Author: Apratim Ghosh
Quality is a critical requirement in the manufacturing industry. High-quality products lead to several far-reaching benefits, including a stronger market position, competitive advantage, customer loyalty, and increased revenues. However, manually conducting quality control checks or relying on security cameras to monitor worker activity is time-consuming and cumbersome.
Increasing consumer focus on product quality and safety and evolving regulations demand a more fool-proof and innovative way to transform quality.
As quality becomes a differentiating factor across the manufacturing production line, there is an urgent and widespread need to move beyond traditional quality control techniques. Learn how computer vision fits the bill!
The Limitations Of Traditional Quality Control Approaches
Traditional approaches to manufacturing quality control often fall short of meeting the complex needs of modern-day quality requirements. With regulations constantly evolving, companies in the manufacturing sector are under immense pressure to ensure their products meet the necessary quality and safety standards.
Any deviation from the expected level of quality can lead to far-reaching consequences, impacting product quality, diluting business reputation, and resulting in hefty fines by regulatory bodies. Let’s look at the are some of the drawbacks of traditional approaches to quality control:
- Inconsistent results: Manually conducting quality checks can lead to inconsistent results. Since different teams might use different approaches and tools for quality control, it can lead to variability.
- Exhaustion: Quality teams that rely on manual approaches to quality control often experience fatigue and exhaustion in the long run.
- Error-prone: Using traditional tools and manual efforts is also known to result in errors and subjective quality assessments.
- Time-consuming: Manual approaches to quality control are also extremely time-consuming, affecting overall production speed and efficiency.
- Reactive: Manually viewing security camera footage for assessing worker behavior only provides evidence via stored tapes and cannot prevent quality issues from happening.
The Business Case for Computer Vision
Computer vision technology helps overcome the inherent challenges of manual quality control approaches. Underpinned by advanced automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and deep learning capabilities, computer vision significantly enhances the capabilities of traditional quality control systems. Through real-time monitoring and analysis of manufacturing processes, modern AI vision quality inspection copilots can help prevent quality incidents and pave the way for intelligent surveillance.
Today, these AI copilots are revolutionizing quality control, utilizing a multitude of algorithms for quality inspection results. Systems with computer vision technology can interpret and analyze video feeds in real time and offer unparalleled insights for proactive quality control measures.
Here are the top five reasons why businesses should invest in computer vision systems for intelligent surveillance:
1. Zero Human Error: AI vision quality inspection copilots guarantee 100% precision in quality inspection processes without human intervention. Easy to deploy, these AI models can provide accurate results with just a few images and data sets, improving your quality parameters in days rather than months.
2. Proactive Quality Inspection: In manufacturing quality control, computer vision systems use camera images and run algorithms to extract relevant insights. For instance, they can assess features like color, size, and shape of manufactured components and spot any deviations from the desired quality standards.
3. Behavior Analysis: Computer vision technology results in smarter, more efficient monitoring of production processes. By harnessing the power of real-time analytics, businesses can process and analyze vast amounts of visual data and enable rapid and accurate decision-making. For instance, computer vision algorithms can be trained to recognize and analyze human behavior patterns. This can help detect unsafe practices and trigger suitable responses.
4. Anomaly Detection: Computer vision technology greatly benefits in detecting anomalies in production processes. Utilizing deep learning architectures, it can inspect raw materials and finished goods for defects and ensure the highest level of quality. Unlike manual spotting, which is tiring and cumbersome, computer vision allows fast and accurate detection of unwanted or threatening objects. For instance, computer vision-enabled surveillance systems can scan raw materials to identify incorrect dimensions and prevent them from being used further in manufacturing.
5. Video Summarization: Manufacturers can also automate video summarization with computer vision technology. Instead of watching security camera footage in its entirety, they can quickly and comprehensively understand red flags. For instance, intelligent surveillance systems can generate a synopsis of captured footage, directing quality inspectors to the exact incidence of error.
6. Proactive Alerting: Computer vision systems can also trigger alarms whenever a spurious activity occurs. For example, the technology can inspect finished goods to identify damaged ones and alert staff to take them off the delivery line.
Revolutionize Quality Control with Computer Vision
Computer vision is a pivotal component of modern-day quality control, with applications extending far beyond traditional surveillance. Replacing traditional quality control with intelligent AI capabilities can perform a range of sophisticated analytics and contribute significantly to higher levels of security and quality.
From behavioral analysis to anomaly detection, video summarization, and proactive alerts, AI vision systems enable smarter, more responsive quality monitoring and control.
Looking to revolutionize quality control checks into a pillar of reliability and precision? Explore InovarTech’s AI copilot, VisionGuard, and learn how it allows flawless quality control via zero human error and total AI precision.
Customer service in the B2C domain has gone through a “rollercoaster” wave since the end of the global pandemic. 72% of customers plan to remain loyal to brands that provide fast and exceptional customer service. 78% of customer service agents find it challenging to balance between speed and quality of service. This has increased from just 63% in 2020. Rising service-related work pressure has increased labor turnover by 19% in customer servicing teams.
According to this McKinsey article, two-thirds of millennials expect to receive real-time customer service. Three-fourths expect a consistent cross-channel experience. It comes as no surprise that more companies are turning to AI technology to scale their customer service to the next level.
In this blog, let’s learn more about how AI can be leveraged to deliver highly personalized customer service even at scale.
What is AI-powered Customer Service?
AI-powered customer service is all about leveraging AI technology to scale every aspect of customer’s interactions with the brand. Depending on business requirements, customer support teams can utilize this technology in different ways.
For instance, AI-enabled chatbots can provide immediate responses to customer queries, instead of making them wait for a human response. According to HubSpot, 90% of customers rate it important to receive a prompt response (within 10 minutes) from service agents.
How does this benefit customer-focused companies? Besides increasing engagement, AI-enabled customer service tools can provide cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Besides, it works to reduce manual work, thus also the operational cost of customer support.
A Zendesk CX Trends report also found that customers are now comfortable with companies collecting their personal information. This enables companies to provide a personalized experience to their customers.
In 2024, 80% of customers have had a positive experience while interacting with an AI-powered customer service tool.
How does AI-powered customer service deliver a personalized experience at scale? Here are some ways:
- Leveraging customer data and insights
76% of customers want companies to leverage their data to provide a personalized experience,
With AI technology, customer support teams can have a more personalized interaction with customers. This requires them to completely understand the customer profile. On initiating this interaction, AI-powered tools provide customer service agents to understand their:
- Customer intent
- Preferred language
- Current sentiment
In turn, this is effective at improving the agent’s productivity and efficiency in addressing the customer query or problem.
- Self-servicing capabilities
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more customers started to migrate to self-service digital channels as their “first point of interaction.” 81% of customers try to take care of their issues before contacting a live agent.
AI-powered self-servicing tools leverage their ability to process natural language to understand customer queries and provide appropriate solutions. Using resources like knowledge bases and FAQs, AI in customer service can quickly find answers to customer queries – without having to wait for human intervention.
To assist customers, self-service portals can help them find their solutions, thus saving both time and effort.
- Predictive analytics
AI-enabled predictive analytics tools can drive more “precise and scalable” personalization. Using predictive analytics, companies can utilize customer data to anticipate their needs and behavior patterns. These insights allow them to:
- Address their customer queries proactively.
- Allocate optimum resources.
- Personalize the customer interaction.
By integrating predictive analytics into customer service, companies can continuously improve prediction models and stay “tuned” to customer preferences. To improve their prediction efficiencies, AI-powered models analyze various data sources including:
- Customer interactions
- Customer feedback and surveys
- Transactional data and buying history
- Social media
- Sentiment analysis
With its natural language processing or NLP capability, AI tools in customer service can easily understand and interpret human language. This can help this tool understand human sentiment and take appropriate actions. Besides this, AI-powered sentiment analysis tools can gauge the customer’s brand perception from:
- Customer feedback.
- Product (or service) reviews.
- Social media posts.
How does sentiment analysis improve customer service? Companies can use these AI-driven insights to personalize their customer experience and respond appropriately to their concerns. Besides, by using machine learning algorithms, sentiment analysis tools can detect “fake” reviews with 85% accuracy.
- Chatbots
According to the Zendesk CX Trends report, companies using AI in customer service could resolve issues 30% faster. AI-powered chatbots are crucial for providing faster responses and answers. Beyond simply answering customer queries, chatbots are delivering a personalized experience by:
- Greeting customers in a personalized tone.
- Guiding them through relevant business processes.
- Routing more complex queries to the right customer support agent.
Effectively, an AI-enabled chatbot acts as a “virtual buddy” that understands individual customer’s needs and preferences.
- Hyper-personalization
By combining AI technology with data and analytics, companies can now “hyper-personalize” their customer service. According to this Deloitte report, companies can hyper-personalize the entire customer journey including:
- Attracting customers with targeted marketing messages.
- Providing dynamic pricing to individual customers.
- Providing personalized services after the purchase.
Through hyper-personalization, companies can customize their products and customer services based on their data, preferences, and behaviors. Their real challenge lies in how to scale personalization without “overwhelming” the customer. Using AI technology, they can deliver personalized content that is in tune with changing customer behaviors and preferences.
Conclusion
Customer engagement is a focus point for companies of all sizes worldwide. As customers expect more personalized experiences, AI-powered customer service is the answer to keeping them engaged and loyal.
At InovarTech, we help you leverage AI technology for your business benefits. Our AI-enabled data analytics can scale your business to the next level. Get in touch with us to know more!
Remember the famous Apple tagline – ‘Think Different.’?
Well, it turns out that thinking differently and innovating is still crucial for a company’s survival and success. All disruptive companies – be it Apple, Google, Amazon, or Airbnb are examples of companies that dared to think differently and innovate.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, fostering a culture of innovation is not just a necessity but a gateway to staying ahead of the curve. It’s an opportunity for companies to think beyond the conventional and meet the ever-changing market demands and customer expectations.
Companies now expect teams to bring a unique and fresh perspective to the table instead of limiting themselves to cookie-cutter solutions.
This change in expectations has raised an important question on the role of domain experts.
The Role of Domain Experts in Modern Organizations
A domain expert deeply understands an industry, technologies, frameworks, and best practices.
- They can understand the business needs and challenges and recommend solutions to solve them. For example, a banking domain expert will be well aware of all the processes in a bank and suggest process automation or optimization to improve customer experience.
- They can set up workflows or implement new technologies that help companies achieve their business goals.
- They leverage their deep business knowledge to choose the right solution for a business problem. For example, they can help companies choose the right cloud service provider that fits their budget and business needs and migrate the workload from on-premise to the cloud.
- They can provide the most cost-effective and best solution to the company.
They implement solutions and frameworks that they know can improve a company’s productivity and profitability.
They are a valuable asset to your team if you want solutions to a domain, process, or tool-related problem.
However, the real challenge arises when a problem requires innovative solutions. This applies especially to the current business environment, where technologies, trends, and demands evolve at a breakneck speed or when problems require a fresh perspective.
Domain experts often resist new ideas that challenge the status quo, become risk averse, and refuse to consider different perspectives that could solve a problem.
This reluctance to experiment or change perspectives creates a barrier to innovation and prevents companies from launching new products. As a result, companies lose the opportunity to generate more revenue and gain a competitive edge.
The only way to address this problem is to go beyond domain expertise and promote innovative thinking.
Here are a few ways to do that:
- Encourage cross-pollination of ideas
Since domain experts are exposed to a single domain, they cannot always bring new perspectives and experiences from different fields. Encourage cross-functional teams from diverse disciplines and experiences to collaborate and exchange ideas. For example, a fresh perspective from a non-domain expert can help you use existing technologies in unique ways. This will allow them to draw inspiration from each other and spark a cross-pollination of ideas that could lead to innovation.
- Bring unconventional and fresh perspectives to the table
Conventional wisdom and limited perspective due to prolonged exposure to a single domain often bog down domain experts. They limit their innovative thinking and hesitate to think differently. Such constraints do not limit non-domain experts. They are more flexible in considering, applying, and testing alternative approaches and methodologies to solve a problem. An unconventional approach also opens the door for building new solutions and business models that earn profits for the company.
- Balance between domain expertise and innovative mindset
No two processes or businesses are the same, even if they belong to the same industry. Thus, a one-size-fits-all solution would not help solve problems or build innovative products. This could result in an outcome that would look the same as that of the competitors, and you could lose out on creating a competitive advantage. Building a synergetic culture between domain and non-domain experts is essential. A domain expert will provide the necessary domain expertise and knowledge to implement a solution, and the innovative mindset of a non-domain expert can help companies think of creative solutions to a problem. This collaborative effort will help you build unconventional products and solutions that delight the customers and give your company an edge over competitors.
Use “The Art of The Possible” Approach to Think and Achieve the Impossible
If you want to build products that stand out from competitors and find a possibility in an idea that might seem impossible to launch, you need to shake up the status quo and don the innovator’s hat. You need to design a framework and a flexible approach that will help you visualize innovative solutions that can accelerate your growth in the digital transformation journey.
At Inovar, we help you do that with our ‘The Art of the Possible.’ approach.
Through this approach, you’ll learn:
- How to find inspiring ideas for your digital transformation journey regardless of your company size and industry.
- Ideate with different teams to find opportunities to capitalize.
- Innovate using a game-changing roadmap and stay relevant by adopting and leveraging the benefits of the ever-changing tools and technologies.
- Integrate our experience of working with different industries and technologies to find the perfect strategy for implementing your idea.
This will help you define the project scope, understand user gaps and customer pain points, conceptualize ideas to address the pain points, and visualize the future experience of your solution.
Contact us to know more about the approach.
Wrap-Up
Continuous innovation is the only way for companies to meet customer needs and stay ahead of competitors. Domain expertise, while essential, will not always help you think differently. It requires a change in mindset and less resistance to innovation.
Take Tesla, for instance. It wouldn’t have reached the height it did if it had solely relied on domain experts alone or did not dare to re-imagine the auto industry. The automaker studied innovative companies from within and outside the industry, understood the opportunities and gaps in the industry, developed its core competencies, and differentiated itself from other traditional players. They learned from different domains – from players in battery technology, solar energy, software engineering, and aerospace and incorporated their insights to become a leader in the space of electric vehicles.
So, don’t limit your ideas to follow a cookie-cutter approach. Use our Art of the Possible approach to encourage the non-domain experts in your company to contribute to the ideation process and build differentiated solutions and products.
Successfully building a digital transformation strategy and implementing and executing it can get extremely challenging. Especially for organizations that have accumulated generations of technologies, the path to successful business transformation is laden with obstacles that hinder outcomes. If you want to set the right foot forward, you need to identify the right opportunities, develop the right strategies, and invest in the right tools.
Learn how an implementation partner like InovarTech can build custom plugins for Copilot Teams and Copilot Studio, enabling your business to be more agile, responsive, and competitive.
Unleashing Productivity with Copilot
As advancements in artificial intelligence surge, tools like Copilot Teams and Copilot Studio are unleashing the next level of productivity. Built with large language models and armed with various automation capabilities, Copilot seamlessly works along several everyday tools to make humans more productive, efficient, and creative.
From senior leaders to marketing professionals, frontline agents to shop floor workers, Copilot offers features that streamline tasks, automate workflows, and enhance collaboration. Employees across the organization can use Copilot to unlock productivity and creativity and adapt to the ever-changing business landscape.
Here are some ways organizations can exploit the capabilities of Copilot:
- Customer service agents can use Copilot to automate responses and provide instant and around-the-clock customer support.
- Team leaders can use Copilot to summarize meeting discussion points and allocate responsibilities accordingly.
- Sales teams can embrace Copilot to integrate sales insights into their workflow, personalize content, and close more deals.
- Financial analysts can leverage the power of Copilot to automate data analysis and analyze critical market information in minutes.
- Copilot can enable HR teams to streamline benefits and compensation or even gather and act on employee feedback and increase engagement
- Marketing teams can use Copilot to understand market sentiment and curate proposals catering to customers’ pulse.
- Risk management teams can use Copilot to analyze large datasets, predict potential risks, and pivot as necessary.
- Copilot can deliver much-needed coding assistance to programmers, reducing time spent on routine tasks and focusing on solving bigger problems and driving innovation.
Tailoring Copilot Experiences with InovarTech
The right team of strategists, designers, and developers can enable organizations to transform business capabilities into consumable services and applications that users love to use. Such a team can help build and execute a digital-first strategy and enable organizations to implement and extend modern tools to accelerate your growth.
When it comes to making the most of Copilot, the right partner can help customize features or tailor the overall experience using Copilot Studio. Built on the foundations of leading conversational AI technologies and interoperable with Azure AI Studio, the partner can customize Copilot by building custom plugins to tailor responses to common scenarios and enable greater control and efficiency. They can also help create your own Copilots and GPTs incorporating your data and enabling engaging interactions.
Here’s how a partner like InovarTech can enable business transformation with the power of Copilot Teams and Copilot Studio:
- Automate Common Workflows: Using the power of Copilot Studio, InovarTech teams can help you navigate the intricacies of your day-to-day processes. We can streamline complex business tasks through intelligent automation, such as submitting expenses, onboarding employees, managing leaves, etc.
- Tailor Conversations: For users who need to send out specific responses, a partner can help design tailored conversations. For instance, they can enable sales teams to send out the right response when they receive customer sales inquiries.
- Summarize Meetings: The right partner can help unlock high workforce productivity levels with Copilot in Teams and enable teams to engage in effective meetings. Custom plugins can help you summarize key discussion points, suggest action items, and allocate the next steps to appropriate members.
- Customize Prompts: Several important discussions happen during meetings that must be referred to for future steps. An expert implementation partner can help you get the insight you need from important discussions. From disagreements to follow-up questions, different perspectives, action items, and more. They can customize Teams prompts, allowing you to wrap up meetings with clear next steps.
- Uncover Answers: Copilot doesn’t just help automate tasks or curate summaries. The right partner can help direct your Copilot to multiple data sources, including external websites and internal knowledge bases, so you can get answers to questions in minutes. For instance, customer service agents can enter questions on SharePoint and have Copilot generate instant answers, help, and guidance from different SharePoint sites.
- Manage Integrations: A partner can help extend Copilot capabilities to other apps and systems within our business. Using plugins and custom extensions, they can enable your Copilot to access and use third-party data from apps such as Jira, Dynamics 365, Bing Web Search, SAP, ServiceNow, Box, and more. Based on your requirements, the partner can enable, disable, assign, block, or remove plugins for Copilot while ensuring the highest level of data privacy.
Copilot Use Cases
Copilot can be used by different teams to meet different requirements; here are some popular use cases:
- Use copilot as your personal assistant to create emails, summarize meetings, and generate a list of action items.
- Have Copilot analyze a particular data set and build intuitive visualizations from the data via a simple prompt.
- Leverage Copilot to find information from existing documents or the web and prepare a synopsis for quicker understanding.
- Make Copilot your hub for all work by integrating it with existing tools and act on real-time data.
As businesses look to better compete in a volatile and highly competitive world, Copilot paves the way for high levels of productivity and efficiency. Reimagine your current digital technology landscape with Copilot-enabled solutions that will take your business to the next level. Whether you’re looking for end-to-end Copilot implementation or a custom agile solution for a particular use case, our team of experts and long-standing experience in transforming businesses from legacy to modern can make you stay relevant for generations to come.
Partner with us to:
- Solve complex problems using the power of Copilot
- Integrate Copilot with the apps you use to run your business
- Get a comprehensive view of data across the enterprise
- Create a unified user experience and enable a single source of truth
Recent years have seen the complete digital transformation of the modern workplace. A Foundry study found that 93% of companies have (or planning to) adopt a digital-first business strategy.
As more companies embrace hybrid working environments, they need innovative technology to align communication between in-office and remote workers.
A recent Microsoft study found that 43% of remote-working employees do not feel included in team meetings. In the ever-changing workplace landscape, organizations need a digital platform (or tool) for team collaboration, information sharing, and communication.
As Microsoft’s collaboration platform, SharePoint has a critical role to play in the modern workplace. What makes SharePoint unique is its ability to integrate different organizational activities. Using SharePoint, companies can easily integrate “traditional” applications like content management, process management, and business intelligence on a single platform.
Here’s a look at six ways SharePoint can prepare companies for the future of work:
- Team Collaboration
As modern workplaces become distributed, effective team collaboration is a necessity. With the SharePoint Team Sites, SharePoint facilitates team collaboration by creating dedicated spaces for organizational teams. In this digital space, teams can share documents and collaborate for their next project from any location.
As part of the MS Office suite of products, SharePoint is integrated with Microsoft’s productivity tools like MS Word and Excel, thus delivering a consistent user experience.
SharePoint Online also allows project teams to brainstorm and share “great” ideas, or simply share the latest documents for immediate approval or review. SharePoint is also easily integrated with Microsoft Teams, thus enabling real-time collaboration.
- Remote Access and Mobility
As a cloud-powered collaboration platform, SharePoint Online is a centralized hub where employees can add or access documents from any geographical location. With more employees opting for remote work, they require real-time access to business applications from any location and on any device.
Using SharePoint Mobile, remote users can access shared documents and stay connected using their mobile devices. They can also stay informed on the company’s latest updates (without being physically present on the office premises). SharePoint tools are available on all Android, Apple, and Windows devices.
- Regulatory Compliance and Data Security
In the age of stringent industry regulations, businesses must reduce the risk of litigation by storing their sensitive data with maximum security and privacy. SharePoint provides compliant document management, thus ensuring that only authorized users have access to business and customer data. Besides, SharePoint enables administrators to configure access permissions for individual files, folders, websites, and web applications.
With functionalities like Data loss prevention (DLP) and eDiscovery, SharePoint also protects sensitive data, thus ensuring regulatory compliance.
- AI capabilities using CoPilot
Thanks to its AI capabilities, SharePoint is redefining online content creation and optimization. With the AI-powered Copilot feature, SharePoint is simplifying the modern workplace by allowing users to create and modify SharePoint-powered websites and webpages.
This level of AI-powered content creation goes much beyond checking for spelling and grammar. It can help generate high-quality content (through intelligent edits) and offer content recommendations and layout designs. This AI feature can also adapt to the organization’s brand voice and design style, thus providing consistent content.
- Business Intelligence
SharePoint’s integration with business intelligence (BI) enables employees to act upon relevant information collected from disparate sources. SharePoint’s BI functionality displays valuable information in the form of “visual” dashboards and graphs, which can simplify decision-making.
Besides, SharePoint allows business users to personalize their views according to their requirements. With its integration with Microsoft’s Power BI tool, SharePoint users can generate and share data-driven reports. They can also embed interactive Power BI reports into online web pages.
- Customization
Customization is one capability necessary in the modern workplace. With SharePoint Online, enterprises can customize this tool to suit their business needs. For instance, they can deploy or use SharePoint as a document management tool or as a centralized digital platform to maintain employee engagement.
Additional customization features include the ability for end-users to create, modify, and design SharePoint projects according to their specific requirements. Further, SharePoint is easy to integrate with Office 365 applications including MS Teams, OneDrive, and MS Outlook. With this integration, organizations can create a cohesive workplace, thus facilitating communication and collaboration.
Leveraging the Power of SharePoint
As organizations adapt to the new “normal” mode of working, the SharePoint tool is now an indispensable part of the modern digital workplace. Besides document management, this platform facilitates collaboration and automation.
With its role as a SharePoint consulting company, InovarTech can help you fully leverage the capabilities of this innovative Microsoft platform. Our team of experienced SharePoint professionals can assist you with designing, development, migration, and configuration.
Download our SharePoint migration and modernization whitepaper for free today. Book a free SharePoint consultation with our team today.
Businesses across sectors have long been leveraging technologies like automation to enhance workforce productivity, improve system efficiency, and drive better business results. Yet, when it comes to accelerating the decision-making process, many hit a roadblock. Given the sheer pace of change, making quick and effective decisions requires organizations to look beyond automation and open doors to the world of intelligent automation.
Read on to explore the need for and benefits of intelligent automation and the steps you must take to orchestrate a seamless transition to intelligent automation.
The Need for Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation, also called cognitive automation, leverages automation technologies such as business process management (BPM) and robotic process automation (RPA), along with artificial intelligence (AI), to accelerate and scale decision-making across the organization. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, rapidly processing information, and quickly identifying patterns in data, human resources can focus more time on strategic tasks at hand.
Through automated analysis of large volumes of data, intelligent automation simplifies processes, leading to:
- Improved productivity: Intelligent automation reduces the cognitive load on humans, leading to better productivity and quicker decision-making. For instance, manufacturing firms facing challenges in managing purchase requisitions can leverage intelligent automation to automate the approval process. This can help minimize the number of people required for the process while also automating the tracking of different requests – thus improving productivity and accelerating operations.
- Continuous improvement: With intelligent automation, humans can cut down on the many steps needed to accomplish certain tasks. Completing mundane and error-prone tasks for people and providing valuable insights to decision-makers, can help kick-start a continuous improvement cycle. For example, while onboarding new customers, teams can get intelligent insights on how they can speed up the onboarding process, thereby reducing the turnaround time. For example, healthcare organizations struggling to conduct health assessments and maintain accurate records of patients can embrace intelligent automation to expedite manual tasks, eliminate multiple steps involved in data management, and generate comprehensive medical reports.
- Reduced errors: Manually going through forms and entering data into systems is a highly time-consuming and error-prone process. Through the intelligent automation of data entry efforts that are most frequently erroneous, teams can prevent miscalculations and ensure the efficiency of processes. For example, HR teams dealing with goal management can use intelligent automation to overcome errors associated with manual goal-setting and tracking, address inconsistencies in operations, and receive automated notifications and reminders for goal updates.
- Optimized costs: Intelligent automation offers the ability to deal with exceptions and anomalies that might emerge in day-to-day operations – thus minimizing the impact and cost of damage. For instance, large MNCs can exploit the capabilities of intelligent automation to streamline license and compliance management, thus improving compliance with evolving regulations and curtailing the costs of non-compliance.
- Better customer satisfaction: Intelligent automation can also allow for better customer satisfaction. For example, suppliers dealing with assets via work order management can use intelligent automation to streamline workflows to reduce errors and manage work orders from creation to completion – leading to better customer satisfaction.
- Easier scalability: Using intelligent automation, manufacturers can more effectively predict and adjust production to respond to changes in supply and demand. For example, startups looking to enable peer-to-peer lending can use intelligent automation to automate the document validation process, pick the right investors based on their risk appetite, and seamlessly onboard more vendors as the business grows.
Roadblocks to Adopting Intelligent Automation
Despite the disruptive benefits of intelligent automation, enterprise-wide adoption comes with several challenges:
- Privacy concerns: One of the biggest roadblocks to intelligent automation adoption is around data privacy. Since intelligent automation algorithms often collect and analyze personal, financial, and demographic data, they raise several privacy concerns among individuals and regulatory bodies.
- Data quality issues: Intelligent automation solutions need highly accurate, consistent, and constantly updated data to work their charm. Poor data quality often dilutes intelligent automation efforts while leading to inaccurate and unfavorable results.
- Poor data governance: The lack of proper data governance also impedes intelligent automation while raising several ethical concerns. In the absence of a robust strategy, intelligent automation systems can act on inaccurate or biased data, snowballing to unfavorable and erroneous outcomes.
- Lack of skillsets: Successfully transitioning to intelligent automation requires the knowledge and efforts of skilled resources. Lack of appropriate talent often makes it difficult to maximize the ROI of intelligent automation.
- Workforce resistance: The adoption of intelligent automation is also often met with widespread employee resistance. The fear that AI technologies might displace human workers leads to limited acceptance and hence, restricted benefits.
- Change management: Bringing intelligent automation into the organization demands several changes to be made to existing processes. This requires strong change management policies to make changes to critical systems, maintain employee experiences, and minimize disruptions to ongoing operations,
Best Practices for Success
If you want to successfully transition from simple automation to intelligent automation, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Have clarity on intelligent automation objectives: Intelligent automation isn’t just about implementing a system and expecting transformative results. You must first have clarity on the goals you are trying to achieve through implementation. It can be anything from improving productivity to reducing errors, lowering costs, or more.
- Build a robust strategy: Once you know the goals you want to achieve, you must build your intelligent automation strategy. Make sure to link your strategy with larger business goals and get the necessary leadership support and funding for your project. Build a robust implementation roadmap and document important milestones, critical challenges, and expected results.
- Invest in the right skill sets: Investing in the right skill sets is a critical aspect of intelligent automation. You can either upskill your existing workforce on technologies like AI, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, etc., hire new resources with these skills, or engage with qualified vendors who can provide access to required talent on demand.
- Eliminate barriers to scalability: Eliminating roadblocks and inefficiencies that eat into profits is extremely important for intelligent automation success. Such elimination can help your intelligent automation project scale more efficiently.
- Reengineer existing processes: Integrating intelligent automation into the existing technology landscape requires sufficient reengineering and revamping of processes. Low-code and no-code solutions are great options to tweak current tools and processes or create new ones, thus ensuring a strong foundation for successful intelligent automation.
- Prepare and cleanse data: Intelligent automation systems need to be fed accurate and clean data, so they can make the right decisions. To ensure this, it is important to identify the most valuable data sources, aggregate, clean, and analyze various types of information, and feed them into automation models for improved analytics and maximum effectiveness.
- Ensure data governance: For intelligent automation systems to drive accurate, ethical, and unbiased decisions, a proper data governance strategy is extremely essential. Make sure to build a high-level governance plan and define goals to improve data quality, guide resource allocation, and enable greater return on investment.
- Train and educate: If you want to ensure your intelligent automation systems are used to their maximum efficiency, you must train and educate your employees. Training employees on how best to utilize these systems and addressing their concerns periodically is sure to enable long-term business benefits.
As artificial intelligence continues to seep across the business world, its significance in the realm of automation cannot be understated. Automation technologies like BPA and RPA, when combined with the power of AI, open doors to several transformative benefits. From improved productivity to quicker and more accurate decision-making, reduced errors to minimized costs, better customer experience to strong brand reputation and more – intelligent automation is the only way forward.
Create long-term business value and ensure symphony with InovarTech. Contact us to know more!
In today’s fast-paced global business environment, process automation has become the need of the hour. Automation, when paired with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, can play a vital role in transforming businesses and delivering best-in-class products and services to end customers.
Yet, the dependence on legacy systems and manual efforts makes it difficult for organizations to keep up with changing business needs and market fluctuations. Read on to learn more about the challenges organizations face in their day-to-day operations and how Power Apps helps overcome them via intelligent automation.
Common Business Challenges
As businesses look to compete in today’s volatile business environment, they come face-to-face with many challenges that restrict them from achieving their goals.
- Legacy systems: Most organizations continue to operate on a foundation of rigid, inflexible, and unsecured legacy systems. Built using proprietary technologies and offering a rather poor user experience, these systems are complex, and costly to maintain and dilute productivity. They also restrict the organization’s ability to respond to changing market conditions. It is estimated that at least $1.14 trillion is spent on the maintenance of legacy systems.
- Restricted data sharing: When teams work in silos and rely on systems that are poorly integrated, there is restricted data sharing. Outdated technology makes these systems incompatible with newer systems, resulting in poor decision-making.
- Manual efforts: Despite the emergence of automation technologies, the manual overload on the modern workforce is substantial. Employees who are compelled to do most of their tasks manually face several issues, including poor morale, excessive burnout, and the inability to meet business objectives on time. Large financial institutions incur costs upward of $500 million a year by relying on manual customer due diligence processes.
- Over-dependence on IT teams: As technology gets increasingly integrated into the day-to-day workings of any business, there is also an over-dependence on IT teams. From addressing minor user experience issues to building new apps, solving integration problems, system failures, data loss, and more, today’s IT teams are overburdened with several competing priorities, leaving no time for strategic IT work.
- Poor collaboration: With the hybrid work model here to stay, many businesses continue to face challenges in driving effective collaboration. With employees using different tools and working from different time zones, working together on projects and resolving issues in real time doesn’t come easy. According to a recent study, 86% of employees cite the lack of effective communication and collaboration as the main cause of workplace failure.
The Business Case for PowerApps
Automation seems to be the first solution organizations embrace to solve business problems, streamline processes, and enhance decision-making. But in today’s era of volatility and change, simple automation tools are not enough. These tools need to be combined with advanced AI and ML technologies to deliver true business value.
Microsoft Power Apps empowers users to build and leverage apps using the power of AI. As an intelligent automation tool, it allows users to make use of low-code/no-code capabilities and build the apps they need, regardless of their coding capability. By enabling organizations of all types and sizes to quickly build custom applications, Power Apps aids in the automation of workflows, driving high levels of agility, efficiency, and innovation in a fast-paced digital environment.
Power Apps’ AI-enabled development, low-code capabilities, and enterprise-grade governance allow organizations to:
- Simplify development and integration using trusted tools, extend app capabilities to specific tasks and roles, and reduce application development costs by 45%. For example, HR teams can build apps to get real-time visibility into employee data across training, leaves, and attendance, skills, and more.
- Automate complex processes using the power of AI and have Copilot design the app they need. For example, finance teams can curate apps to digitize physical documents, automate the KYC process, and onboard customers quickly and more efficiently.
- Improve workforce productivity via streamlined processes and improve business outcomes, resulting in business benefits of over $14.25 million. For instance, operations teams can use Power Apps to count objects in a warehouse or receive AI-powered insights into real-time inventory.
- Ensure secure data sharing by making the most of advanced security and compliance capabilities. For instance, sales and marketing teams can connect disparate systems and share critical information about customers as they progress through the sales funnel.
Streamlining Power Apps Implementation – The Role of a Partner
Power Apps can help overcome many of the challenges organizations face daily. However, like any other technology implementation, there are many things to keep in mind while embracing Power Apps:
- As a cloud-native system, Power Apps requires organizations to have some level of cloud maturity. Those not completely cloud-based are likely to have a few hurdles in realizing its full potential.
- Power Apps’ ease of use puts the governance and scalability of the apps built by citizen developers a major issue. While this might not be an issue for small or localized implementations, the consequences might be far-reaching for enterprise-wide rollouts.
- Licensing is another issue that comes with adopting Power Apps. Since the costs of embracing Power Apps depend on several factors like team size, existing Office 365 licenses, and capabilities, most organizations struggle with choosing the right plan.
- Configuring Power Apps and ensuring they meet necessary functionality, performance, and availability requirements is another challenge that organizations face.
- When employees who have created apps using Power Apps leave the organization, maintaining and managing these apps becomes difficult.
- While building apps, existing data sources are completely exposed to citizen developers, which increases the risk of data theft, misuse, or breach.
Successful Power Apps adoption requires the right approach and skill sets. A qualified partner can streamline the implementation process, allowing for long-term business benefits.
With a Power Apps partner in tow, organizations can:
- Undergo a detailed discovery session, understand the business case for Power Apps implementation, and address their immediate pain points, both from an IT and business perspective.
- Get a detailed roadmap on how best to maximize value from Power Apps implementation and accentuate enterprise-level delivery.
- Make the right decisions on which users can build apps to minimize the risks of shadow IT and data misuse.
- Build a robust data security strategy, ensuring data is always encrypted and only accessed via strong access control mechanisms.
- Understand and resolve larger business problems via comprehensive process automation, the integration of data-driven decision systems, and the adoption of collaborated enterprise analytics.
- Achieve economies of scale via well-planned integration of Power Apps with various existing enterprise applications.
- Get much-needed assistance on a Power Apps licensing model that makes the most sense for their users and business use case.
As businesses drive efforts in enabling intelligent automation across various processes, Power Apps paves the way for high levels of efficiency, reliability, and agility. Although Power Apps allows organizations to solve business problems, streamline processes, automate tasks, and enhance decision-making, an implementation partner can provide vital guidance and tips for the best results.
Learn how InovarTech can help you create true business value with automation!
Last year, Google officially bid goodbye to the futuristic Google Glasses launched in 2013.
It failed because of its clunky design, high cost, and customers’ concerns about data breaches and hacking.
Amazon’s Fire Phone met a similar fate. The company launched the smartphone in 2014. However, it never gained popularity because of its bulky design, limited apps compared to Android and Apple, and unaffordable prices.
Both products failed because the companies did not fully understand the market and customer needs. Amazon, for example, underestimated the popularity of Google Play Store, Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail. Customers could not access these popular apps, which became one of the main reasons for Fire Phone’s downfall.
Like Amazon and Google, many companies fail to see their innovations succeed. According to Harvard Business School, that number could be between 70% to 90%.
Failure in innovation could happen due to various reasons:
- Lack of practicality in ideas: The products were not designed properly, as in the case of Google Glass or Amazon Fire Phone. Google Glass was poorly designed, while Amazon Fire Phones were heavier than other smartphones. The product must address real-world needs and concerns for the idea to succeed.
- Not understanding customer needs: A lack of research and understanding of customer needs could lead to building products that are not useful to customers.
- Lack of alignment with business objectives: Innovation cannot always happen in silos. After all, it involves the company’s resources, time, and money. It must align with the company’s overall objectives to deliver the desired outcomes.
- Not accounting risks: Most companies do not consider risks or unforeseen challenges while developing an innovative product. This could derail the plan and lead to early failures.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to always be this way.
Innovation is not an impossible goal to achieve. At Inovar Tech, we call it the Art of Possible. It opens up a world of new possibilities for experimentation and growth.
To succeed, companies need a practical approach to building innovative products.
Let me explain how it works.
Art of Possible – Bringing Practicality in Innovation
To build innovative products, companies must focus on solving real-world problems rather than building to demonstrate an innovative mindset.
This approach is called practical innovation.
Practical innovation is not just about developing new ideas. It is about turning those ideas into products that deliver tangible results. Innovation and practicality cannot function in silos.
Practicality has to be baked into every step of innovation.
Here are some ways to do it.
- Solve real-world problems
Do thorough research to understand the pain points of the customers. This will help you find solutions that will alleviate the customer’s problems.
- Use multi-pronged approach
Don’t rely on a single approach to solve problems. For example, companies use a single tech stack to build products. A single tech stack could hinder innovation if it has limited features and does not evolve with time.
Use a multi-pronged approach to consider multiple approaches to a problem. For example, multiple tech stacks provide more features and flexibility, making innovation easy.
There may not always be a correct answer, but a multi-pronged approach eliminates the assumption that there’s only one way to solve a problem. It encourages companies to find more solutions to solve problems and innovate.
- Find the balance
Too much focus on creativity and innovation can pose several challenges. For example, complex interfaces and confusing navigation can lead to customer churn. Impractical products with no real-world use case can lead to wasted company resources and reputation damage.
Find a balance between practicality and creativity to overcome these challenges. Define a clear goal, find multiple ways to achieve it, and choose the best solution after a thorough feasibility evaluation.
- Take a customer-centric approach
Create detailed customer personas to understand the customers’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. Build products and features keeping these insights in mind. Once the product is ready, launch it to the most avid users for feedback. Conduct usability tests and customer surveys and seek reviews to identify areas of improvement. Implement their inputs to improve the product.
- Don’t forget the MVP
Don’t get distracted from the objective of building a practical product by including all shiny features. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with critical features and functionalities that solve real-world problems. Release it to the users to gather feedback and improve the product. This approach will accelerate the development cycle and save time on building products nobody wants.
- Iterate always
Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and measure the metrics regularly. This will help you identify areas for improvement and iterate the product to achieve the business goals. Regular iterations will help keep pace with customer demands and stay innovative.
You must also collect feedback from customers and other stakeholders about the product, analyze it, and integrate the key takeaways to improve it.
How To Decode The ‘Art of Possible’?
In a fast-paced business environment, balancing innovation and practicality can become challenging.
At Inovar, we understand this challenge well. That’s why we conduct workshops called the ‘Art of Possible’ to accelerate a company’s journey toward becoming a digital business.
In this workshop, we will walk you through our 4I framework: Inspire, Ideate, Innovate, and Integrate.
In other words, through this workshop, we help you:
- Find inspiration for your digital innovation journey.
- Identify multiple opportunities to generate business ideas and capitalize on them.
- Build a roadmap and guide you through the innovation process.
- Brainstorm multiple strategies and implement the most viable to make the vision a reality.
From discovery to understanding challenges and conceptualizing innovative solutions, we will be with you throughout the process so that you can learn the impossible art of achieving practical innovation.
To know more about our Art of Possible, contact us.