AI/Automation
An Open Source Approach to Maximize the Value of Automation
As organizations increasingly realize the benefits of automation, adoption is steadily picking up. According to Gartner, the robotic process automation software market is expected to grow by an enormous 41 percent year over year through 2022.1
Yet, for traditional industries that run on legacy or restricted systems, achieving modernization goals via automation is still a challenge. This is because these systems along with customized processes do not support new-age automation frameworks to fully deploy streamlined automations replacing humans with digital workers. This compels these organizations to remain heavily dependent on human workers for repetitive, low-value activities that can potentially be automated. This not only makes the process highly inefficient; it also leads to sub-par operations.
For instance, in a fortune 500 company operating in power and heavy electrical equipment, due to lack of modernization, systems were being monitored manually, resulting in potential undetected outages due to human lapses. Similarly, in a leading international courier services company, lack of automated ticket escalation mechanism, was resulting in increased lead time for incident closure. A leading designer and manufacturer of mobility products, was relying on manual testing of their online catalogue, which was time consuming and potentially impacting time to market.
In general, failure to automate can cause delays in addressing incidents, leading to reduced customer satisfaction. Lapses in monitoring can result in unplanned outages and hamper productivity. Manual testing adds considerable human dependency and increases time to market for products. Using human workers for repetitive and mundane activities is costly and results in sub-optimal use of human talent. The high reliance on manual processes also leads to scalability issues.
Open source RPA framework
One way to get digital workers without disrupting the core legacy systems is to opt for an open source RPA software. Open source technology by nature of its openness is highly adaptable to work with customized processes and applications. Additionally, they provide freedom from vendor lock-in, better security and power of crowd for best-in-industry solutions. iOpsRPA, for instance, is Infosys’ robotic process automation framework that is based on open source platforms and hence helps keep the cost to a minimum. At the same time, it uses the latest and popular open technologies to help drive greater customer acceptance. The digital workers created using iOpsRPA can impersonate human actions with great accuracy and repeatability.
Such an approach for automation, can help create several benefits:
- Greater accuracy: Digital workers can take care of almost all documented rule-based activities with great accuracy. As the RPA has high repeatability and accuracy, they eliminate human errors
- Reduced effort: Open source RPA tools can help achieve 100 percent automation in proactive infrastructure monitoring and significant reduction in effort in error processing
- Better performance: Digital workers can help meet response time SLA for incidents consistently and improve customer experience, by automatically routing requests and responding to tickets. The digital workers can streamline the service request process with automated ticket creation from mail requests
- Speed of execution: Thanks to automated reporting, incidents are escalated on time to bring them to closure and increase customer satisfaction. Automated web testing helps in quicker time-to-market with streamlined testing and increased coverage
With digital workers, from our experience, it is possible for organizations to achieve 100 percent automation on activities such as infra monitoring, customer ticket assignment and routing, and web testing activities. It can also result in a significant effort reduction in activities such as messaging queue processing and report generation activities for management governance. Additionally, it can streamline service requests and change requests fully via automated ticket creation.
Of course, while RPA technology has advanced considerably, it still has its limitations. Digital workers cannot replace humans for complex decision-making activities. They, however, provide immense value by reducing the load on humans and freeing up their time for more complex decisions.
For organizations it makes sense to have an open mind towards adoption of open source technologies based automation as part of their modernizing the core strategy.
