Monthly Tangentia Byte
June 2020
Meeting the demands of your customers & supply chain
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm. The global intelligent virtual assistant (VA) market is set to reach more than $25 billion by 2025. In day-to-day life people interact with AI for shopping, banking, and smart home devices. In business, chatbots have made customer communications more efficient and a VA can help people organize their schedules and more quickly connect with the information they need to do their job better.
A VA is an AI technology that is also useful in the realm of higher education. In this setting, the VA can transform the university and college experience by helping students access the information they need when they need it. It can also help universities manage the inquiries and communications they receive from students and the general public.
AI Powered Chatbots make it possible for each student to individualize their on-campus experience and education. From asking questions regarding registration to finding out where the nearest campus coffee shop is to getting help with their work, an AI Chatbot is there to help students. There are many ways that students can enhance their college experience with an AI Chatbot such as:
AI Chatbot technology is advancing quickly, improving its capacity to provide more intuitive guidance for each student based on their individual needs.
Universities have a limited staff that needs to service a very large student body. If enrollment grows, hiring more staff can be costly. With the use of a AI Chatbots, a university can easily and efficiently service a large student body by deploying an AI Chatbot to:
TIA can be built, trained, and deployed to provide individualized conversations via any application, device, or channel. It has the capability to:
These capabilities provide higher education institutions with the means to offer the following services:
Language:
Vision:
Data insights:
As an example of the use of TIA, an IBM Powered Watson Chatbot, a Canadian University was looking for a chatbot digital assistant that would allow the Office of the Registrar to improve their response time to student inquiries, particularly with online inquiries via email and direct chat services. With more than 80,000 emails, 71,000 phone calls, and 37,000 in-person inquiries, staff was frequently overwhelmed and working overtime to keep up.
Tangentia was chosen as the service provider and to demo their TIA Chatbot to the University. We trained the chatbot to help students and website visitors find the information they needed quickly and easily. In addition, we were able to provide smart integration with the University’s website and include live agent integration. Not only that, but we worked closely with the IBM Watson AI team and had a working chatbot demo built within five days!
Contact Tangentia today for more information and to schedule a POC on the IBM Watson Virtual Assistant and TIA.
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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When a customer wants to buy a car and applies for an automobile loan, they choose the vehicle they want, put in the application, and hand over all their financial documentation. Then all is quiet on their front while they wait – and wait – to find out if they have been approved.
However, behind the scenes there are a number of tasks being done to process that loan application and finalize the sale of the vehicle. Most of these tasks are tedious, repetitive, and done manually, which is why the customer is left waiting. Simply put – it takes time.
This is where robotic process automation (RPA) can help. RPA is an automation system that can take these tedious and repetitive tasks and do them more quickly and more accurately than any human. Whether it is checking a customer’s credit history, verifying their information and documentation, loan boarding, sending out a welcome letter, or ensuring the title transfer of the vehicle, it can all be automated.
This is incredibly important at a time when auto retailers are facing a potential increase in demand for new vehicles. While auto sales have gone down due to COVID-19, that same reason is prompting many people to purchase a vehicle to stay off public transportation. It’s a potential silver lining for the auto industry.
Of course, the automation of the automobile industry isn’t new. Automation has been used on the factory floor for years and the industry has always been at the forefront of innovation when it comes to the manufacturing side of things. It is the sales side that, until now, has been lacking. Fortunately, that will soon be a thing of the past.
One of the hottest auto-buying markets in the world right now is India. In February of 2018, the sale of passenger vehicles rose by over 7%. Seven cars were being bought every minute. Tangentia saw this as the ideal market to integrate RPA into the auto loan process.
We partnered with the largest car dealership in India, to implement an RPA solution that would help them with their auto sales process. When a vehicle is purchased in India, the purchaser has to register with 12 different agencies to finalize the sale. These are agencies such as the department of transportation, insurance, roadside assistance, and vehicle warranty.
Prior to RPA implementation, the entire purchase and loan approval process was done manually. It took two days before a customer was approved and all the paperwork was done. It was a time- and energy-intensive process for sales associates. Yet, RPA took the entire process and shortened it from a couple of hours to minutes.
This freed up associates’ time, made the process more efficient, and reduced the number of errors that occurred. It also made the customers happy because they didn’t have to wait long to get loan approval and get their new car on the road. This has significantly impacted the ROI for Indus Motors.
The more time sales associates spend on the sales floor, the more vehicles a dealership will sell. With RPA, sales associates won’t be tied to their computer and phone dealing with the tedious loan approval process and all the other number of things that must be done when selling a vehicle. Instead, RPA bots can take care of all that behind-the-scenes work and sales associates can be where they’re needed most – on the front line making sales.
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Automation. It’s that one word that every industry is starting to become familiar with. The idea
of an autonomous system is quickly becoming the norm in many industries—the insurance industry included.
Insurance companies stand to gain a lot from implementing automation into their workflows.While this traditional industry is often cautious, procedural, and afraid of change. Having access to an innovative technology that can greatly optimize labor-intensive processes is essential for insurance companies looking to maintain market dominance.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need for digitization and the implementation of new technology. Companies have been forced to think and act differently. And in the insurance industry, this has meant embracing change.
There are several use cases on how RPA can transform the way an insurance business functions.
Here are just a few of the main benefits that an RPA solution can offer an insurance company.
1. Claims: Insurance companies are flooded with claims. Some companies say claims have tripled. This has led to increased pressure on the assessor, delayed processing, and decreased customer satisfaction. RPA can add value to this process. Bots can read documents, access different systems, update records, and provide claim decisions. Not ready to give that much control to a bot? You can implement a hybrid system that lets your bots do the heavy lifting and leaves the decision-making to humans.
2. Underwriting: With changing lifestyles, the approach to underwriting needs to change.Underwriting isn’t a one-size-fits-all scenario. RPA can move a majority of the underwriting to Straight-Through-Processing. This will enable underwriters to focus and underwrite critical cases, analyse trends, and more.
3. Customer On-boarding: Building a digital front with access to both the customer and the sales agent where the bot reviews the information and completes the back-end processing is vital to simplifying the on-boarding process.
4. Policy Administration and Servicing: A bot can calculate changes to premium and send reminders to customers to pay outstanding premiums. A chat-bot can also answer questions related to policy status, renewals, and provide other relevant information with 24/7 service.
5. Reconciliations: RPA can assist in quickly matching premium amounts to the policy, allowing your employees to focus on exceptions.
6. Finance: Finance automation is one of the first places most companies implement an RPA solution. There are countless use cases for automating invoices, payroll, expenses, and other finance tasks.
7. Policy Cancellations: Bots can calculate the payout amounts and update records across systems far quicker than a human can.
8. Fraud Identification: Cognitive RPA can quickly analyse transactions and provide alerts or handle suspicious claims.
1. Error free processing of transactions
2. Increase in efficiency, faster processing of transactions and accurate data entry
3. Change management is easy and quick
4. Easy implementation with storefront BOTs
5. Can integrate with legacy systems
The biggest benefit of RPA is that it allows employees to focus on their core tasks, leaving the
bot to take care of the administrative and transactional aspects of a transaction.
Almost every business has had to transition to a digital model overnight. Employees are now
working from home and sales teams cannot meet their customers. Companies need to transform how they deliver exceptional customer experiences and improve internal operations.
Digital processing through an RPA solution is one of the easiest ways to achieve this.Implementing an RPA solution will improve your operational efficiency, customer experience,and so much more.
Get in touch with us today to learn how RPA can transform the way you approach your core workflows.
Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how financial institutions can quickly and easily implement RPA today with Tangentia and Automation Anywhere.
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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The closure of non-essential businesses and physical distancing mandates across the globe from COVID-19 has revealed an important challenge for organizations needing to quickly adopt a remote worker strategy. Over the course of a month businesses have had to quickly mobilize their in-office workforce with the tools they needed to work from home, while maintaining security and compliance. As leaders and internal teams were busy focusing on the “how” we also needed to pay close attention to our most critical asset – the people.
When it comes to your company’s supply chain, one of the most common weak links is inventory management. There are very few businesses that handle their inventory management well. Typically, retail businesses face problems scaling up their inventory management systems as they grow.
As your business grows, efficient inventory practices become more and more worth investing in. Retail companies with poor inventory management can suffer from stock issues, slowed turnover times, and needing to order excess inventory to prevent running out of stock. Slow delivery and stock issues are a sure way to reduce customer satisfaction, so keeping these issues at a minimum is important.
How can retail companies improve their stock management and inventory processes? For most businesses, the answer is automation. Most inventory management issues stem from human error, inefficient practices, and incomplete item information. Automation resolves all these issues. It is intrinsically efficient and requires complete item information, and eliminates human error.
So, how can your business get started with inventory automation? The process isn’t as difficult as you might think. Just-in-Time Inventory (JIT), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are a few strategies that you can utilize onto your supply chain to be well on the way to an optimized system.
JIT inventory is a way to decrease waste and increase the efficiency of your supply chain. With JIT, your supply chain only receives goods as they become needed.
JIT keeps your business at maximum efficiency. By having goods on hand only when they’re needed, you can keep your supply chain operating smoothly without needing to worry about long-term storage of stock.
Maintaining JIT inventory reduces the amount of waste your supply chain produces from leftover, unused goods. It also keeps the investment into your supply low, as you don’t need to stock more goods than you need.
While JIT keeps your business on top of its efficiency when supply is readily available, it can cause your business to suffer greatly from issues farther down the line of the supply chain.
Since you don’t keep a stockpile of the goods your supply chain uses, if they suddenly become scarce or expensive, your business might unexpectedly run out of stock. You might also end up needing to buy overpriced stock.
In general, Electronic Data Interchange is simply the technical term for two computers communicating with each other. In the context of the supply chain, EDI is a way to get a full digital picture of your electronic transaction exchanges with your customers, as well as your inventory.
Many supply chain issues, such as inventory shortages and surpluses, happen because of a lack of inventory visibility. EDI allows you to keep track of all your inventory in one centralized location, making it easy to track and prevent inventory errors.
With EDI, it’s also much easier to manage more complex inventory processes, such as multichannel sales. The more complicated the process, the more likely it is for human error to occur.
Having a guarantee that all of the information about your inventory is accurate allows you to make supply decisions with the big picture in mind. Overall, EDI improves almost all aspects of the inventory management process.
EDI can be hard to adjust for your supply chain to work around, especially if it is a legacy EDI system that is in place. This is especially the case for rapidly growing businesses, which don’t usually have particularly well-optimized supply chains.
If your inventory isn’t well-suited to EDI, it can take some work to get full value out of the EDI system. You may need to overhaul some of your inventory processes altogether.
RPA is a way to increase the efficiency of your inventory management by replacing human operators with various digital systems. With an RPA system, the computer essentially uses itself by means of a virtual operator, called an RPA robot.
RPA robots have a wide array of functionalities and are able to completely replace human users for many applications. They can perform tasks such as moving and collecting data from various sources, as well as process data by performing calculations.
RPA can allow for quite a lot of inventory management automation, sometimes up to 90%. In general, processes that can be automated should be, as humans are almost always slower than an RPA robot. RPA robots can drastically increase the efficiency of your inventory management processes.
Like EDI, RPA removes the human element from many processes. In particular, RPA robots can handle data entry, data processing, and other repetitive tasks easily, with a 0% rate of error. This gives them a sizable advantage over humans, who are unable to focus on these tasks for as long.
RPA systems can also keep running overnight, giving them yet another advantage over human operators. Overall, RPA is almost guaranteed to provide a large boost to your business’s supply chain efficiency.
Like EDI, a proper RPA system is not trivial to implement. Rolling out an RPA project into your business’s inventory management or production environments actually has a good chance of failing at first. After some troubleshooting, you will likely start getting full value out of the RPA system.
Automation is a great way to increase efficiency and eliminate errors within your inventory management process. It can’t do the job on its own, though: if you want to optimize your inventory management, you should use a combination of JIT, EDI, and RPA.
On their own, these three methods of optimizing your inventory are sure to increase your efficiency significantly. When put together, though, they are more than the sum of their parts.
The biggest weakness of JIT is that it’s prone to human error. Improper data entry can result in an unexpected stock outage of your product. EDI and RPA prevent this by removing the capacity for human error in the majority of the inventory management operation.
On the other hand, EDI and RPA can suffer from bottlenecks. It doesn’t matter how efficient your data processing is if your business is bogged down by extra costs relating to storage or other inefficiencies. JIT helps alleviate this bottleneck by increasing the efficiency of your business outside of data processing.
While JIT, EDI, and RPA are tools that are best used together, they can be used individually to great effect. You should make sure you’re on the lookout for the potential issues with using these tools.
So as long as you build your inventory management process around the tools you’re using—you should be able to work around JIT, EDI, and RPA’s various weaknesses. Overall though, we recommend trying to implement all three inventory management tools, as they work best in tandem.
If your business has been growing and you’re having trouble handling demand for your products, the solution may not be to expand and spend more. Oftentimes, it’s much more budget-friendly and effective to invest in ways to improve your efficiency than expand your flawed, existing system.
When it comes to improving the efficiency of your supply chain, the best way is with automation. JIT, EDI, and RPA are all easy-to-implement forms of automation that are designed to provide you with a quick return on investment. Once you have these systems in place, you’ll find that your inventory management model is much more scalable.
If you’re interested in learning more about JIT, EDI, or RPA, feel free to contact us today to find out how these tools can help your business be the best it can be.
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming increasingly popular in many industries. PwC conducted a survey of the financial industry in which 98% of the respondents said they believe RPA implementation is “important, very important, or extremely important.”
The reason for this overwhelming support for RPA is simple. The use of RPA to automate many of the repetitive tasks that use up too much in terms of human and financial resources is helping companies lower their overhead costs, increase productivity, and streamline their operations.
However, with the increasing use of RPA, it can be overwhelming when trying to choose the right RPA partner for you. Yet, choosing the right partner is critical to the success of your business. With this in mind, here are the five things to consider when choosing an RPA partner for your organization:
The very first thing you need to do is take a close look at the RPA partner candidate’s automation portfolio that shows what they have to offer. This portfolio of offerings, including their methodology, the support they provide and the commercial model they use, is critical to your RPA success. You also want to know things such as:
You want to be sure that the RPA partner you choose will be able to provide you with the very best tools to ensure robust automation delivery capabilities. This means that RPA partner will, in turn, rely on partnerships with RPA product companies, such as Jiffy.ai, ABBY FlexiCapture, BluePrism, Automation Anywhere, UI Path, and winautomation. These products should provide things like:
This should all be offered for a competitive price and come with full technical support. In addition, your RPA partner should be fully certified to deliver RPA solutions and experienced in implementing those solutions in your industry.
In 2020 scalability will be a big focus area for organizations, when it comes time to choosing an RPA partner. Ensuring the RPA platform you select is fully scalable and will meet the needs of your business as they change will help maximize the benefits and long-term ROI. This means that you will be able to use the bots across multiple processes, regardless of variations in process volumes, and have a solution that works as your business grows.
Be sure your RPA partner has a level of process oversight that will meet regulatory compliance and ensure the protection of all data. This includes saving data and information related to automated workflows in an activity log that provides a clear record of all data flow and transactions, ensuring you are prepared for any internal or external audits that may be conducted.
Look at the RPA partner’s track record and clientele. It is important that you can see they have a proven automation blueprint that has successfully worked for other organizations, particularly those in your industry or sector. Take a look at who their customers are and pay attention to ratings and reviews of their products, so you can get a good feel for the success of their automation solution.
Ultimately, when you are looking for an RPA partner, you need to be sure that their expertise and capabilities meet your specific needs. Tangentia has the proven track record, the tools, and the innovative spirit to help you get your RPA off the ground.
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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If this pandemic has taught us all one thing, it is that the future is uncertain. And though there may be business disruptions, life and business must continue. This pandemic has also laid bare the unpreparedness of large industries and companies who have invested heavily in Information Technology, but the processes are still
largely manual.
And this has definitely affected customer experience and satisfaction . If we were to conduct a survey today, we would realize that customer experience is negatively affected. The reasons for customer dissatisfaction are mainly delay in response time, inadequate information and non-transparency. If RPA was deeply entrenched in the system, it would have enabled Banks and other financial service institutions to respond quickly and more efficiently to this new normal.
There are a few use cases for RPA in Banks. But these have so far been restricted to fraud detection and customer service to name a few. Some of the areas where RPA can provide immediate benefit can be as follows:
These are only a few areas where RPA can be integrated into the Bank’s processes.
a) The biggest benefit is that the employees can focus on their core competencies and leave mundane, repetitive tasks to the BOTs
b) RPA with a mix of Machine Learning can increase efficiency and accuracy in transactions and data entry
c) Implementation is quick due to availability of storefront like BOTs
d) RPA integrates with existing frameworks and systems and does not require a change in infrastructure
e) Change Management is easy and there are use cases where changes have been done in a matter of days
Banks are often looked at by governments as vehicles to add stability to the economy. This is also reflected in the large workforce most Banks carry. One of the biggest fears people have is that building a digital workforce will eliminate the need for a physical workforce.
That is not entirely true. The employees will instead be used for their core competencies. Employees will provide oversight, handle exceptions and take judgement calls based on experience. The goal of RPA is to improve operational
efficiency and not eliminate workforce.
So while a few Bank may have deployed chat-bots, the uptake has so far been slow. But now is the time when the banking industry must invest and build a digital workforce. It will not only improve efficiency and accuracy but also strengthen our defenses and readiness for the next disruption.
Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how financial institutions can quickly and easily implement RPA today with Tangentia and Automation Anywhere.
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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