Focus matters in process automation

Something extraordinary took place in the U.S. this spring. A car manufacturer producing tiny volumes of just a few models and not creating any profit at all, rose to be the one with the highest market value. Huge giants, General Motors and Ford, are now #2 and #3. As you can easily guess, the number one manufacturer I’m talking about is Tesla. Automotive industry is being disrupted by a new player. The engineers of the Tesla company don’t have any plan B combustion engine in their back pocket: electricity is a “do or die” for Tesla. This lack of alternative strategies forces them to rethink something quite ordinary, a car, with totally new goggles on. And while doing so, they are disrupting a market currently dominated by global giants.

Why is a single cause so powerful?

The example of Tesla is not unique. We have all heard of Netflix, which in a less than a decade nearly eradicated the movie rental business. They created a new business model based on a new status quo: almost everybody having a wide band internet connection at home. The dominant thinking for Netflix wasn’t about how to bring a monthly online subscription on top of existing stock of physical DVDs for rent. Neither was it for Tesla on how to bring a new kind of electric engine to an existing car make. Essential for both companies was to rethink how something we thought we already knew (a car or a movie rental) could work in the best possible way considering newly emerged technology. And even more importantly, to start with a blank sheet and to go all in with something new and unique.

Digital Worker is a new emerging technology

You have most likely already heard quite a bit about digital workers. These tireless new employees being able to perform routine tasks far more accurately and efficiently than a regular human employee. But it may well be that you haven’t considered the full nature of digital workers. In the same way as the experience of driving a Tesla Model S is different from a Ford Mondeo, a business process created to take the full benefit of digital workers really is something quite different compared to the ‘as is’ manual process. Delivering service to a customer in hours instead of days, serving ten times bigger volumes or eliminating costly errors are just examples of individual benefits. Key question should be “if digital workers were available when we created this process, would we have built it differently?”.

I give an example on how this works. Let’s say the help desk needs to open ten different legacy applications to be able to type in agreed actions after a customer call. So, in practical terms, help desk assistant spends 5 minutes for customer interaction and then 5 additional minutes for keying in all the information. With a Digital Worker working in the background, the agent could type all the information to a simple template. While the agent takes the next call, the Digital Worker types in all the actions to the underlying systems.

For us, Digital Workers are our ‘do or die’

We, the experts in Digital Workforce, are proud to state that we focus only into enabling new business models based on full utilization of digital workers. This means that we take a wider perspective than only considering current manual processes from the point of view of suitability to Digital Workers. Additionally, we are the only Digital Worker provider having a 24/7 cloud based Robot as a Service Platform, an online Academy for training your own people to maximise the value of these new colleagues as well as a mobile reporting tool for following up the results of the work.

Focusing into a single cause forces us to be better than anyone else in the market. Otherwise we wouldn’t be there at all. Even more importantly: we are not just better, we are distinctly different.

We understand how to turn this new technology into concrete business value. Want to know more? Contact us to unravel the automation potential hiding in your organisation.

Article: Tuomo Sievilä – Program Manager, Digital Workforce

Tuomo has extensive experience from process management in banking industry and previously worked as Robotic Process Automation Concept Owner at Nordea. He joined Digital Workforce in March 2017 and is currently responsible for extensive and international robotics projects.