Business Chief Europe Magazine August 2020 | Page 23

“ As organisations grappled with their own specific challenges and disruptions whilst the pandemic unfolded , it quickly became clear that intelligent automation programmes facilitated faster decisionmaking , much needed agility and operational resilience to adjust to rapidly changing demands and pressures . Now , as businesses begin to stabilise relative to the earliest days , smart business leaders are reimagining operations with radical agility baked in , and automation at the forefront . They ’ ve also begun to realise that the decisions they take will shape many aspects of business and the future workplace , not just for the remainder of the pandemic – but for years to come .” added Jason Martindale , Vice President Sales at Symphony , a SYKES company – a long-time UiPath partner specialising in IA implementation and managed services .

“ The benefits of automation are easy to sell ,” contemplates Duddridge , “ everything that can be automated , will be automated as long as it ’ s process led , rules driven and you deal with large volumes of data . Think of the many hours an employee spends copying and pasting data from one application to another or extracting information from one document and inputting it on an excel sheet for example . Think of the huge volumes of invoices a financial shared service centre needs to operate and how only a robot will pay the same attention to the 5000th invoice as to the first . Usually the challenges with implementing RPA are that someone has to deliver it , a subject matter expert has got to share their intelligence around how that process works dealing with every nuance that comes with it . Which leaves you with the reality that robots are very clever , but they do not replace cognitive skills . Humans still retain the ascendancy in every automation because they ’ re either the subject matter experts that need to program the automation , or they are the part of the loop which needs to train the robots to learn and continue to deliver value in that process . And so the real world challenges with delivering automation revolve around firstly having enough people to dedicate to delivering that journey , scaling up the RPA centre of excellence , the subject matter

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