It was not long ago that Digital Process Automation (DPA) was mainly consigned to a few experimentative champions looking to bring about marginal improvements in their respective departments. However, in the last few years DPA has built up a lot of steam as organizations look to realize the full potential of their digital transformation initiatives. The past decade has firmly entrenched DPA initiatives as a top priority for any IT or business leader as they now view it as an organization-wide initiative that is central to creating and sustaining a competitive business advantage.
The advent of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
In the early years of the previous decade, a lot of process automation took place on the back of large scale, enterprise-wide BPM & ERP tools. The business users were only at the periphery and were called upon to provide functional specifications and carry out user acceptance testing. These projects were managed by centralized IT departments and often turned into long drawn-out multi-year initiatives that would eventually lead to secure, scalable, and reliable transactions that served as good systems of record.
These monolithic ERP/BPM systems were quite unwieldy and making changes to them was cost and resource intensive. As a result, alternate systems of record & transactions started popping up to help business users get the vital data they needed to make critical business decisions. Robotic Process Automation tools, such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, were introduced to automate repetitive manual tasks and improve the efficiency with which business users move data within & across different systems. Although, RPA projects started out mostly as small-scale experiments within individual departments, their growing success led to them eventually being adopted as enterprise-wide programs that covered end-to-end process workflows.
A few more factors have driven the accelerated adoption of RPA over the last few years across various industries. These factors include the infusion of AI-ML models to drive intelligent automation, increased use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to aid improved understanding of information in document heavy processes, and the seamless integration of Chatbots to drive near zero-touch handling of service requests from employees and customers alike.
DPA & LCAP: Progressive Business Applications – for the Users, by the Users
With large scale Digital Transformation projects becoming top priority across many organizations, there has been an evolution towards Digital Process Automation (DPA) which not only looks to automate repetitive tasks but swiftly reimagine business processes to provide improved user experiences within and outside the organization. To do this in earnest, organizations will have to fundamentally modernize core legacy applications and bring business users to the very forefront of all automation initiatives. This shift in mindset is one of the primary factors driving the greater adoption of Low Code Application Platforms (LCAP) like Outsystems and Medix for Rapid Application Development.
LCAP enables organizations to build applications “for the business users, by the business users”. This is done by leveraging citizen developers who are essentially business users with basic programming knowledge to build the exact applications they need with minimal effort. The decentralization and democratization of application development leads to greater agility, resource optimization and cost efficiencies. In the long run, businesses can also greatly optimize their operational expenses by replacing their expensive, monolithic legacy systems with simpler and interconnected applications that are built on platforms which are easier to operate and manage.
Strike the right balance between Decentralization & Dedicated Expertise
As the competitive landscape intensifies and organizations look to create customer centric products and experiences that are future ready, they will have to adopt the same principles while developing internal applications as well. Organizations should look to leverage the latest technologies in the DPA space and establish an internal CoE that can provide the guidance and expertise required to drive DPA initiatives across the organization. The CoE would be tasked with choosing the right platform (RPA & LCAP), defining the automation roadmap, providing DPA guidelines & best practices while training & coaching business users in adopting these new technologies. The business users of each department would bring with them an authentic end-user’s perspective in shaping their own DPA projects, while the CoE would help them in leveraging the right platforms and guiding them throughout the journey.
Embracing an approach that blends decentralized execution, business-user involvement and dedicated DPA expertise is imperative for an organization to drive DPA initiatives pervasively and realize the full benefits of automation.
Senior Vice President and Head of CoE, Digital Process Automation at Happiest Minds Technologies, comes with over 23+ years of experience across Business Consulting, Analytics and Automation. He has worked as a consultant in Operations Transformation, IT Strategy, Outsourcing and has led the Global Analytics capability in the areas like Risk Analytics, Marketing Analytics and Supply Chain Analytics.
Sundar studied Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Delhi and is a gold medalist in Marketing & Finance from XLRI Jamshedpur.
