I have Denny Morais with us to share his thoughts on the Robotic Process Automation adoption.
It’s my pleasure to have him here and would like to thank him for sharing his perspective 🙂
Here is a short Bio:
I am in the IT industry for the past 25 years, currently working as Head of RPA and Business Development Manager for Ubiquity Technology, a Europe based company. I am a computer Science Engineer with particular interest in continuous improvement methodologies and collaborative team effort to improve performance.
Traveling, reading and sports are among my top interests, apart from the professional and social activities.
Small Talk
Sharath Raju:
We would like to know about your digital transformation journey?
Denny Morais:
From an early stage, Ubiquity Technology (Ubiquity) understood that RPA would play a very important role in the digital transformation of organizations. As such, Ubiquity focused resources and investments to become a leading firm that specializes in the UiPath platform. This focus and investment also led to the creation of a proprietary training framework to ease the integration of new consultants in the organization.
Ubiquity was one of the first UiPath partners in Europe and now has successfully implemented numerous projects across Europe, North America and Africa. Ubiquity is also experienced in complex projects with specific capabilities in integrating complementary and valued solutions for RPA projects, that drive even more value to their customers
Sharath Raju:
One of the best accomplishments that you can share with us which can inspire RPA enthusiasts?
Denny Morais:
It’s very difficult to choose! I believe projects that most motivate our entire team are those in which, once implemented, brings immediate recognition from employees that are directly benefiting from automation.
Of course, projects with quick financial benefits are important, however, when we feel that we are truly helping people by eliminating routine work and repetitive tasks, that give us an extraordinary duty-fulfilling function! And we can easily understand why: RPA allows individuals to focus on higher value (knowledge based) work which also benefits the organization at a strategic level as it frees up talent to add value by taking on more qualitative and strategic work.
Sharath Raju:
How do we scale up the RPA projects across the organization?
Denny Morais:
This is a very controversial topic!
In reality, what can be a good strategy for an organization can be bad for many others. This is independent of the sector, region or hierarchy within the organization. We must consider the fact that we are very directly involved in processes, in tasks performed by people and, sometimes, causing sudden changes in deeply rooted routines. As a result, scaling up RPA is quite dependent on the business itself. In some situations, it can be interesting to look to RPA as tools that work best in a combined approach with iBPM tools.
Many RPA initiative are still focused on the “low hanging fruit” that produce a quick “wow” effect and as a result are not designed to scale. To implement a properly scalable RPA approach, “Strategy”, is the key. The investment in RPA must the strategic, and the organization top management and key stakeholders should be aligned on the strategic importance of RPA. Furthermore, Business and IT collaboration is essential in helping to identify the right RPA opportunities.
I must also include another very important element: organizations should seek a strategic partner with knowledge and maturity in the use of the technology that supports them throughout the process of setting up and scaling up the initiative. Strategies for progressive autonomy (that includes training organizations own resources, for example) should be established from the start of the RPA implementation. Yes, organizations should also train their own developers and analysts, but that is not enough! A well-designed RPA team should include much more than that, it should consider Service Analysts, Infrastructure Engineers, RPA Architects, with enough maturity level that better understands what pitfalls to avoid or best practices to implement.
Believing RPA is easy and that organizations can train business users to build automations is a very common mistake and, in my perspective, can have an opposite effect in a strategy for scaling RPA.
Sharath Raju:
How do you measure RPA success and what are the key factors that contribute to it?
Denny Morais:
I think many businesses are applying RPA in different ways to create additional value.
From my point of view, some leading factors are: increased compliance, improved employee satisfaction, faster delivery and reduced cost.
Measuring RPA success starts with establishing measurable goals that align with specific business reality. These goals must be compared to the impact of the automation to determine true success. There are numerous effective tools available that facilitate measuring the impact of process automation.
Our preferred tool is the UiPath Insights tool which helps users measure, report and align RPA operations with strategic business outcomes.
Sharath Raju:
We would like to hear about the future of RPA from you…
Denny Morais:
RPA will go far beyond basic task automation by harnessing the potential and capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). AI, ML along with other emerging technologies will expand the sphere of possibilities – improving productivity beyond anything we can imagine.
We know that RPA is a fantastic solution for processing structured data. However, we know that most data within an organization is not structured and that is where the opportunities for the biggest gains lie. Today, a human is required to work with unstructured data. However, we can see a future where sophisticated cognitive technologies will allow RPA to go from mimicking human activity to mimicking humans. Meaning, RPA will have functionalities like speech recognition (through Natural Language Process), reasoning-based decision making (through Machine learning) and problem solving (through Artificial Intelligence). These technologies will allow RPA to integrate and automate human responses within a workflow.
The goal is to learn, ingest and model data so that the RPA platform is able to minimize human intervention.
There is also an exciting potential of using AI and ML to allow the RPA platform to “learn” how best navigate a given workflow leading to innovative solutions that we have not seen.
You can connect with Denny Morais, he is always happy to help 🙂
Click here to connect with him on LinkedIn
I hope you enjoyed the post!!!
And if you think you or your management has some thoughts on RPA that you would like to share with the hundreds and thousands of people out there and be helpful…
Let’s have a small talk 🙂
Connect with me on LinkedIn or you can email me at sharathkumarraju@gmail.com
