Robotic process automation or RPA has the power and capability to help organizations increase their output and accelerate their digital transformation agenda. The true benefit of RPA rests on the technology’s ability to increase efficiency while reducing costs. There is no surprise that RPA is gaining traction in the market by taking away repetitive manual tasks from the human workforce and freeing them to focus on more critical strategic functions.

6 steps to use RPA in an effective way

1. Identify the process

The first thing is to carry out a thorough assessment of all the operations, within and across various departments, so that you can determine which processes can prove to be good candidates for automation.

2. Manage expectations:

Implementation of RPA is all about managing the people and their expectations. Employees must be informed about the need for automation, its essentiality, and how it is likely to influence the return on investment (ROI). The most important areas in which you need to manage expectations are:

3. Choose the right tool

Another vital task is to have a crystal-clear set of objectives that your company aims towards. There you can follow two criteria. First, you can consider vendor-related criteria, such as their experience or their orientation to future-proof automation solutions.

Another way, you can try to match the RPA software features, like security and screen scraping capabilities, ease of implementation, the total cost of ownership, etc., to your company’s hierarchy of goals and needs.

4. Assessment of ROI

A fine-grained analysis is required for analysis of the feasibility required before successful RPA implementation. It is important for every organization to compare investment against return, and to decide based on this to what extent it is profitable to invest in RPA.

5. Involve your IT team

The members of your IT team can provide critical insight as you choose an RPA tool that meets your business objectives. Their expertise will also be valuable whenever unexpected issues or malfunctions occur. Training for other employees will be also easy with their support.

6. Measuring the performance

Finally, formulate key performance indicators (KPIs) based on which you can find out the success rate of your RPA implementation.

Inovar blends diligence with skill

Inovar delivers state-of-the-art smart solutions by blending diligence with skills. We adhere to the aforementioned steps and identify what processes/functions need to be automated.

Considering the massive importance and benefits of RPA solutions in reducing efforts, improving customer service, and increasing profits, proper implementation becomes pivotal to ensure that every step is duly scrutinized, vetted, and backed.

The pandemic has changed how people around the world live, work, and engage with each other. In late 2019 when covid-19 struck the world, affecting millions of people all over the planet — the healthcare industry was hit the most. The pressing need for resources, information, cost optimization, and supply chain inefficiencies in the sector calls for a major technology overhaul. Therefore, embracing new-age digital technologies is key for healthcare providers in addressing the immediate concerns and driving long-term goals.

Automation makes a revolutionary process change in most of the industries, that has the same or even more potential for the healthcare sector. Introduction of Business Process automation can streamline the healthcare system for simplicity, increase service quality, and manage pen and paper-based manual tasks, saving time and cost without the slightest glitch.

Challenges in Healthcare

Application Disparity: Modern healthcare is a complex environment where many disparate applications work. The complexities also grow with the business. With mergers and acquisitions, modern technologies are adopted to meet new challenges. In this situation managing all technology becomes quite difficult for the healthcare IT departments and business users.

For example, in most healthcare sectors, patient data transfer is still carried out manually in the form of files and documents from one department to another. As the volumes of data are generally high, compiling them in one single process is a tedious and lengthy process. Not to forget, since they are done manually, there is always scope for multiple human errors and miscalculations. The greater the rate of error, the more the cost will be for rectification.

Lack of efficiency in patient service is another challenge that can be a barrier to your organization’s growth and reputation. In most scenarios, customer care executives are busy with paper works and other files and documents compilation that they lack prompt and timely delivery of services to the customers.

I hope you can relate to the problems I discussed above. So now I am going to share how automation becomes an integral part to solve some of healthcare challenges.

 The business automation software works on all programs whether, new applications, legacy programs, cloud-based solutions, or on-prem.

BPA makes human-oriented processes much smoother with greater results like increased speed, productivity, and efficiency. Suppose for a patient, scheduling an appointment with a doctor usually happens online in a matter of minutes, but what happens behind the scenes is a bit more complicated. Healthcare institutions have to collect personal information, diagnosis, insurance details, and confirm the doctor’s availability. If the right information cannot be accessed during the registration process, or if the doctor is not available, it is up to the staff to inform the patient beforehand.

Implementing automation can resolve some of the bottlenecks related to scheduling patient appointments. Bots can automate patient data collection and processing, so patients can be optimally scheduled according to diagnosis, location, doctor availability, and other criteria. By simplifying appointment scheduling, healthcare institutions can focus their efforts on providing exceptional service and other tasks that cannot be automated. Automation tools also enable customer care executives to take the assistance of such tools with automated call and email options.

Inovar proposed Automation Solutions with better ROI

Something similar also happened with one of our US healthcare clients. They were also facing customer support challenges during the pandemic. They were primarily using a pen and paper-based system for information collection and symptom analysis. After the outbreak of the virus, a lot of patients started asking for support in their chatbot regarding diagnosis, vaccination, and other medical support.

With a lot of restrictions, it becomes necessary to give patients the capability to run the assessments on their own from the comfort of their homes. Remote work capability also became especially important, and they needed an infrastructure through which they can achieve that.

To manage the entire scenario, they required VPN, which was not designed for such large-scale use resulting in low bandwidth and frequent outages. Additionally, a lot of the content and manual workflows required the physical presence of the employees on the hospital premises that was quite impossible at that moment.

In this critical situation, the first hurdle to cross was to get them to a cloud-based solution to ride care facilities across all their nation-level operations and provide the best health support to patients. This would make remote work possible for the hospital staff in case they were showing symptoms and had to quarantine at home.

In this situation, Inovar helped a leading US healthcare organization to automate their Covid-19 Helpdesk and Registration process from a pen and paper-based manual system to a cloud-based automated solution.

SharePoint Online became the choice of the platform along with Power Platform as their primary productivity technologies allowed them to create a technology framework with a built-in rapid growth mechanism and assist hospital staff to manage the entire remote work process.

With the implementation of the initial solution, the healthcare organization was also facing challenges to roll out the solution in all other locations of the US that becomes much fair with SharePoint and the power platform.

A simple but practical experience gained a high adoption rate within the healthcare organization. The organization’s IT team also considered it as the best rollout experience with almost a zero-touch provisioning and deployment strategy. Ultimately, with all these solutions 90% of their remote and quarantined caregivers were able to serve the patients over remote calls and Online consultation.

The digitization of call centers was a major bonus as it consisted of Automated Diagnosis for Covid, automatic decision-making capabilities, and other similar tools that ensured self-help services that were non-existent before. This resulted in a reduction of 70% in phone calls.

Businesses transitioning from manual processes to comprehensive workload automation tend to go through several phases on their automation journey. If you are also facing the same difficulties within your organization, then Inovar is the best partner to collaborate with and make your automation journey smoother. Feel free to reach out to us we would love to collaborate!

Jeanne W. Ross (MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research) says-

“Clearly, the thing that’s transforming is not the technology — the technology is transforming you.”

Staying relevant has never been difficult – difficult was, to be adapted to the rapid pace of innovation, drive by the number and variety of new technologies, and most importantly, step forward with the growing economic pressures after the global pandemic. From the “big bang” to the “e-commerce boom” we have surely come a long way. But now digital transformation is probably the real buzzword for e-commerce businesses and global industry leaders.

We could start this article with a definition of digital transformation and why it’s essential for running an e-commerce business in 2021, but that would be boring (as most people aware of digital transformation and its benefits) – so we won’t. Instead, we decide to focus on the two principal aspects—

  1. What are the driving forces behind the digital transformation in ecommerce?
  2. How will digital transformation drive the future of e-commerce?


Before we dive too deep into this topic, I think it’s valid that first answer the question:

How does COVID-19 affect e-commerce businesses? 

The standardized lockdown rules across the globe and the growing hesitation among consumers to go outside and shop for essential goods have tilted the nation towards e-commerce. Consumers have switched from shops, supermarkets, and shopping malls to online portals for the purchase of products, ranging from basic commodities to branded goods. Since the norm of social distancing has been initiated scope of online purchases and online businesses skyrocket. Many people have embraced the concept of online retail, and the surge in FTUs (First Time Users) on e-commerce sites is visible.

(Source: Statista.com)

As per the statista report, the market opportunities for online commerce in world are expected to touch $740 billion by 2023 from $468 billion in 2017. Based on the data available, the growth in the countries like Indian, Philippines, Malaysia are going to beat other established markets like US, Mexico, China by 2034.

On the downside of things, lack of productivity during the nationwide lockdown resulted in the loss of jobs, pay cuts, and finances. Shutting down shops and family-based businesses has made many people sway towards online retail to meet their financial requirements.

In that situation, digital transformation isn’t jargon extracted from a pretentious keynote speech, it becomes an essential part of staying in business. Now, B2B and B2C companies compete against their online rivals to take a slice of the e-commerce pie, and companies who don’t keep up quickly go bust. The above facts work as a catalyst behind the adoption of digital transformation strategies in e-commerce.

The driving force behind the digital transformation

1. Shoppers are looking for new products online

According to salesforce, 87% of shoppers look for product information and helpful reviews online — even if they plan to make their final purchases in a brick-and-mortar store. Consumers always expect to find up-to-date information and brand contact information quickly and easily.

2. Consumer expectations continue to rise

Modern consumers are now expecting to personalize experience across a range of channels. Have you heard of Omnichannel Marketing? People are enjoying apps and hope their shopping basket to travel from device to device. Hence, you need to cater to your customer base to grow your bottom line.

3. A robust online presence of brand to show value

The majority of growing brands now choose direct-to-consumer, rather than wholesale marketing strategies. The main point behind this: cut out the middleman and make more profit, and consumers get to communicate directly with brand manufacturers. Strong online presence and robust branding are the primary weapons to create a roadmap for success in that type of marketplace.

Now, you have enough reasons to implement digital transformations on the e-commerce platform. But reasons aren’t enough, you also need to know how to implement digital initiatives in your every business touchpoint. Below we describe in detail the digital trends, which will make your work much easier.

 How digital transformation will shape the future trends of e-commerce.

Digital transformation does not have an endpoint, so you won’t have a chance to sit back, dust off your hands, and say, “Right— that’s it.”

Keeping up a digital vision and mindset is the most vital aspect of your organization’s digital transformation. Hence, you should keep a track of your customer expectations to modify your tactics and meet the need of your customer demographic. Instead of worrying many entrepreneurs try to approach change management with a sense of adventure and opportunity so that they can invest in new business processes and reap significant rewards. Let’s look at the principal ways of digital transformation change in e-commerce in the coming future.

1. Technology in the frontline

Only the will to achieve digital transformation is not enough. E-commerce sectors need to acquire and successfully deploy the right technology if their efforts are not to be in vain. To achieve success, e-commerce industry should improvise their IT infrastructure and software — management and maintenance skills must also be in place. Skill shortage in the IT part means rather than looking inward, B2B companies are increasingly having to explore possibilities outside the enterprise for technology provision. This puts a greater emphasis on cloud-based infrastructure and solutions, managed services, and automation.

(Source: centerity.com)

Automation is not necessarily direct AI-related technology — is a necessary step in the development and delivery of digital transformation for e-commerce at this stage. Some widely using automation processes are natural language processing (NLP), and cognitive automation, robotic process automation in conjunction with AI, and others. Here I want to highlight the top five ways to leverage automation for e-commerce business—


2. Significance of big data and analytics in enhancing personalization

Big data is one of the substantial parts of e-commerce digital transformation. Giant retailers use this technology to provide consumers with highly personalize shopping experiences.

You know how they make this magic?

Online giants are using machine learning to modify site algorithms based on previous consumer activity because they recognize that familiarity boosts the bottom-line. May in the future, it will be easier for people to opt-out of personalization. But, for now, companies continue to push personalization on the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, like thermostats, doorbells, and artificial intelligence (AI) tech (think Amazon Alexa or Siri). With all these approaches, data is becoming a larger and larger component – and therefore a challenge – for many organizations.

(source: iot.electronicsforu.com)

Data analytics initiatives require a clear understanding of the objectives they’re put in place to achieve and the resources available to implement them. Stakeholder and user requirements may influence the selection of software and services. Hence, the business should choose their technology or solution partners with these considerations in mind.

3. Cloud to cater to the changing market demand

There is myriad of advantages e-commerce is drawing from cloud computing today. Most importantly, cloud in e-commerce enables the business to look big virtually and operate extensively. To make it clear, I want to highlight four crucial aspects:


4. Headless and API-driven strategy continued innovation

We have a ton of favorite sites, but do we have any idea how those sites work? We hope online at free time, fulfill our midnight cravings, and go back to work. Behind the scenes – our order preferences travel faster than the speed of sound through a headless commerce system and file neatly into its database.

Using API in E-commerce to collect product information

(Source: ecommerceinsiders.com)

In a nutshell, headless commerce decouples a company’s e-commerce platform from its frontend. When uncoupled, any data entered a website’s backend travel seamlessly to a range of frontends via application programming interfaces (APIs) — for example, progressive web apps (PWAs) and content management systems (CMSs). In order to leverage these techniques, companies add content to a compatible backend and couple on APIs – or customized frontend (like reaction button). Is it sounds too complex?

Check out few additional reasons behind use headless commerce:

Flexibility: Headless commerce is SEO friendly, and it is flexible and agile across a range of devices.

Personalization and customization: Businesses can control the consumer experience from start to finish by using a headless commerce tech stack, streaming data from one central database to a collection of APIs.

5. Content and digital web presence

Content and the creation of brand narratives can boost the processes of building a stronger digital presence while fostering brand recognition.

Content and storytelling can help reach customers and create more brand loyalty, as well as establish companies as thought leaders and experts in their field. Through a clear content program, a brand can drive product offerings with a briefing on necessary aspects and influence purchasing decisions of customers. This is an area where manufacturers and distributors need to incorporate a broader Customer Insight/experience strategy to maximize outcomes and increase revenue.

Digital web presence is often how customers experience the brand for the first time. This is also a route for improving customer experience and increase website conversion rate. According to a statistic, most consumers leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Digital UX and UI is playing an important role to help users navigate through the website, find their requirements, and develop a trustworthy connection with the brand. Many organizations are still developing and improving the functionality of their websites and eCommerce platforms, both on the user and internal sides. Websites can drive additional growth and revenue – but they can also play a role in capturing more data, sourcing out leads, and boosting customer engagement.

6. Digital transformation at an organization level 

Digital transformation is moving beyond eCommerce and marketing, to embrace the organization. It’s looking at what leadership is involved in decision making, undergoing internal process changes, and even creating new job responsibilities and titles.

New recruitment practices for digital transformation are seeking out software engineers, user experience experts, and data scientists to acquire the needed skill sets and embed the right innovation mindset across the board.

Apart from that increasing mobile shopping experience, the wide spreading of alternative payment methods, direct to consumer strategies are accelerating the digital revolution in the e-commerce industry. From understanding how buyers make decisions (and who those decision-makers are) to opportunities for more personalized content and messaging in all funnels, digital transformation technologies and data management help enable more effective e-commerce business techniques. Now, this is the time to align all business digital touchpoints with business goals, and digital strategy consulting companies are here to help you navigate through all these digital strategies. For more information and consultation feel free to reach to digital consulting service company Inovar Consulting.  

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how one operates and delivers value to customers. With all the service options a customer has nowadays, the relationship a service-provider has with its customers has never been more critical. Businesses must be agile and flexible to meet their evolving demands, and the onus is on these businesses to support those needs and streamline efficiency.

Additionally, a digital transformation strategy helps employees being more engaged. With updated systems, applications, and solutions, it’s easier to communicate with customers, partners, and co-workers, and it leads to better collaboration as well, helping them succeed in driving important business initiatives.

digital-transformation-market-share

There are many ways that a company can gain benefit by instituting a digital transformation plan, some of which are short-term wins, while others become more obvious down the line. Here are the 6 critical factors that lead to success in Digital Transformation.

  1. Setting a strategy that covers what, why, and how and defines specific business outcomes
  2. Winning leadership commitment from CEO through middle management
  3. Finding the most capable people to drive the program
  4. Developing an agile governance mindset that is flexible and adaptable.
  5. Establishing clear metrics for processes and outcomes
  6. Building modular tech and data platforms driven by business needs
digital-transformation-strategy

The key to addressing all six factors is planning, preparation, and execution of digital transformation strategy. Once the plan is fixed, then one can determine what it is that one wants to gain from upgrading the digital foothold. Digital Leaders have accomplished an earnings growth 1.8 times* higher than companies that resist Digital Transformation. Organizations that get these 6 elements right have an 80%* chance of success.

digital-transformation-improvements

Out of the six factors mentioned, two of them are the most critical:

Agility is the key – Organizations need to ensure that all operations adopt an agile approach to work. This means learning continuously, acting as one team, being outcome-oriented, and being committed to action. While making this shift, having an agile mindset is of utmost importance. This requires an authentic belief in the behavioural changes required, as well as supporting tools such as playbooks, processes, and support to work in a cross-functional, mission-oriented way.

Soft skills are as important as tech skills – Another key factor is spending enough time to get the right people in place and then supporting those people. Leaders need to find the best people with the highest potential to lead a successful transformation. A few things to assess when finding a transformation team are:

  1. Have you taken extra care to fill pivotal roles such as program manager?
  2. Are there enough digitally literate people to drive new thinking?
  3. Have you sourced team members tactically from business units so that they can become champions in critical areas?
  4. Do you have a detailed assessment of the skills required and gaps to be filled?
digital-transformation-kpis

In addition to tracking progress toward goals, company leaders should track the momentum of the project. Digital Transformation leaders should ask these questions to measure momentum:

These “threshold behaviours” are a good indicator of whether the work is headed in the right direction or stalled out. Success is measured by the percentage of targets met and value created, the percentage of goals met on time, success relative to other transformations, and success relative to management’s aspirations for sustainable change. 

InovarTech eliminates the complexity of end-to-end integration with a modern cloud integration platform that connects B2B Data flows, applications, and data across the entire ecosystem and drives complex digital transformation efforts.

References:

*6 ways to win at Digital Transformation from TechRepublic

CEO Satya Nadella said,” We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

In this pandemic, there is no choice for anyone but to be tech-savvy. Most businesses that were not dependent on technology, have now been forced into adopting technology. This has forced a shift in remote-work policies and workplace hygiene as well as evolved in business-continuity strategies. The one silver lining to this situation is that industries will now understand how smart-technology platforms and digital-transformation tools can help make fool proof business models in the face of such a global crisis.

The impact that technology is having on the society will persist for years to come. The top digital revolutions are work from home, distance education, telehealth, online entertainment leading to reduced bandwidth and retail industry. Here is our perspective on how some of the industries have changed recently.

RETAIL INDUSTRY:

Retailers are now focusing on launching online stores and developing a well-mapped customer journey across various e-commerce websites. Survival of the retail industry calls for its ability to sell, which involves checking the existing business process to find problems and creating a more robust framework. This will improve efficiency and help converge evolving technologies. Thus, improving customer experience.

digital-transformation-in-retail-industry

HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY:

In the health care sector, non-urgent cases are being dealt with using telemedicine as most governments are now insisting on being technology-enabled. Nowadays, patients get better treatment with virtual reality tools, wearable medical devices and mobile technology. Hospitals are using big data to create a customer persona which compiles statistical information on what the prospective patients want and need, and the platforms where one can reach them. Even doctors can now streamline their workflows using artificial intelligence-powered systems.

digital-transformation-in-health-care

FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS:

Most banks still have not adopted cloud-based infrastructure due to security concerns, but this pandemic has driven them to make this their top priority to become resilient. Banks being digitized can see reduced costs and streamlined processes and this end-to-end integration provides a seamless, engaging customer experience. This makes room for further business transformation with new digital technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Being primarily powered by AI and its related technologies of machine learning and predictive analytics, insurance operations have become faster. Digital transformation is also speeding up customer service, where live chat and digital assistants are helping customers in their most important times of need.

EDUCATION INDUSTRY:

Digital transformation has impacted the education industry and educators are now realising the benefits of technology in classrooms. Education is an industry with antiquated methods and practices, but with the help of digital transformation, teachers have begun making drastic changes to their instructions and assessments at a much faster and smoother rate than expected. New educational technology is helping students learn in a collaborative and interactive manner. Virtual and augmented reality plays a major role in enhancing teachers’ instructions while simultaneously creating lessons that are fun and engaging for students. Thus, teachers are being able to bring the outside world into the classroom.

digital-transformation-in-education

Today’s pervasive online environment allows exciting possibilities that can educate students on cyber safety as well as individual responsibility. Colleges and universities are starting to create informal campus learning spaces for the students to understand the importance of collaborating and creating whenever possible and not just within classrooms. Artificial intelligence has also become a major tool in higher education. Australia’s Deaken University used IBM Watson to create a virtual student advisory service available every day of the year. In the very first trimester, over 30,000 questions were recorded. Thus, giving actual advisors time to spend on much advanced problems.

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES:

Infrastructure modernisation has become a priority for governments looking to serve citizens in the digital era. Local, state as well as federal government agencies are undergoing digital transformation to help them use the power of the cloud. While, technology can help governments become more effective, the change does not happen overnight. Due to various factors, different government agencies are at various stages of digital transformation and are looking at how they can scale their efforts to fulfil the commitments made to their constituencies.

Executives of various industries are now inspired to use digital advances such as analytics, mobility, and social media to transform businesses. Customer interactions and internal business processes are changing to take over new technological capabilities. Governance is a key determinant in managing digital transformation as it often goes beyond organisational structures to include specific leaders. These new roles include ‘digital czars’ who lead digital transformation at the firm or business level as well as senior liaison roles.

digital-transformation-in-government

To conclude, in each of the above-mentioned scenarios, the thing in common is to transform organisations into smarter, more proactive, and more energetic entities that are able to cope up with the changes in our behaviour and technology demands. Taking the right steps can help them evaluate what they need to do to harmonize their back-end systems with new digitized capabilities for clients, partners and staff.

When digital transformation is done right, it is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar,” rightly said by George Westerman, MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy.

The situation has become very troublesome for last few weeks for business and customers alike, with the onset of the pandemic of COVID-19. The effects of COVID-19 have been shaking up the entire world and forcing us to undergo drastic behavioral changes.  

In this situation, every business is planning on how to continue the rhythm of business with our customers, partners and suppliers and manage their business in a seamless fashion. With almost entire world being under a lockdown, this is a very far fetched reality. Most of the business cannot function without having people on ground. For example, supply chain and most of the upstream/downstream services/businesses related to that is a prime example. 

As per McKinsey, here is what readiness for restarting looks like for all affected countries 

economy-in-corona-situation

Emergency services and IT driven businesses are still functioning but struggling with multiple issues. From finding a secure way work from home to digitizing all the paper and people-based process is uphill task. Even if you can re-purpose and find workaround to get things done, adoption still will remain an unsolved question. 

We @ Inovar, have seen these challenges first hand with one of the top US Health caregivers, and helped find a solution to their challenges. Starting from rapid infrastructure setup to digitizing their process and helping their team adopt the solutions which were created. While designing the solution it was key that we keep the end user in mind and make it easy for them to transition on to this new platform.  

Some of the items we have helped them with are: 

business-application-procedure

If you are also facing technical challenges in this pandemic condition, then our technical experts might be able to find out instant feasible solutions. Our knowledge with rapid digitization platform can definitely help you get moving and mitigate most of the challenges you are facing today.  

Here some quick guidelines that will help you to be more productive in your daily operations: 

The present situation becomes more critical as most of the SMBs are in the center of the crisis. However, we believe that adopting best practices for communication and modern tech solutions are the essential ways to combat against such global crisis. Always feel free to connect with us for solving any business problems and better technical suggestion. We will be glad to be your technical partner and always committed to lead you in the right track of digital transformation.