Key takeaways
- Services businesses need to stay agile and globally competitive.
- AI/ML-led automation is a powerful enabler in the crowded market.
- It enables businesses, irrespective of their size, to stay lean yet competitive.
Service industry businesses, such as security and compliance firms, law firms and legal services, accounting and bookkeeping, HR staffing services, and management consulting, have to stay competitive while navigating market upheavals and business constraints. The pursuit of excellence is common to businesses irrespective of their scale and size. It often means finding strategic pathways to achieve revenue growth at scale. Some of these options include modernizing the services’ business operations and platforms without direct investment in specialized in-house technological human resources. The solution lies in adopting intelligent automation as a service. This AI/ML-led automation approach allows businesses to stay agile and flexible while being competitive at the same time.
Challenges faced by the service industry
The service industry is prone to many challenges because of its manual administrative operations. Some of them are:
- High operational costs: The service industry has significantly high OpEx due to error-prone manual administrative procedures. The overhead incurred through manual data operations results in lower revenue and profit margins.
- Repetitive operations: The service executives are overloaded with repetitive tasks and operations. Increasing workloads and procedural bottlenecks create an error-prone business environment that requires continuous corrective actions and rework.
- Lower service quality: Repetitive manual work results in a high variance in service delivery. The inconsistent quality of delivery influences customer satisfaction and stickiness.
- Lack of process transparency: Manual functions affect the visibility of business operations, resulting in a lack of real-time process visibility and transparency, which is important for critical decision-making.
- Poor operations scalability: Manually scaling up service operations is challenging, resulting in a lack of adaptability to seasonal workload increases.
The business imperative of intelligent automation as a service (IAaaS)
Intelligent Automation is transformational and is within the scope of implementation of small to medium and large businesses; however, implementing it requires specialized skill sets, robust infrastructure, and process understanding. Leveraging intelligent automation as a service (IAaaS) is a strategic opportunity for businesses to engage with the best of both worlds. It supports operations modernization without a heavy investment in platform upgradation and still unlocks the full potential of intelligent automation. This approach allows small, mid-cap, and large-cap businesses to modernize operations and supports their quest for agile operations while pursuing customer-centric and time-bound engagements.
What are the benefits of intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation is a convergence of rule-based technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA), and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) led technologies, such as intelligent document processing (IDP). Businesses also integrate copilots and BI-driven tools for comprehensive automation integration and coverage across different business functions. This technological convergence allows businesses to automate complex tasks from within a single application without having to log into several applications to deliver processes or generate meaningful insights.
Some of the major benefits of intelligent automation are:
- Higher productivity and efficiency: It streamlines processes, requires minimal human intervention, and accelerates tasks and processes. It allows the executives to focus more on their core capabilities, such as customer interaction, customer service, knowledge work, etc. For example, customer service executives can resolve service requests quickly with real-time information at their fingertips. Accounts executives can process invoices faster to claim the early payment bonus and make time for interaction with different vendors and stakeholders.
- Lower operational costs: By reducing manual intervention, errors, and rework, businesses save a significant amount on operational costs. Automating effort-intensive processes creates a huge impact on the top and bottom line. This proves a significant advantage for small and mid-cap companies, which run thin on margins. It is also of particular importance to large-cap companies, which are looking at streamlining operations.
- Higher accuracy and compliance: Highly accurate and consistent output with audit trails at each juncture enables businesses to provide evidence for all statutory obligations and compliance audits.
- Scalable and agile operations: This technology’s versatility allows dynamically scaling up operations according to the business workloads. It also allows scaling down when the load has subsided. The speed and agility of operations optimization, according to the onslaught of work, are beneficial for adapting to changing market dynamics.
- Superior customer experience: Automating paper-based and repetitive processes enables executives to deliver faster and better. The quick and consistent service delights customers. AI/ML/NLP-driven agents offer personalized service 24x7 by responsibly using customer data.
- Informed decision-making: Intelligent automation enables businesses to work with real-time data. In turn, it powers data-driven decision-making tools, allowing all stakeholders to make faster and better-informed decisions. It enables them to take corrective and preventive action in time, enabling continuous business improvement.
- Higher stakeholder engagement: Technological advancements enable small and big businesses to automate mundane tasks and manual processes so that their executives can focus on strategic work. It enables higher satisfaction at all levels, including customers, vendors, and employees. Increased stakeholder satisfaction results in lower churn and higher customer stickiness and loyalty.
These benefits offered by intelligent automation enable small and mid-cap businesses to streamline processes without heavy investments and compete with bigger enterprises. Intelligent automation enables large-cap businesses to maintain operational efficiency and stay nimble, agile, and competitive, similar to start-ups. This technology empowers businesses irrespective of their market capitalization.
What are the strategic advantages of IAaaS over intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation offers sharp revenue benefits. However, all AI/ML-powered business solutions revolve around the enterprise data sanctity. Hence, businesses must assess their data-readiness and implement corrective actions. Small and mid-cap businesses lack the expertise and skilled resources to conduct data sanctity assessments or even build and maintain foundations, AI/ML models, and automation solutions. Large businesses have the capital to invest; however, they believe in focused investment and outcomes, allowing in-house talent to work only on their core projects. Engaging IAaaS offers tangible advantages in such cases.
Some of the strategic advantages of IAaaS are:
- Specialized skill set on demand: IAaaS enables businesses of all sizes to onboard core expertise, such as AI/ML engineers, automation solution architects, and other seasoned experts, on demand. They bring in deep expertise at a fraction of the amount required for having skilled resources on the payroll and eliminate the overhead required for building and maintaining specialized intelligent automation teams.
- Faster time-to-value: Specialized IAaaS teams bring in proven expertise to the table. They undertake quick readiness assessments and align the groundwork for intelligent automation implementation. They are adept at identifying the automation opportunities that would show quick, measurable results and bring in faster return-on-investment (RoI). They build, tune, and optimize the automation projects with faster timelines as compared to the erstwhile automation solution releases. The shorter cycle times ensure faster realization of benefits.
- Risk mitigation: An automation project encounters a number of risks. Some of them are project scope bleeding and unexpected automation complexities. IAaaS providers are experts who know how to navigate around these challenges and mitigate risks. The experts bring in a structure to the overall intelligent automation program rollout and risk management.
- Best-of-the-breed technology integration: The intelligent automation continuum is still evolving. With the release of sophisticated AI/ML models every month, more complex project scenarios can be automated at scale. However, it is practically impossible to hire in-house talent for the different intelligent automation skill sets for particular automation scenarios. Intelligent automation service providers are up-to-date with the emerging technologies in the automation continuum and bring in the right skill sets to suit the automation and system integration requirements.
- Lean business structure: Businesses of all sizes prefer to stay lean while navigating the vagaries of the dynamic market landscape. Onboarding IAaaS providers enables businesses to offload their automation and maintenance projects to them while ensuring that their data and automation requirements are safe in their professional and trustworthy hands. This structured approach allows businesses to stay lean and focus on their core capabilities.
- Flexibility of operational structure: IAaaS is flexible enough to be customized as per business requirements. Similarly, it scales up and down as required by bringing in more human resources or releasing them to their other intelligent automation assignments. This flexible operational structure allows businesses to deliver along complex value chains to ultimately benefit the end-customer.
- Industry best practices: IAaaS providers bring in the astuteness and decisiveness gained by successfully executing hundreds of intelligent automation projects. At the same time, their unbiased perspective helps the business to identify the right projects for automation that can fetch quick revenue returns. Their insights on industry benchmarks enable businesses to align with the global best practices while staying lean.
- Build-Operate-Own-Transfer (BOOT) and maintenance: The IAaaS providers work with a BOOT mode. They deliver both built-in and bolt-on projects, as best suited to the business requirement. They also offer after-sales support and maintenance to ensure that the intelligent automation solutions work seamlessly, learn continuously, and deliver optimally. It also helps businesses in staying current with the changing regulations and compliance in the data and automation space.
IAaaS – The roadmap
Businesses aspiring to adopt intelligent automation through IAaaS providers can follow a proven roadmap towards adoption, implementation, and optimization.
Here are the key milestones of the intelligent automation roadmap:
- Opportunity identification: Engage a provider to identify the right processes for automation. Define your automation objectives, such as faster time-to-value, lowered operational costs, and better customer experience. List the low-hanging targets, such as procedural bottlenecks that take time to resolve, high time-consuming repetitive processes, high volume, and erroneous processes. List the potential benefits of automation and define relevant KPIs. Conduct a feasibility analysis and build a comprehensive business case with RoI estimate for intelligent automation.
- Design and development: Synchronize with the service providers to shortlist the plan of action. Ascertain the appropriate intelligent automation technologies that best suit the identified automation opportunity and the existing automation infrastructure. Design the end-to-end solution on paper. Outline the workflow, inputs and outputs, the integration points, error and exception handling mechanisms, etc. Create a proof-of-value (PoV) to demonstrate its capability and the value of the solution to important stakeholders before an enterprise roll-out.
- Implementation: Team up with the IAaaS providers to configure the automation solution, integrate it with the existing system, and ensure internal and external compliance. Test the minimum viable solutions under rigorous conditions to ensure solution reliability and accuracy. Go live only after comprehensive testing.
- Program management: Set up an elaborate program management schedule comprising all stakeholders. Manage their expectations and get their buy-ins. Change management is an important aspect of an enterprise-wide automation solution roll-out. Conduct training sessions. Evangelize program benefits and address concerns. Focus on new roles and responsibilities. Mentor employees during the transition to adapt to the new methodologies, functions, and process workflows.
- Continuous optimization: Track key metrics and KPIs defined during opportunity identification, such as time-to-value, operational costs, etc. Find new automation opportunities. Identify areas of solution optimization to deliver higher business value.
IAaaS – A futuristic automation outlook in the business value chain
The business landscape is highly dynamic. Automation technologies offer businesses a competitive edge by staying current and relevant to vendor and customer expectations. IAaaS bridges the gap between small and mid-tier companies and their larger counterparts by helping them adapt to the ever-changing technological requirements without making upfront investments in terms of in-house talent. It is a lean and cost-efficient alternative to making direct investments. It is a powerful option for being dynamic and agile, and staying ahead of the competition in complex business value chains.
Simply put
IAaaS offers businesses the option to confidently jumpstart their automation journey by using state-of-the-art technologies, astute minds, and proven methodologies. The collaboration brings the best of both worlds, that is, high-end technology and a lean operational structure. It reduces the risks of implementation and accelerates the time to value. Strategically leveraging the expertise of IAaaS enables businesses to gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead.
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