By James Dening, VP Automation Anywhere.
Innovation has revolutionised industries since time immemorial — from the wheel to electricity and the motorcar, all the way through to the modern-day internet, smartphones and, even more recently, Artificial Intelligence and automation.
Today, we are no longer on the cusp of the next milestone on this timeline — we are living it.
The Digital Workforce — automated computer-based team members trained to carry out complete business processes from start to finish just like any employee – is a key element driving Industry 4.0. The Digital Workforce is transforming the future of work — for the better of businesses and employees alike.
It’s made up of elements that may already be familiar — Robot Process Automation (RPA), which handles structured data, and Cognitive Automation, which handles semi or unstructured data — are now being used by companies across every vertical.
However, there’s a quiet, but exceptionally smart addition to the digital workforce that hasn’t yet had its time to shine: Real-time analytics play a crucial role in driving business value and return on investment in intelligent automation programmes.
By taking the dull, repetitive tasks that teams must complete before they can get to the meatier, higher-value tasks, and automating them with RPA, you can increase productivity.
This not only improves the bottom line, as well as morale, but you will also enjoy better accuracy — the benefits are clear. Then, add in the cognitive technologies, which can handle the semi-structured or unstructured data, extracting usable hard data to be processed — continually getting better and smarter the more they do.
So, all this data — the lifeblood of your organisation — is being handled by your Digital Workers. They can spot trends in the data they’re processing and tell your business leaders about the hour-to-hour changes they need to make to their operations.
Real-time analytics engines do exactly that. They can not only tell you about the health of your Digital Workforce — in exactly the same way that your HR department can tell you about the health of your human workforce — they can tell you about the data your workforce is processing too.
RPA analytics work tirelessly — they can examine data 24/7 and never miss a detail. And that data contains every aspect of your business, both good and bad — everything you need to know is in there somewhere.
From day one, companies spend huge amounts of time and money analysing their data, creating month-end or quarter-end reports, slicing and dicing in a thousand ways to gain actionable insights. But, do you want to wait that long? Or would you rather have those insights in real-time?
That right here, right now aspect is crucial. The business world today doesn’t run on a quarterly, monthly or even daily cadence. It runs in real-time. So, finding out that actionable data insight immediately could be critical to your success.
Advanced RPA analytics give you the opportunity to look at the inputs and outputs of your business as they happen, so you can steer the ship accordingly.
And the most advanced RPA analytics reveal both what’s meaningful and predict what’s next. It might be the single most valuable thing you gain from your automation project.
