The automotive industry has a long history of automation. Automakers have used robots in their assembly lines for decades. But now, the industry is waking up to the benefits of automating processes in other areas of business.

But what kind of automation is possible in the automotive space? What are the specific benefits and challenges that automakers face in trying to make automation a bigger part of what they do?

What Is Automotive Automation?

When people think of automotive automation, they probably envision big robot arms assembling cars on a factory floor. While this is the classic robotic automation you’ll see from automakers, the modern approach to automation, typically, focuses on software.

Beyond the assembly functions within a plant, there are a huge number of digital processes that help support a business. This can include everything from sales and purchasing to accounting and logistics and with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) businesses can have bots carry out tasks and processes – instead of people.

Opportunities For Automation In The Automotive Industry

Car manufacturers have a unique opportunity to implement automation more widely within their businesses. This is, in part, because they already have an existing culture of relying on robots to help with certain tasks.

Collaborative robots, or co-bots, have already offered a big evolution in the space, with smaller machines designed to aid workers rather than just take tasks away from them. Now that manufacturers are taking steps to develop robot assistance further, they also need to take that stance when it comes to boosting process efficiency for the lives of their office staff as well as their shop floor workers.

Challenges For Automation In The Automotive Industry

Right now, the global supply chain is in a state of disarray. Between pandemics and conflicts, there haven’t been this many barriers to the movement of goods for many years. As manufacturers, the automotive industry relies on the movement of goods to not only assemble, but also to distribute their products.

But, that challenge clearly presents an opportunity. Where there is increasing pressure to improve throughput and production times when material deliveries are delayed automation can greatly benefit process improvements throughout businesses.

Use Case For Automotive Automation

Because automation can be incorporated into almost any business process, there is a massive variety of potential use cases for it within vehicle manufacturing. However, one particular area of real benefit is within order processing.

Order Submission

Automotive manufacturers and distributors can use order management software to read and transcribe order information from multiple formats into the company’s order database. This program frees personnel from manually processing orders to focus on customer care.

Payment Processing

Order to cash (O2C) is a highly automatable end-to-end process that begins with a customer order and ends with payment processing and collection. Taking payments for goods can be completely automated – just think about how your online shopping normally works, there’s no need for a human operator.

Inventory Management

Inventory management software can use RPA and API to verify inventories. This software can be programmed to create an automated restocking order when inventory levels for a car or screw dip below a set threshold.

Not Alone

While the automotive industry does have its own challenges and opportunities with automation, just like any other industry it needs to get on board with the technology. To be competitive businesses need to look to tech to find better ways of doing things, and automation is a great way to boost top and bottom lines everywhere.

Work in the automotive industry and want help with automation? Reach out to PAteam now.

Demand is growing for attended robots that help human operators with manual activities, enhancing productivity, accuracy, and customer and employee experience. Today we’ll cover what attended automation is, where it’s used, how it works, and why your business could benefit from onboarding it. Let’s get started.

What is attended automation?

Attended automation works by giving employees a ‘robot companion’ (in the form of a piece of software) that helps to augment the work that they do. The addition of a bot can speed up processing times, improve customer and employee experience, and reduce errors – if used in the right way. Here are three distinct attended automation use cases; to give you some insight into what it can be used for.

Live Employee Virtual Assistant

Triggered by an on screen event, employee chat, voice calls, or any kind of interactive callout to the bot, it works side by side with the user and helps them to execute their current task in real-time. The bot can also continue to execute tasks while the attendant can focus on other jobs.

Real-Time Guidance

Again, triggered by screen events a bot can be used to work side by side with the user – to help guide them through a call perhaps, reminding them to ensure certain data fields are filled during a customer call. The bot can also collect information for future use to improve the way it helps the attendant.

Manual RPA Assistant

This potential use of attended automation is distinct from our other two examples, in that it is manually called in by the user when they want assistance. This means that the user needs to be trained in how to work with the bot and how to get the most out of it. Also, because it is a manual process, oftentimes the bot will need to complete the automation before the user can move on to their next task.

How does attended automation work?

Fundamentally, robotic process automation involves taking human activities (such as clicking the mouse, pressing keys on a computer, or dragging and dropping files) and automatically, quickly, and accurately carrying them out.

For an attended bot, you can set up trigger events to create certain actions that a bot automatically carries out when required. This trigger could be a human worker picking up the phone or hitting a button on their screen. The tasks the bot takes care of could be finding consumer information from one platform and automatically updating it in another, saving the human operator time and removing any potential human error.

Why do you need attended automation?

The automation of tasks and processes has a number of key advantages. In an environment where attended automation is going to offer the most value, likely a customer focused role, it allows a human employee more time to focus on delivering a personal service to a customer. It’s suggested that automation helps augment human intelligence – because it provides human operators with additional knowledge and insight right when they need it to make better decisions.

Could attended automation help your business? Contact PAteam to find out.

ROI in RPA is a way for businesses to quantify their expected and actual returns on investment in Robotic Process Automation. Understanding the ROI of RPA is critical to the long-term success of adopting the technology.

Developing RPA ROI indicators is crucial for any deployment plan, building support for the project, as well as validating any preconceptions surrounding how well the technology will work in your business. Quantifying RPA investment returns helps companies make better decisions, optimize solutions, and avoid problems. Because of this, businesses need to know what data to collect, which metrics to track, and how to use this information.

The Importance of RPA ROI

Providing the ROI is at a comfortable level, you can justify almost any commercial project. The same is true for RPA, where showing great ROI in different areas of the business can have a huge impact on getting it over the line. Leaders can boost buy-in across the company by demonstrating how RPA will improve customer experience, innovation, productivity, and cost reductions.

Ultimately, any project you undertake in a business needs to have a better ROI than other competing ideas if it is going to get off the ground. RPA comes with a variety of benefits above just financial incentives, but to make a strong case for the technology you need to be able to quantify any positives that it can bring your company.

How to Measure RPA ROI

If you want to measure RPA ROI effectively you need to do so right from the beginning of an RPA project. That actually means understanding the data you need, where to find it, and what to do with it, before you’ve begun to implement anything. Here are just a few metrics that a business like yours might track to see how valuable its RPA is.

Employee Satisfaction

RPA is a great way to take away the boring, repetitive, and manual processes that employees enjoy the least. Therefore, removing these from their workload results in happier and more productive people. Since this is a soft ROI, measuring it might be challenging. However, you might still see it in reductions in staff churn as well as through employee satisfaction surveys.

Full Time Equivalent

Full Time Equivalent (FTE) is the number of hours an employee works in a month, year, or any defined period. Because automation can save time, a great metric to track is how many FTE hours are saved as a result of a process being automated. This can have a direct link to cost but also can show how much more time a member of staff can dedicate to more valuable activities.

RPA Cost Savings

Cost savings don’t only come in the form of time saved not carrying out a task but also from having to check for mistakes and correct them. Because automation guarantees how a task will be carried out there is no room for error. The cost savings that stem from improving quality can be time-based but also measured by things like customer satisfaction.

Increasing RPA ROI

If you want to get the most out of RPA then you need to have a plan. That plan should start by engaging the key stakeholders in your business as well as external experts to ensure that all bases are covered and you make the most of this brilliant technology.

At PAteam we work with customers from a wide variety of industries including banking, public sector, retail, and logistics, and have helped our customers get more from RPA than they could have on their own. Whether it’s dedicated developers, working with one of our technology partners, or just providing a guiding hand – we’re proud to say we are the difference maker.

We can calculate your RPA ROI and offer you:

A Free Automation Assessment | Auditing Services | An ROI Report Sent Straight To You

Speak to PAteam today.

Many organizations are realizing that in order to make the most of Intelligent Automation, they must first standardize and improve their processes. This has seen the rapid rise of both process and task mining.

But what are these two technologies? How do they differ? And where can businesses use them to improve how they work – and make the most of intelligent automation? Well, lucky for you, we’re going to cover all of that today.

What Is Process Mining?

Process mining, simply put, is the analysis and monitoring of business processes. As a discipline, it seeks to look objectively at how a process is performing in the wider business context. Compared with traditional process evaluation it focuses on the objective state of the process to give a true reflection of how effective it is. In the past, process evaluation has been done through things like staff interviews which can give skewed and subjective results.

Process Mining Use Cases

One great example of where process mining boosts efficiency is for internal and external auditors. It can provide quick, comprehensive insight into the organization’s present and past processes. This lets auditors progress from subjective sample analysis to objective, full, as-is process analysis – delivering assurance and saving time.

Another good place for process mining is within purchasing teams. Typically, they have very high volumes of purchase requisitions that have to be created, verified, and filed before payments can be released and well ordered. Because of the complexity of the task and the number of steps, there is a lot of room for error. Process mining can help identify where the process can be improved as well as which parts can be automated.

What Is Task Mining?

Task mining focuses on smaller process components, i.e. those tasks of the process that are carried out by staff on their computers. This can include taking customer enquiries from a web portal and putting them into a CRM system or filing completed jobs. In addition to increasing the general transparency of how people work, task mining helps ensure that the potential of automation is understood before development begins – particularly by highlighting potential bottlenecks.

Task Mining Use Cases

The best example of task mining in action is tracking how employees carry out tasks on their desktops. A task mining program runs in the background, monitoring clicks, scrolls, and other user actions that go into completing the task.

Task mining software also uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) while recording user actions to understand the context of the user’s actions. It does this by gathering words, figures, and other text from the recording and screenshots taken while the user is in an application and creates a map of them against the user’s clicks, scrolls, and other inputs.

Combining The Two Techniques

In reality, it isn’t a question of processing mining v task mining – they’re complementary techniques. Using both techniques together, businesses can fully understand end-to-end processes and analyze handoffs, resource usage, and other factors to then optimize what they have – ready for intelligent automation to live up to its potential.

Want to make your processes as good as they can be? Get in touch with PAteam today.

Human beings are under more pressure than ever to deal with the increasing amount of data that people and platforms generate. If left untouched, this is bound to end badly: as people are prone to error – particularly when dealing with multiple data sources at once.

A more cost effective, error reducing method that is on the rise is Intelligent Document Process (IDP). Today we’ll share some of the fantastic IDP use cases out there that you might be able to use in your business – no matter the industry.

What Is Intelligent Document Processing?

IDP is an AI and machine learning-based system that automates data extraction from complicated, semi-structured text. IDP uses technology to extract, analyze, and classify data in a structured way. An IDP system must be ‘taught’ how to process using training models which feature the type of documents it will be required to process.

When the machine isn’t sure whether the data is right after training, it seeks human validation to confirm what it ‘thinks’, and it will also use this confirmation as further learning input. Any business that manually extracts data from documents can benefit from IDP.

Banking – Anti Fraud

The ability to import paper-based forms into fraud detection engines using Artificial Intelligence algorithms is one brilliant IDP use case. IDP can auto-extract data from documents and push it into a bank’s fraud detection engines to get a 360-degree view of potentially fraudulent cases. This saves banks time and also protects them from the risks associated with counterfeit applications.

Logistics – Consignment Details

Long packing lists are sent with every logistical shipment as a means of providing the receiver with a delivery checklist. Checking off these items is a time intensive, manual process, but IDPs can be used to extract the packaged items from the paper-based list and add the information to an ERP system so that every part of the booking process is fully traceable.

Healthcare – New Patients

During the patient onboarding process, a lot of data needs to be collected by hospitals, including onboarding forms, test results, pre-existing medical conditions, as well as family medical history. With IDP, the data the patient fills in can be automatically extracted – and then uploaded to the relevant databases within the hospital’s IT infrastructure.

Legal – M&A

Mergers and acquisitions are extremely document intensive processes that require an eye for detail. Mistakes during due diligence can cost businesses huge sums of money so Right First Time (RFT) is critical. Thankfully, IDP offers a solution as it can analyze and ‘understand’ data at a scale and speed that no human being could ever match. It can be ‘taught’ to look for certain phrases and using Natural Language Processing (NLP) it can even summarize the contents of documents scanned.

Media – Trend Tracking

One particularly interesting IDP use case is in the tracking of news and trends in digital media. An IDP bot can scan a list of websites or news sources to spot common themes or repeated concepts. A list of these ideas can then be put together for marketing teams to help them generate content in line with topics that are already being engaged with.

IDP can work in your business. If you want to know more then talk to the experts – PAteam.

We’re passionate about making things simpler and better for all. That’s why we’re proud to have been appointed to work with HM Revenue & Customs – the UK’s taxation body – to help use our leading-edge machine learning and automation tools and support them in making tax operations more efficient.

PAteam will collaborate with HMRC to develop, deploy, and continually improve RPA and other automation software with a view to helping HMRC improve its processes as well as operational efficiency.

With many years of experience, PAteam will take everything we know to truly support HMRC’s goals and ambitions regarding automation tech. We’ve got a track record of successful digital transformation for a host of businesses and we know this is going to be no different.

HMRC will be able to draw upon our extensive consulting expertise and work with the leading technology platforms in the industry to cut down on the repetitive tasks their people have to carry out. This reduction in time spent processing will help HMRC staff deliver a better customer experience with more time to focus on individuals.

Speaking about the partnership, Martijn Zuiderbaan, CCO at PAteam, said:

“PAteam is very happy to bring our NICE expertise to HMRC as part of the joint ecosystem with Capita and ISG. We look forward to taking over the great work done so far and bringing it to the next level.

Alongside other key suppliers, we intend to help HMRC build on their already impressive automation resume and work together to create solutions that make people’s lives better using technology and a collaborative mindset”

Does your business need help with automation? PAteam is ready to help you too.

There are a number of key things that help make RPA a success. But RPA best practice isn’t just limited to the quality of design of bot or process design. Instead, it’s a host of other, often non-technical factors, that contribute to how successful RPA deployment is in the long term.

Here are our five key RPA best practices that you need to know.

Put Humans On Top

The best RPA services out there recognize the importance of human beings. That means that bots are built to help people – not take away their oversight or overall involvement.

Automation should always help give people back their time, but those people still very much need to deal with outliers, maintain the bots, and look to where further improvements can be made.

Human beings should always be in control, so while it’s great to save them time, it’s important to make sure RPA is being used to add value – and users assert control over the automation that’s in place.

Create A Culture

Effective RPA needs a supportive culture. That culture starts at the top; so if you want RPA to be successful you need buy-in at the most senior level. You could consider starting an RPA committee that brings in stakeholders from each part of your organization.

This would involve a wide range of people and also demonstrate the importance of the technology to other staff. One simple, but very effective RPA best practice, is to name your bots. This is an easy way to make them more familiar and ensure people engage with them more easily.

Standardize Through Governance

Culture is hugely important; but you don’t want everyone in your business trying to develop automation on their own – that will get messy very quickly. Instead, you should establish a clear governance model for your organization’s RPA.

This model will demonstrate the core principles you want to employ, as well as give developers reusable components in their RPA builds – keeping up a level of standardization. Strong governance ensures quality, security, and compliance in all your RPA development.

Become Agile

Agile methodologies were built for tech, so they’re perfect for helping to build, test, and deploy bots. The agile approach is all about breaking down blocks of work into smaller components. By seeing tasks at a more granular level, you can more quickly develop bots to take on that work.

Deploying a bot isn’t the last step though, they need to be monitored for effectiveness and then adjusted to improve performance. Assessing success at a wider scale can be done by evaluating all bots deployed within a specific project or timeframe and this can help to inform further development.

Make Automation Everywhere

There’s no question that RPA can lead to dramatic reductions in costs – particularly stemming from time savings. But to make automation a key part of your business, it needs to be everywhere, and it needs to be seen by everyone.

Making bot development and deployment with low, or no-code tools is a great starting place because it will mean more people have access to the tools to put automation in place.

Want to make automation successful in your business? Contact PAteam today, we’re here to help.

Contact centers are often the main area of communication that a business has with its customers. Because of this, they’re a critical part of many organizations and because of this are pressurized environments often with a lot of manual data work. This work is time-consuming and prone to error. Contact Center RPA (or Attended RPA) is a great way to improve nearly every aspect of its operation and we’re going to show you exactly how.

Why Is Contact Center RPA So Powerful?

Contact center RPA can develop from a small application to eventually being involved in almost every manual process that is normally taken care of by people. When you think about how much data flows through a contact center, you realize that RPA is a pretty revolutionary technology if applied in the right way. After all, robots are brilliant at dealing with data.

Best Benefits of Using Contact Center RPA?

The typical benefits of RPA are just the same when it’s used in contact centers. That means there are big cost savings to be made, a reduction in errors, and an increase in data processing speed. But in that improvement of speed and accuracy, employee job satisfaction increases and customers can be provided with better experiences, this helps improve customer satisfaction and can lead to greater customer spending and business revenues.

Top 5 RPA Contact Center Use Cases

Tracking Feedback

Contact centers often take feedback following calls to understand customer satisfaction. RPA can transcribe spoken feedback and update a feedback database. Once it has done this it can even be used to bring together the data and show trends to internal teams so that they can understand what the contact center can do to improve customer experience.

Order Management

When placing or revising an order, a lot of information that the customer provides must be gathered and placed into numerous, separate, databases. A robot can do this at scale without any risk of error. Also, a robot can spot missing or incorrect information and flag it to a human agent so that they can contact the customer to resolve the issue – again improving customer satisfaction.

Maintenance and Upkeep

A robot can monitor the uptime of services the business provides to customers and book an engineer if problems are detected. A robot can then send out a communication to the customer alerting them to the issue and checking that the booked time is suitable and offer an alternative if not.

Checking Customer ID

When a client calls in, an operator has to check who they are and validate their ID. They do this by checking details in the system. This often involves putting a customer on hold. However, RPA can use voice recognition to check speech in real-time against the database and provide the operator with confirmation on who they’re speaking to in an instant.

Updating Records

When calls are complete, operators have to update customer records. Manually inputting data in different areas of a business’ IT system is crucial but also time-consuming. Mistakes can cause poor data quality in the system which can pose regulatory risks. RPA reduces the risk of mistakes by taking the initial operator entry and then replicating it in every area of the system that needs updating.

Why Wouldn’t You Use RPA?

RPA can be used in any number of ways within contact centers to help reduce cost, improve customer satisfaction, boost employee satisfaction and increase revenue so what’s stopping you from getting involved with RPA?

Want the benefits of RPA in your contact center? PAteam can help, so get in touch today.

Podcasting is a big deal – and with over $700 million in ad revenue kicking about it shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. Because of podcasting’s popularity, we’re seeing more and more specialist shows that are built around educating audiences on niche topics.

We’re very thankful to say that this includes automation and so we’ve put together our top 5 automation podcasts that you should definitely check out. Let’s dive in!

Get Automated

Kelsey Bratcher, aptly nicknamed “The King” by some of his former colleagues at Infusionsoft, has worked on automation in almost every business type and has seen how much it can impact businesses in a really positive way.

His experience speaks for itself and he has built his podcast around 3 core concepts, Understand Automation, Apply Automation, and Automate Everything. His belief is that he can help educate on the fundamentals of automation, show how people can implement it, and then use that knowledge to spread it throughout their business.

Better Automation

Only a few months old, this automation podcast is produced by Procesio – which provides its own productivity tool to help teams manage processes. They’re experts in the space and their podcast brings other experts on to share the very best ideas for using automation to improve business processes.

Already on episode 27, at the time of writing, there’s already a wealth of information available and experts from every tech under the sun if you are looking for specific advice and guidance.

The Automation Mastery Podcast

Now in its second season, The Automation Mastery Podcast is presented by Justin Morgan and seeks to give direct business advice on implementing automation into every corner of your business. Justin takes on topics like outsourcing and hiring, while also looking at industry trends.

If you aren’t sure which episode to try first we recommend ‘Easiest Way To Send a Handwritten Note’ which features the founder of handwrytten.com – David Wachs.

Automators

Hosted by David Sparks and Rosemary Orchard, Automators is a podcast that brings a simple message – automation makes your life easier, everyone can do it, and we’ll show you how. With over 100 episodes now in the bag, the podcast features a wide variety of guest speakers and that means you’ll learn a lot about automation as well as new industries.

Behind the podcast is a forum where fans of the show can hang out and trade information about a host of different automation applications and it’s a valuable stock of information to go alongside the podcast.

Smart Buildings Academy Podcast

Formerly Buildings Automation Monthly, the Smart Buildings Academy Podcast has the biggest back catalog on our list with over 330 episodes to listen to. That means if you want to learn all about building automation then you’re in the right place.

Phil Zito is the founder and CEO of Smart Buildings Academy and he’s created the podcast as a way to help technicians, operators, salespeople, and engineers find out more about building automation.

Any More?

We only have so much time and space to cover great podcasts and while we picked some great ones we know we’ve only scratched the surface. Do you have a favorite that we’ve missed?

Got any other great automation podcasts we should know about? Get in touch today.

We’ve taken a left turn today and rather than talk about technology and themes in the industry, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the automation influencers from the tech space. They’re all working on brilliant things in 2022 and genuinely inspiring new ideas and helping to educate people on what can be tough topics to get to grips with. So without further delay let’s take a look at who they are.

Julie Bort

Truly tuned in to all things tech, Julie Bort is the Deputy Editor at Insider in their startup/venture capital team and she’s always got her finger on the pulse of the industry. Julie has written some brilliant focus pieces on the people behind the biggest tech brands and always provides great insight into the behind-the-scenes that we often don’t get to see.

She talks here about key trends between competitors, Amazon and Target, in the retail space and how they’re using talented people to get a competitive edge using technology.

Adrían Bridgwater

A Senior Contributor at Forbes, Adrían Bridgwater has been writing for over 20 years and self describes as an analyst, technology advocate, and content consultant. As programming’s narrow scope has expanded over the past few years he’s begun to focus on open source, data analytics, and intelligence, cloud computing as well as mobile devices and data management.

This great piece on Forbes’ site talks about optimization within the business and gives some real insight into how much of a subject matter expert Adrían is.

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is the Editor in Chief for Celonis, a company built on an advanced process mining solution that now employs over 2500 people and raised $1 billion in Series D Round funding. Suffice to say as a business they’re a true leader in the space and Larry, as the person responsible for every piece they publish, is truly in touch with automation and tech.

He helps put out some brilliant content including this guide to process mining, which if you’re happy to hand over your details, is a truly great piece of insight.

John Gallant

Another great automation influencer is a tech journalist and content strategist John Gallant. With experience working at Foundry, formerly IDG US Media, John now has a great eye for future tech trends.

John has recently turned his hand to cyber-security and a focus on data and it really shows, so check out some of his great work. This article roundups his work on CIO’s 5G roundtables.

Dana Gardner

In his own words, Dana Gardner is a content jockey and that doesn’t go far enough in describing just how much excellent work he produces. AI, cloud, and cybersecurity are hot topics that he does a fantastic job covering.

What Dana does a brilliant job of is linking great content from other producers so if you follow him you’ll get a depth of insight you’d struggle to find anywhere else. Here’s his own blog as well for an extra bonus.

Who Else?

We’ve covered just a few of the great automation influencers of today, are there other brilliant minds who cut their teeth on all things automation?

If you know some other great influencers get in touch and let us know who else to follow.