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For Lila Benhammou, CEO of Humans4help, the decrease of the company profit caused by the crisis could be balanced by more efficient processes. What should we do after this crisis? How to deliver new services?

What is your observation of the companies hit by the crisis?

In this crisis we distinguish two categories of companies: those related to tourism or transport, which their profit has been strongly impacted, sometimes even 100%. Then, there are those that have been less affected but still had to cope with the many unforeseen events induced by the crisis. I am thinking in particular of the SMEs that had not started their digital transformation. During the first few weeks of lock-down, they had to establish a business continuity plan for teleworking in a hurry. However the lack of preparation and equipment made remote-working impossible or not professional. Indeed, according to a BPI report, only 4 out of 10 SMEs were equipped. Even for large groups, the machine was slow to restart, forcing them to freeze their projects due to a lack of preparation and equipment. It’s clear that they did not take into account the digital transformation. This is the moment to ask ourselves: isn’t the time to reinvent ourselves and rethink the way we provide our service?

How is it possible to predict when we are facing such uncertainty?

The idea is not to proceed on the basis of hypotheses, but rather on the basis of the means available. In other words, it is based on what is known and on the means available, so existing clients, employees and work processes. Companies that are able to identify and work on the pain points of their current processes will be the big winners of this crisis. The challenge here is to measure the efficiency of their processes and quantify them in order to optimize their productivity. Indeed, the crisis is forcing them to do better with less. And in this context of uncertain profit, it is essential to focus on three aspects:

• Employees who will contribute to renewal through this new work processes
• Costs: Achieving operational efficiency with little or no turnover, while ensuring continuity of service and customer satisfaction?
• New services: reinventing themselves and venturing into previously envisaged areas. Many companies have been able to take advantage of this crisis to reinvent themselves and at the same time benefit from it. For example, Air Liquide, a specialist in industrial gases, has started to manufacture respirators. And the world leader in sugar refineries, Tereos, has transformed its factories to produce hydro alcoholic gel. They seized the opportunity to continue and potentially maximize their activity.

However you can only change what you can measure, hence the necessity to quantify your processes internally.

What will the change in work processes concretely bring ?

The transformation through the work process makes it possible to compensate part of the loss of its turnover by the gains in operational efficiency. It is estimated that 80% of the data that can be used in a company is unstructured. Automating, for example, certain accounting processes or customer relations (insurance purchase orders, site delivery orders, social benefit forms, social housing, etc….) would represent substantial time savings for employees. Time that can be put to good use for the more strategic issues of the company. In particular, digital transformation.

How to carry out these transformations?

Humans4help offers a support called the 10-25-30 Method. This appliance starts by an audit phase that maps the key processes and identify the obstacle and the possible evolution, which last 10 days. In order to collect the most objective data, we do not base it on collaborators’ reports. Our system is plugged to the company’s system which reveals failures in the incurred processes.

We then estimate that it takes 25 days to implement the changes to be operational. Finally, we guarantee a 30% ROI. We also offer a solution for mass processing of a company’s mails. This can represent an enormous time saving for telecom operators or insurers when dealing with claims. It is important to realize that digitalization is the lever of today’s business. Indeed, the company choose to transform itself or dies. The current crisis is proof of this with the acceleration of a new way of working that is no longer based on face-to-face meetings. A new situation driven by digitalization.

Source: www.widoobiz.com

Pascal Bornet is a recognized expert and pioneer in the field of intelligent automation (IA). He founded and led the IA practices for Mckinsey & Company and Ernst & Young (EY), where he drove hundreds of IA transformations across industries. He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and he was awarded Global Top Voice in Technology 2019.

What is Intelligent Automation (IA)? How do you define it?

It is one of the most recent and impactful trends in the broad field of artificial intelligence. In our new book “Intelligent Automation”, my co-authors Ian Barkin and Jochen Wirtz have defined Intelligent Automation (also called Hyperautomation or Cognitive Automation) as combination of methods and technologies, involving people, organizations, machine learning, low-code platforms, robotic process automation (RPA), and more. It is aimed at automating end-to-end business processes in a computerized environment. It delivers business outcomes on behalf of the employees. It works hands in hands with them to deliver faster, better and cheaper services, improving significantly employee and customer experiences.

For example, IA supports the automation of most work activities in “Procure to Pay”: from the selection of vendors (using machine learning), sending of orders (leveraging workflow platforms), reception and processing of their invoices (with natural language processing), up to the payment of these vendors (with RPA).

How is Intelligent Automation related to Industry 4.0?

It is in the middle of it. While I4.0 involves all types of automation, both material and information based, Intelligent Automation focuses only on the information based one, which we also call the automation of knowledge work.

IA focuses on automating the work done by knowledge workers, whose principal capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, designers, public accountants, lawyers, and any other workers whose line of work requires them to “think for a living.” As opposed to manual labor, which is material-based (common in manufacturing industries), knowledge work is information-based and commonly found in service industries. Simply put, IA is the “white-collar” version of the “blue-collar” industrial automation, which started in the 19th century.

We demonstrate in the book that, today, knowledge work represents more than 80% of the global workforce. Hence we expect the impact of IA on our world to be as significant as the one of the previous industrial revolutions.

In which industries and fields has IA been used so far? And what have been the impacts?

Key business impacts include the improvement of business efficiency by 20 to 60%, the increase of client satisfaction by 50%, while improving significantly employee’s experience by automating or avoiding about 60% of the mundane tasks.

In terms of applicability, it is universal. IA provides strong benefits across functions and across industries. To demonstrate this, in the book, we have built the largest publicly available library of 500+ IA use case. It covers 8 functions and 5 industries.

While service industries (i.e. banking, insurance, telecommunications) have been leading in the adoption of IA, all industries are concerned, as all companies have at least support functions which can benefit a lot from IA (e.g. finance, HR, procurement).

In what stage of Intelligent Automation’s adoption companies currently are?

86% of global business leaders recently surveyed believe that to stay ahead in their given domains, their organizations must deploy IA in the next five years. Because of its unique characteristics, we estimate that IA will be able to reach a level of adoption and sophistication in the next five years which took industrial automation over 200 years. According to a Deloitte survey, IA already has an adoption rate of over 50%. This rate is expected to increase to more than 70% in the next two years. If this continues, IA will have achieved near-universal adoption within the next five years.

What are the most challenging things when adopting Intelligent Automation?

SCALING! It is easy to succeed at implementing a proof of concept or a pilot. But when it is about scaling the transformation within an organization across several departments, functions or divisions, it becomes very hard. While 50% have started their journey in IA (according to Deloitte), only 15% have been able to implement it in more than 3 functions or divisions (according to McKinsey)

How can companies succeed in scaling IA?

According to our experience and research, companies which were successful had all implemented 5 initiatives:

To start with, they have implemented two fundamentals:

1. Always put people in the center of an IA transformation: IA is built by people, for people. Without people there is no IA. Without IA there are still people.
2. Start with a strong and healthy foundation: management support and sponsorship, capability building and change management

Then, they have implemented the below initiatives:

3. Thirdly, combine the IA capabilities to create synergies, and be able to automate complex end to end processes
4. Democratize IA by using technologies, such as low code platforms, that require limited skills to build IA applications. They make IA accessible to most business users. As a result, they accelerate the speed of the transformation, drive higher ownership and acceptance of IA, and allow the shift of the company culture to more digitalization and automation.
5. Accelerate IA implementations by leveraging technology. For example, process discovery and process mining, data discovery, AutoML, and automated maintenance.

How have IA transformations been impacted by COVID-19?

Intelligent automation used to be a factor of competitiveness, where the companies which had implemented it were able to gain market share by selling cheaper and better products.

With the current COVID 19 crisis, IA has become a factor of survival. Indeed, companies which are not digitalized and automated enough can’t survive in our new world. Companies that can’t sell products and services online, collect the cash online, motivate their employees remotely, and manage their operations remotely with minimal human intervention are only alive thanks to government subsidies.

Despite the devastating aspects of Covid-19, the pandemics has helped the world understand the importance of digitalizing processes enabling remote performance, and automating them to rely less on the human workforce and improve them.

How does IA improve employee’s experience?

According to Gallup research, 85% of employees worldwide are not fulfilled by their work, because it is too manual, repetitive, and tedious. IA solves a large part of this issue by freeing up employees from repetitive and transactional tasks (e.g., keying in invoices in an accounting software). And it refocuses them on more value-added and exciting tasks (e.g., the ones involving insights, creativity). It also augments them, transforming them into superhumans able to generate insights from millions of data in a few seconds (e.g., identifying a tumor on an X-Ray in a few seconds). According to our research presented in the book, 30% of the current scope of work tasks can be augmented, while 70% can be either automated or eliminated (e.g. unproductive meetings or emails).

Can IA improve customer experience as well?

Building trust, satisfying and retaining customers is critical for businesses. 96% of unhappy customers don’t bother complaining, and 91% of them will simply leave and never return. IA helps to create innovative and customized products, and highly responsive, omnichannel customer services available 24/7. Based on my experience with IA, companies can increase the level of their customer satisfaction by over 50%, while reducing the contact center workload by over 50%.

You say in your book that IA can save lives. How?

IA has the potential to save millions of lives every year by supporting clinical trials and disease diagnosis, and avoiding medical errors. In developing countries, it can help reduce deaths from preventable causes (e.g., 1.6 million people died from diseases related to diarrhea in 2017) and compensate for the shortage of 4.3 million physicians globally, by enabling remote diagnosis. For example, IA application Tissue Analytics instantly diagnoses chronic wounds, burns, or skin conditions just by taking a photo from a smartphone.

How can IA save money and how much?

In addition, IA could have the potential to realize a $10 trillion of cost savings yearly, by reducing frauds, errors, and accidents. Indeed, IA not only makes transaction processes more efficient and reliable, but it also generates log files for every action, creating transparency and ease of compliance. Such a vast amount of money would allow us to double our global budget for education, help restore our planet from pollution, or even eliminate hunger!

You have just published a new book you co-authored called Intelligent Automation, why did you write that book?

First, it is about sharing a passion, a conviction that we can make our world more human with intelligent automation. Then it was a necessity. A need to inform and educate. Finally, while many books have been published in the fields of AI, machine learning, or robotics, a comprehensive reference guidebook had never yet been written on the topic of IA. Hence, it seemed critical to us to objectively document and build the latest insights on this field in a first reference document.

 

 

The Fortune 200 companies are losing $237 billion a year due to the failure to find and eliminate inefficiencies in their processes. Inspiring from which, Humans4Help serves with the mission to improve the processes to tackle those inefficiencies towards business outcomes. The company believes in delivering better with less.
Humans4Help is specialized in Data Automation through two practices: Data and Machine Learning (ML) and Robotics Process Automation (RPA). The company helps businesses leveraging from their gold mine internally which is their DATA to discovering, structuring, cleaning, and indexing their data as a key.

Today only 20 percent of the structured data is used in the system and over 80 percent of corporate data is locked in documents. The unlocked value for a company is to use this data to better anticipate and predict what would be the next action for them to remain above the crowd. Because companies who reduce risk can simplify compliance and improve efficiency through Automation. This is why Humans4Help was created. With the company’s scalable Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based data enrichment platform called Digidoc, people can easily transform unstructured data from thousands (or millions) of documents into structured data that’s primed for process automation, insight systems, and compliance imperatives.

Humans4Help was created to democratize the use of Intelligent Automation by facilitating technologies toward business and not the other way around. The company’s enables optimizing processes through automation and intelligent document capture platform to transform constantly the unstructured data to more structured one that can bring its value to the business and gain efficiency.

Humans4help was created in 2017 with a clear vision that technology should serve the business. Since inception, the company grew from 2 people to more than 70 talented people with a common passion around data and how powerful the data can be toward business outcomes.

An Exceptional Leadership

Lila Benhammou is the Founder of Humans4Help. She founded the company with the key willingness to deliver excellence to customers when it comes to Intelligent Platform Automation. She believes in a thinking: “You can’t change what you can’t measure.”

According to Lila, the first step for Humans4help is to understand for a customer what doesn’t work in the processes along with how to simplify the steps to make the processes more efficient. It is always related to business outcomes. The technology should be aligned with business outcomes. Humans4Help’s clients come from different fields of the company from support businesses to front businesses like customer care, commercial or marketing, supply chain and production chains. She said, “nine out of ten times, we got inefficiencies that are identified in the process and we started our work from there.”

Many of the company’s clients ignore what doesn’t work internally. Instead of getting what doesn’t work from the business owner, Humans4Help got it directly from plugging its platform in the customer system and analyzing the data.

The company is fact-driven, which gives it immediate results on what is not working on the client-side and get the immediate ROI not only in terms of costs but also process simplification and Intelligent Automation.

A Customer-Centric Approach to Innovation

Humans4Help merges all technologies including AI, Intelligent Automation, RPA, Machine Learning, NLP, Chatbots toward customer needs, and customer experience improvement, bringing them into the customer management process.

Prior to implementing its intelligent automation strategy in the customer management process, the company analyses how the customer uses workflow. Many times, it would involve time-consuming processes where managers have allocated staff members to pass certain customers on to.

Humans4Help inverses this trend by automating the process end-to-end to receive internal requests from the customer side. The automation process — which consists of a mix of AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) — that takes place after that request analyses the staff member’s skill-set and allocates a customer best suited to it.

Humans4Help’s ‘as-a-service’ offer allows companies to use the best of the technologies and not being locked with any RPA vendors, but at any time benefitting of the best of breed technology depending on their process need.

Customer service, claims management, and churn prevention are the next priorities post-COVID 19, and processes behind them should be reworked and rethinked from scratch. Lila says, “None of what was true yesterday will be tomorrow. New ways of working from remote.

No more paper processed for paper-intensive companies like insurances or banking back offices.”
That would be the next challenge for any company: Working from home how to reengineer their process without disrupting their processes and keeping their customers safe and satisfied?

So what should any company do?

According to Lila, they must rethink their processes from the top and be agile to not staying behind the curve – digitally transforming or dying is the new rule.

And this is where chatbots are important to get a real customer experience and ease the user experience. RPA would process manual tasks from clients behind the chatbot and AI will help agents to be more focused and spend quality time with their clients.

As understanding if a client is about to leave, is a key for banks and insurances, thanks to AI, Humans4Help makes the ‘data speaks’ towards business outcomes.

Transforming Data Through Disruptive Technologies

Disruptive technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), RPA, and Chatbots impact customer experience in a way that DATA should serve the next actionable decision for all the businesses, says Lila. According to her, transforming their unstructured data (80% of their data) to structured data (only 20%) is key to get the benefit for their businesses.

Delivering Robust AI Solutions

Humans4Help is specialized in data automation, by delivering powerful applied AI solution for intelligent document processing to process optimization and automation. The company infers valuable information from images, tables, graphs, pdf, and help clients structure their data towards their business needs.

Invaluable Achievements Across Industries

Humans4Help received many recognitions from its RPA partners, as being a key preferred partner for RPA as well as from its clients with the company’s 10-30-40% strategy which uses 10 days for auditing any customer processes to find inefficiencies in processes – Thanks to Process and Task Mining technology.

For a client, the company took 30 days for implementing the process with at least a 40% ROI for it.

Thanks to the agility in Humans4Help’s offer and its AI-powered platform in the document process, the company is able to get the virtuous cycle of identifying the inefficiencies in the process, evaluate the automation tasks and getting the ROI faster.

Humans4Help addresses many clients from manufacturing, banking, and insurances and retail with some key killer use-cases that are common to any of these sectors. In Banking or Insurance, the pain points are around customer support and know-your-customer (KYC) processes where 70 to 80% of KYC mundane tasks could be automated.

However, using augmented agents, companies can prevent churn in their customer base and getting the best out of their conversations with clients.

Envisioning a Data-Driven Future

Lila envisions the future of Humans4Help as being a reference in Intelligent Data Process Automation by helping AI/ML/RPA to be used by any company, regardless of their size; understanding and classifying data; and most importantly finding one specific data in a pile of messy documents which is common to any company.

Source: www.analyticsinsight.net

“Think of technologies like RPA as using automation to bring yesterday’s systems into the ‘present’ of work:” why IDC’s taking part in UiPath’s upcoming Reboot Work Festival

 Later this month (December 15 to 17 inclusive), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market leader UiPath is hosting a special ‘Reboot Work Festival’. The virtual event’s aim: highlight the ways companies are using automation to reinvent the way they work and free their employees to realize their potential.

On Day 2 at the EMEA version of what seems to be a major global automation debate is a special ‘Meet The Analysts’ event, with a topic of “Where are we and where are we going?” There, the vendor’s Chief Evangelist, Guy Kirkwood, will be in dialogue with senior analysts covering all things automation and digital transformation.

In advance of the show, RockingRobots reached out to one of them, IDC’s Neil Ward-Dutton. Ward-Dutton is a VP at the research group, leading its AI and Intelligent Process Automation practice; he told us his job revolves around “driving a broad collaboration of analysts across Europe to create world-leading AI and automation research and strategy results for clients”. We now present a slightly edited version of our conversation; for more information on Reboot Work, including the full EMEA agenda, please go here.

The main theme of Reboot Work is the role of automation/robotics/RPA in the future of work. This is obviously a complex issue, Neil–but what are your maybe top 2-3 thoughts here?

I think there are two sides to this. Firstly: automation has been a feature of the business landscape since the 1800s! And the history of IT is really the history of automation in business. But what’s happening now is quite a shift from where we’ve been. Since the first information systems took hold until perhaps 10 years ago, organisations typically bought or built business systems that ended up hard-coding assumptions about what I call the “who, what, when, where and how” of business practices. The result of all those decades of investment is often hundreds of systems, none of which really fit the requirements of modern digital workplaces.

Modern digital workplaces, enabled by the Web, cloud platforms, mobile platforms, and more, create a completely new canvas that makes far fewer assumptions about the “who, what, when, where and how” of work. Today’s automation strategies–often led by RPA–are an attempt to bridge the gaps between what modern digital business operations need, and the business systems that commonly exist.

So really, you can think of technologies like RPA as using automation to bring yesterday’s systems into the ‘present’ of work (before we even get to the future). And secondly, particularly when AI and ML get added into the mix, automation technologies are now creating opportunities to create collaborations between a virtual workforce of digital assistants and human workers.

What do you want to tell us about at the conference? It’s fine to give us a high level answer–let’s not blow your presentation!

At the event, I’ll be sitting down with a peer from another analyst firm and Guy Kirkwood, UiPath’s Chief Evangelist. We’ll be talking about two simple things: where we are with automation in 2020, and where the market is going next. We’ll talk a bit about technology for sure, but we’ll also talk about how practices are changing as organisations look to use automation more broadly and deeply.

Great answer, sounds intriguing. Our final question today, Neil: If there is ONE thing to do about automation at my organisation in 2021, what should it be?

Simple: every organisation should develop an automation strategy in 2021, if they haven’t got one already. And that automation strategy should answer a few key questions, including:

• To what extent should we look to automate work?
• What kinds of work, or kinds of use cases, should we try to tackle in the short term, and what should we postpone?
• How will we measure success, and how will we prioritise investments?
• And last but not least, how will we build collaborations between technology suppliers, our own IT people and key business stakeholders (including regular workers)?

Here are some predictions for the enterprise automation sector:

Citizen developers will go back to the drawing board.

In 2019, Gartner predicted that 2020 would be the year of the citizen developer. The vision was that thanks to no-code or low-code software, anyone could become an RPA developer. But the hard, cold truth is that the movement was a failure. The average RPA user interface, or wizard, still requires considerable training to extract the most value. To make the citizen developer movement real in 2021, RPA vendors will have to start over on their user interfaces.

Covid-19 will expedite the momentum of front-end RPA adoption.

The fallout from the global pandemic has forced businesses to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives with a greater focus on customer-facing automation. Imagine a bank that would like to create an interface for its employees on a web page for a digital mortgage product. It’s possible to use RPA to automate the back-end processes involved with employee transactions and get it done in a matter of days. But it can still take months to develop a front-end user interface. In 2021, we will see more focus on low-code front-end design capabilities and tools that interact with RPA processes. I expect some RPA companies will go after the front-end RPA market.

The lines between attended and unattended automation will blur.

In the early days of enterprise automation, we saw a greater distinction between attended bots (those that require some user direction) and unattended automation, which runs complete workflows in the background. But in a few years, no one will be talking about them in separate terms. Even today, attended bots can run unattended ones through parallel processes and hybrid models. Looking at the story and the vision for RPA, the difference between the two will shrink, and eventually, we will see a proliferation of bots that will handle both. Vendors need to get a handle on this and master both to stay competitive.

The cloud will drive RPA adoption, solve scaling issues.

Here’s a hidden secret: Eventually, all organizations need to install bots on-premises to handle large-scale RPA deployments and integrate with their IT systems. It’s one of the major reasons why scaling is not happening at a high level yet, driven home by Covid-19 and the need for remote deployment. To get around this, RPA vendors will need to find ways to provide value much faster. By moving the delivery of RPA to the cloud, we will see more solutions to the scaling dilemma. RPA powered by the cloud or hosted as-a-service provides more auto-scaling solutions and can support bots on demand.

M&A in RPA will continue.

We’ve already seen that 2020 was a busy year in M&A activity in the RPA industry. Large IT companies, including Microsoft and IBM, scooped up innovative RPA startups to fill a gap in their solutions portfolio. Every month in 2021, we should expect either an M&A deal or VC investment in an RPA company.

Article author: Shay Antebi is the Chief Technology Officer of Kryon Systems

During the Reboot Work Festival yesterday various aspects of the relationship between humans and robots were discussed. One of the underexposed aspects in this theme is the unprecedented opportunities that the development of robots offers for people with autism. UiPath therefore presented a video that highlights this special part of the relationship between humans and machines.

This is all the more important because executives and senior managers at large organizations are increasingly requiring employees to have, and seeking new candidates who have, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) skills. When choosing between two similarly qualified job candidates, 73% of surveyed executives said they would pick the candidate with more experience with automation and AI tools, even if the role does not require those abilities.

Forrester

Companies around the world are turning to automation to boost business productivity and employee satisfaction – in fact, a study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of UiPath, recently found that companies are increasingly using automation to address new business and market pressures stemming from the pandemic. Supporting this trend, 70% of the executives that UiPath surveyed cite that their organizations already invest in automation or AI tools, with 18% of those organizations using it across all departments.

Survey

As automation and AI tools become more prevalent in enterprise settings, UiPath’s survey, conducted in October 2020, sought to understand how important it is to enterprise executives that their employees – even those in non-technical roles – have automation and AI skills. The study found that:

• Automation and AI skills are becoming increasingly critical for all employees, regardless of job focus. Most surveyed executives (70%) believe it’s important for employees in non-technical roles to have a working knowledge of automation and AI tools. The survey found that 94% of individuals in non-technical roles at respondents’ organizations already interact with automation and AI technologies in some capacity. When executives are looking to hire a new candidate, even in a non-technical role, 69% of surveyed executives believe it’s important that they have experience with and/or knowledge of automation and AI tools – and 73% would choose someone with automation skills between two similarly qualified candidates.
• Employees with automation and AI skills will increase their career posture. Forty-four percent of surveyed executives believe automation and AI skills can increase employees’ responsibilities; 64% cite that these skills can increase employees’ pay; and 67% say it can give employees more opportunities for career advancement within their organization.
• Automation and AI will be a necessity for jobs in the future, according to 83% of surveyed executives. The pandemic has only propelled this necessity, with 82% agreeing that the pandemic and work-from-home mandates have increased the need for employees and candidates to have working knowledge of AI and automation.

AI Education

Automation and AI education must be prioritized so that employees can acquire the skills they need to be successful in the workplace. The skills that surveyed executives now demand complements a previous UiPath study of 4,500 global office workers, which uncovered that 91% surveyed workers believe their employers should be more willing to invest in digital and technology training skills for their employees to be successful in the future of work.