Key challenges

Key challenges organizations face in achieving the overall strategic and operational goals include:

• Constant pressure for cost reduction and addressing depleting margins
• Growing requirement of skilled resources in the market
• Growing cost of labor in developing economies
• Rate of changes in the business dynamics
• Relentlessly evolving business models, often at high velocities

Intelligent Automation has a proven record of addressing these challenges by direct impact on the traditional model of labor arbitrage. KPMG defines Intelligent Automation enabled transformation as the continuum of technologies that will help organizations automate both business processes and operations.

Intelligent Automation can be broadly defined into three classes based on the level of automation:

Class 1: Basic  process  automation	Class 2: Enhanced  process  automation	Class 3: Cognitive  automation
addresses transactional work activities that are  rules-based and  primarily repetitive  in nature. This includes screen-scraping, macros, incorporating workflows and basic design capabilities.	enables the recognition of unstructured data and aids in adapting to the business  environment.	enables decision support with the  help of advanced  decision algorithms, the evolution of  these tools are generally interlinked with artificial intelligence, natural language processing, big data analytics and evidenced-based learning.

Areas with high automation traction

To realize quick benefits the following activities can be targeted by basic and enhanced automation across various processes.

• Data entry
• Data extraction
• Manual activities/Verifications
• Reporting
• Excel based activities
• Follow up/ email communications

Apart from the above activities, functions such as finance & accounting, procurement, information technology and human resources have high potential to be reinvented through automation.

Finance and Accounting	·       Accounts payables ·       Accounts receivables ·       Reconciliations ·       Fixed assets accounting
Procurement	·       Supplier setup and amends ·       Purchase order management
Payroll Management	·       Payroll accounting and processing ·       Compliance settlements
Human Resources	·       Travel desk ·       Attendance tracking ·       Reporting ·       Data processing
Information Technology	·       IT helpdesk ·       Data center management ·       Infrastructure management

Potential benefits
The following potential benefits are expected to be realized over a period of time.

• Reduces operations cost and improves process performance
• Boosts productivity and reduces effort spent on repetitive tasks
• Increases service quality resulting in higher customer satisfaction
• Increases flexibility to accommodate volume fluctuations

KPMG’s portfolio of Intelligent Automation services

KPMG offers a suite of tailored services depending on your maturity of Intelligent Automation and supports you to achieve a desired outcome.

Discovery:

• Leverage KPMG’s industry insights and use cases to identify opportunities for business improvement
• Identify transformation opportunities leveraging solutions across the various classes of Intelligent Automation
• Perform risk assessments across the robotics environment
• Benefit from the KPMG global network and alliances for a holistic experience

Pilots + Business Case:

• Identify potential pilot candidate processes based on agreed objectives
• Prepare ROI calculation models for prioritization
• Build pilot bots and test hypothesis
• Develop business case
• Conduct management presentations to share findings and insights

Roadmap:

• Provide vendor insights and assist with fit for purpose RPA tool selection
• Develop implementation roadmaps
• Provide architecture assistance in defining/designing the target solution
• Assist in technical feasibility analysis of RPA opportunities across various business units
• Designing a change management and adoption process to embed automation thinking
• Design operating models such as COE for governance

Industrialization:

• Analyze and design automation needs based on established guidelines
• Build bots - onshore and offshore capability exists
• Conduct unit, performance/volume testing
• Participate in user acceptance testing
• Operationalize bots and support metrics reporting
• Integrating with risk management procedures

Centre of Excellence:

• Charter
• Communication
• Adoption plan/metrics
• Operating model
• Organization model
• Benefits management
• Standards, templates, leading practices
• Architecture guidance
• Trainings

Download the Intelligent Automation brochure [PDF, 238 KB]