Intelligent Automation
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Baker Tilly couples advanced technologies with extensive process subject matter expertise to design and deploy effective automation solutions that achieve higher rates of success and outcomes related to error and cost reduction.
How Baker Tilly can help
Companies face tremendous pressure to increase their labor productivity, reduce their costs, and improve their bottom line performance.
One way that organizations are achieving progress against these goals is by implementing intelligent automation solutions, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA is a software solution, usually called an RPA bot, that works like a virtual employee as the bot replicates key strokes and performs repetitive tasks. The bots often connect multiple fragmented systems together through automation without changing the current enterprise IT landscape.
Several key facts associated with automation solutions include:
Triggers for automation opportunities
The following are general parameters that provide guidance on where an automation solution can unlock value.
- Data intensive activities
- Manual & repetitive in nature
- Rule-driven activities
- Manual activity serves as an electronic trigger to the process
- Process includes electronic start-points and endpoints
- Activities involve manual calculations
- High error rates have been observed
- Sensitive content
- Activities are required to be performed out of normal office hours
- Complex IT landscapes that drive manual work around processes
Five capabilities of intelligent automation
Baker Tilly Digital typically assists clients with effective design and implementation of the following key intelligent automation capabilities.
Automation implementation process
A typical RPA implementation spans a 10-week timeframe and requires involvement from numerous departments. We take the time to understand your needs, and connect with both key internal and external stakeholders. Additional detail associated with our typical implementation process include:
- Identify business processes to automate: Select the RPA use cases to be automated
- Pilot automation opportunities: Develop RPA pilot and/or Proof of Concept
- Build a business case and ROI model for automation: Develop a business case with projected cost savings and capacity release
- RPA development and implementation: Develop, Implement and Validate the RPA production solution
- Automation at scale: Harnessing AI, machine learning, robotics and advanced analytics to maximize the RPA technology
Leveraging Baker Tilly’s Digital Accelerators, we create a thorough automation roadmap and pipeline of use cases to achieve mass adoption and scalability.
- Begin by determining the purpose, strategy, and key drivers for automation
- Conduct a Design Thinking ideation session with the client team to engage, gather ideas, and identify common pain points
- Use our Baker Tilly Digital eleven factor framework to assess, analyze, and prioritize use cases
- Create a ‘bite sized’ automation roadmap that delivers value based on Quick wins, Short, Medium, and Long term
Automation strategy and roadmap
Purpose and strategy
- Define the business purpose before determining the technology needs
- Identify short and long term goals
- Map business outcomes
- Prioritize initial investments
Organize and mobilize
- Create an automation innovators network with stakeholders across the organization
- Develop the automation external ecosystem (vendors, partners, SMEs)
- Implement infrastructure, application and policy updates
Relevant and sustainable
- Facilitate program governance and operationalization
- Elicit enterprise collaboration and sharing
- Develop automation skills and overall scalability framework
Organizational challenges with automation
Overcoming ‘automation anxiety’
- Broad perception of robotics
- Fear and job uncertainty surrounding automation
- Lack of case studies to show value
Fragmented impact
- Specifying value in only a part of a process
- Understanding future workflow and handovers due to fragmented impact
Coping with fast pace of transition
- Automation can process rapidly from proof of concept to implementation
- 12 weeks or less typical technology implementation
Defining evolving responsibilities and accountabilities
- Knowledge gap where roles change
- Negotiation local legislative variation
- Defining accountabilities and responsibilities due to fragmented impact
Achieving global consistency with tailored local adoption
- Varied change approach due to varied value or impact
- Achieving consistent global automation change approach
Automation benefits and common roadblocks
Automation allows organizations to optimize decades of system infrastructure and data management complexity. That’s why we believe in order to truly realize the benefits of automation, you must look beyond the specific use case and consider a change management strategy throughout the enterprise. We offer broad automation enabled transformation services with other service lines and functional/industry expertise.