Virtual FTE’s” – this means they are automating the existing human tasks which is subtly different to process automation. The client offers a platform in which the robots are “trained”, the rules are recorded, the systems they need to drive are mapped, the audit and change control is managed. In a recent study by the analyst company Forrester they stated "there are many processes that can be automated but are being overlooked due to the tendency for businesses to look at bigger processes. Many organisations simply don’t know how much improvement opportunity they’re missing. Traditionally, firms have focused on the big rocks in the garden while ignoring all the weeds that choke growth, the economics of self-service are too compelling to ignore."
Key Benefits
Benefits include: • Employees moved from manual, repetitive tasks into customer facing revenue opportunity roles • Reduced levels of manual administration for employees - less error prone • Substantial reduction in process operating costs • Projects with complex and varied application interaction typically completed three to five times faster than with a traditional approach • Enhanced customer satisfaction through improved response time for customer requests • Removal of a significant processing backlog • Dramatic improvement in accuracy and ‘right first time’ processing • Measurable improvement in visibility of process metrics • No changes or operational impact on existing systems • A proven track record of deploying the platform in large and complex organisations • Experience of working successfully with both business users and IT functions • A knowledge transfer programme to train and empower business users on the software
Applications
Mobile operator O2 has deployed the system to reduce the cost of back office operations and cut its reliance on offshore recruitment to cope with spikes in workload. O2 processes about one million transactions every month. To ease the expense of the workload, it has about 400 people offshore in lower-cost locations. Although the cost of offshore resources was only a quarter of the onshore equivalent, “it was still a fairly large cost”. As a result of deploying this clients solution O2 expects to save millions of pounds and get a return on investment in the first year, with year two and three delivering pure savings. As well as O2, customers include the Co-operative Banking Group, Shop Direct, RWE npower, Fidelity Investments, the NHS and Experian