Scaling up Intelligent Automation initiatives

Intelligent Automation (IA) is at the top of many organizations’ strategic and tactical agendas. Rightly so. Not only can Intelligent Automation improve operational efficiency and effectiveness, it also provides the basis for new or enhanced products and services to drive future revenue growth. But what is the status of Intelligent Automation in Switzerland and how can you best get started or scale up your Intelligent Automation initiatives in such a wide-ranging and fast-moving area?

Intelligent Automation is an umbrella over technologies that enable business transformation and the automation of business processes. It brings together Robotic Process Automation (RPA), low-code platforms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate and augment processes, and ultimately helps companies achieve their profitability targets and maintain competitive advantage.

Organizations can dramatically improve their business processes by adopting a technology-first mindset built on well-established process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma and Lean. When looking at your processes through a new lens, it is important to: 

• Understand the output and outcome of the process, rather than start at the beginning
• Work your way backwards to understand what data is utilized during the process and how it is utilized to achieve the desired output, e.g. using process mining to have a data driven approach
• Redesign the process by flipping traditional thinking. Set up the process to be fully automated, end-to-end, and then add humans only where needed, such as for decisive decision making or handling unknown errors or exceptions.

Enhancing the client experience

This approach will give you a technology-first, human-second perspective. It will enable you to achieve incredible improvements such as faster, more efficient processing and reductions in manual labor requirements by up to 70 percent. Ultimately allowing you to enhance the experience of your customers and employees.

This works well in practice. For example, KPMG worked with a large Telco to insource, design and automate their entire core finance and accounting processes, drastically reducing manual labor requirements. We have also helped enable other businesses to structure and harmonize their data to deliver truly valuable analytics and forecasts.

We see clear market trends regarding the maturity level and adoption of Intelligent Automation by both global corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises.

In general, we note that global corporations in Switzerland have made significant investments and are already quite mature in their experimentation and adoption of Intelligent Automation and Artificial Intelligence. This is especially the case in back-office functions such as Finance, HR and IT. One Swiss-based global pharmaceutical group has partnered with a global technology provider to leverage Intelligent Automation and Artificial Intelligence to modernize their approach to developing, designing and creating new medicines.

In order to truly benefit from Intelligent Automation, we believe that global corporations should focus on organizing, structuring and combining the technologies, ultimately scaling Intelligent Automation by:

• Building business cases with input from the business and IT
• Setting up a stable fit-for-purpose infrastructure (possibly cloud driven)
• Ensuring that Intelligent Automation is ‘in control’. 

The current landscape of investments into Intelligent Automation is fragmented, in our view. It ranges from a group of data scientists helping with financial forecasting, to RPA developers scattered across an organization in small process excellence teams.

The next level in maturing Intelligent Automation may be achieved when individual teams, with their different capabilities, work together to automate the processes end-to-end.

We believe the Intelligent Automation maturity level in the Swiss SME market is lower than in comparable European markets. We have, however, seen growing appetites and investments in more mature technologies such as RPA and low-code platforms. This trend was already visible prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 and has grown over the past year. A particular focus has been on easy-entrance technologies – with high degrees of user-friendliness, low entry costs, cost efficiency, and cloud/as-a-service solutions – such as low-code platforms. SMEs have generally used Intelligent Automation to maintain a competitive edge by:

• Optimizing manual processes to allow employees to focus on value adding tasks
• Improving processing speed to respond quicker to customers, suppliers and employees
• Supporting processes that cannot be securely managed through the work-from-home setup, including mobile/ tablets due to infrastructure limitations, existing compliance rules, etc.

Position Intelligent Automation capabilities strategically: To take Intelligent Automation maturity to the next level, pilot initiatives could be scaled up in high impact areas. Due to SMEs’ sizes, they should position Intelligent Automation capabilities strategically in the organization, maintaining central alignment while empowering local employees. This was evident when we worked with an industrial manufacturing SME to build a single Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence to support regional branches. SMEs should also consider taking a hybrid approach where they integrate some skills within the organization, while acquiring other skills, platforms and capabilities under as-a-service arrangements.

Holistic costs and benefits are an important consideration. SMEs should focus not only on actual process execution costs and process benefits. They also need to consider the future agility that Intelligent Automation can bring, and how it can free up employees’ time to focus on other tasks.