By Mavenick Consulting

Over the last decade, the focus has been on

ways to streamline business processes (process
optimization or re-engineering) to increase efficiency
and improve the user experience. Today, newer
technologies including Robotic Process Automation
(RPA) are bringing about transformational changes
across industries.
Automated testing can also be used to simulate large volumes
of data and the actions of large numbers of virtual users,
interacting with a network, software, and web applications,
more efficiently that with manual testing.
Business process automation is being widely applied to
various other roles, functions, and departments, such as…

•Insurance
•Banks and Financial Services
•Customer Care Portals
•IT Back Office Processes
In the insurance industry, automated processes are
used for checking policy renewal, recalculating
policy premiums, early detection of fraud and loss,
and data gathering. Automating these routine
processes has resulted in fewer errors and reduced
operational costs. The insurance company staff can
now focus their time and attention on their new
customers and on improving their core business.
Banks and other financial services have automated
a wide array of processes, such as making new
account entries, generating reports, sending
notification emails and messages to clients,
processing of credit card orders. Another key use-
case is in early fraud detection by tracking account
activity, purging known old data, and so on. This
has allowed these institutions to achieve significant
operational efficiency, scale, and resilience.
 Using online customer care portals, users can now
make changes to their investment options, or make ticket
bookings, order products, or take an online training without
the need for any human intervention.
Most organizations have automated their front-line
customer facing operations using software-driven
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems. This helps them
to reduce cost and provide 24X7 support. These systems
guide customers by accepting key tone or voice-based
responses and pass on instructions to the underlying
application to complete a transaction. Similarly, optical
character recognition (OCR) technology has been around
for a while now. This helps save a lot of time and effort when
creating, processing and repurposing various documents.
 Many organizations have automated their batch
processing and night-time data center operations.
Organizations can thus manage their night time operations
with minimal staff on duty. This has become a huge
opportunity considering how many large enterprises have
geographically distributed support centers, strategically
located to take advantage of the 24-hour day. I am
personally aware of cases where RPA has helped cut the
processing time of sales incentive calculations from 2 man-
days to 2 hours. This is a favorite area of mine – I can think
of so much more to talk about here but maybe in future
posts.
 Business process automation is also being widely
applied to various other roles, functions, and departments,
such as finance, HR, data entry, inventory management,
shipping, purchasing, and billing. In a nutshell, there is the
potential for almost universal applicability in making
repetitive business processes more predictable and
manageable.
 Business process automation is no longer the future
– it’s the present, and in many ways, it’s now the imperative!
While it certainly does not eliminate the need for human
workers, it does eliminate the need for humans to perform
routine, uninteresting, repetitive tasks that require little or
no judgement. It provides an opportunity for enterprises to
focus their workforce on higher value activities. It promises
better returns, improved performance, agility, and quality.
As the use cases for automation are increasing by the day,
more and more enterprises are embracing the wave of
software-driven automation to reap its benefits – is it time
for you to join them?