The World Doesn’t Need Another RPA Tool; It Needs More
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By Todd Michaud, HuLoop CEO
Today’s enterprises are under immense pressure to improve their business through automation. With ongoing external and internal pressures, companies need an enterprise automation platform to help streamline tasks, cut costs and boost productivity. However, existing RPA solutions alone are simply not sufficient to transform organizations to be more competitive in the today’s business climate. This article outlines how the future of intelligent automation has become unified automation.
External Pressures Enterprises Face
External pressures are creating a strong drive for businesses to improve using automation, in fact a ~$600B dollar software market (according to Gartner) has emerged to address this need. They include labor scarcity, rising interest rates and uncertainty about a looming recession. This has served as a growth inhibiting cloud over enterprises, limiting access to capital because of higher interest rates and the scrutiny that banks are now facing.
In addition, there are market challenges of changing customer dynamics, which means customer demand patterns are different. Client expectations of their partners have changed, and competitors are reacting to these changes, meaning that competition has become tougher than ever.
Internal Pressures Enterprises Face
The internal pressures are impacting business performance even more than the external pressures. For example, most enterprises have disparate technology that they’re being forced to stitch together. There are significant IT backlogs with competing IT priorities—and not enough resources to get to all of them. The big technology investments they made in enterprise software such as ERP and CRM are providing insufficient coverage across the automation needs of the enterprise.
The disparate technologies are creating data silos that organizations have to deal with when it comes to making better, faster, more data-driven decisions. In fact, technology issues are exacerbating the people issues companies face.
As a result, enterprises are too often asking their employees to do mind-numbing, BS work. More clearly, our people are doing things we really don’t want them spending time on—especially when the low unemployment rate has created limited access to talent. With enterprises trying to find new ways to run leaner and meaner, employees spending time on non-value-adding activities simply doesn’t make sense anymore.
The only solution to overcome these external and internal pressures is by using intelligent automation.
The Old Way of RPA
Automation has evolved from being a “nice to have” initiative to being a condition of survival for enterprise leaders looking for new ways to drive profitable growth, cut unnecessary cost and optimize human productivity. It’s critical.
Organizations looking to apply automation to their business—particularly over the last 5-6 years, would have searched for and identified a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution provider. There are many great RPA solutions out there. However, shortly after embarking on their automation journey, these enterprises would have quickly realized that they need more than just RPA alone.
They would have quickly realized they need intelligent document processing or cross-application workflow orchestration, or process mining and so forth.
So, what started as a simple RPA project quickly became a much more complicated, expensive, and ultimately, slow proposition.
As a result, a significant number of RPA projects have failed to deliver on what the enterprise needed. The organization wanted something fast, easy, and impactful—but given the nature of where the technology was, they couldn’t accomplish their goals with RPA alone. But fortunately, things have changed for the better.
The Value of Unified Automation
HuLoop is disrupting the automation software market with a new approach that works for companies of any size. Instead of engaging with multiple solution providers—which results in finger-pointing, higher cost, and more complexity, HuLoop delivers a unified intelligent automation platform.
HuLoop’s unified automation approach provides a “one stop shop” for companies of all sizes to get all the automation tools they need from a single solution provider. In addition, these tools are designed to work together. Unified automation effectively serves as an ERP model for automation.
HuLoop’s unified automation platform provides some key out-of-the-box integrated functionalities, such as process and task discovery. This enables companies to learn and understand what employees are spending time on, what systems and tools they’re using to autogenerate, how current business processes actually work, and even identify and prioritize automation opportunities systematically based on repetitive activities and places that are either document—or people-intense.
In addition, the platform provides a full array of automation capabilities that can orchestrate processes and tasks across disparate applications, automate mundane, repetitive and manual work—ultimately liberating human capital—and speed up business process cycle time by 40-60%. HuLoop can also integrate the documents that live and exist around the processes that need to be automated, and bring them into the process orchestration.
Lastly, when comparing unified automation to first-generation RPA solutions, the new platform has evolved to become much more human-centered. It recognizes the fact that providing human-in-the-loop capabilities enables the injection of emotional IQ into decision-making. Ultimately, human governance ensures better adoption of the technology and better integration with the work that people perform.
To validate our perspective, we see first generation RPA vendors in a scramble to acquire complementary solution providers to provide more automation coverage. Enterprises considering the addition of these solutions from an RPA vendor should understand that under the covers, their could be an “automation Frankenstein” with disparate architectures and half-baked integrations.
Summary
There can be no doubt that successful automation projects will need more than just RPA. This leaves only two options. Option 1, the Enterprise can select best-of-breed solutions from disparate vendors, or Option 2, the Enterprise can select a unified automation solution provider. In the same way that SAP’s ERP may not have the best capabilities in every module, it is selected over the alternative because of the aggregate greater-good of using a single platform on a single architecture. Unified automation, not just RPA, is the best solution for enterprises seeking faster, more effective outcomes.
If you are interested in learning more or seeing a demonstration, click below.
About HuLoop Automation
Based in the Sacramento, California area, HuLoop Automation serves enterprises who are digitally transforming their businesses to maximize human productivity and improve customer experience, all while leveraging existing technology investments. HuLoop has built a unified automation platform to help enterprises automate manual, mundane tasks, so their human talent is able to spend time on higher value work. Our AI-based, codeless, Human-in-the-Loop software eliminates mind-numbing work, saving our clients money and improving employee satisfaction. You can learn more at www.huloop.ai and follow HuLoop on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.