Digiblu: A Step toward Intelligent Automation

How does DigiBlu engage with clients?

When organizations begin their automation programs, they often use RPA tactically, for automating easy-to-implement as-is processes, spreading automation thin and wide. This can mean scale but doesn’t necessarily correlate to value. However, as credibility is gained, and the power of RPA - as an Operating System for the Digital Workforce - is appreciated, so organizations look to other technologies (such as chatbots, OCR, cloud computing) to open up use cases and automate customer interactions. Such capabilities, integrated with RPA, also bring about the potential to re-imagine processes by orchestrating and automating activities from customer engagement to fulfillment, turning decisions into action without external intervention. This gives organizations the potential to achieve competitive advantage and unlock superior value. With this understanding, we engage clients to think big even while starting small.

As the Digital Workforce scales, so it should be positioned as an enterprise asset. Bots don’t need shifts, work 24/7/365, are multi-skilled and don’t need to be organized in silos. The principles of scientific management, designed for people, no longer apply to the Digital Workforce. The bots don’t recognize boundaries and their capacity can be dynamically orchestrated to handle automated processes, against SLAs, 24x7, balancing workload across all runtime resources to address peaks and troughs in demand and planned and unplanned business events, without the need of additional human resource or training. Ultimately, the operating model is itself transformed around the integrated human-digital workforce. Rather than get there slowly or by accident, DigiBlu seeks trusted relationships with client executives to guide them towards this aspiration, helping them every step of the way.

With an intent to help our clients create and operate multi-purpose Digital Workforces, as a strategic enterprise asset, we trust that our collaborations with blue-chip organizations make this realizable and, with the understanding that we are all still feeling our way into the 4IR territory, we are grateful that they let us try new things out.

Could you provide us with an example of deploying a Digital Workforce as a Strategic Enterprise Asset?

One of our clients is an international financial services company that provides life insurance, investment, savings, asset management, banking, and personal insurance solutions. They were excited by what they’d heard about RPA and initially explored its potential through a pilot. Our approach demonstrated RPA’s potential, then we ‘reset’ the program to set the foundations to scale and progressed into full implementation, switching from a tactical to a strategic orientation to achieve competitive advantage and unlock superior value.

The start seemed slow as they became familiar with RPA, as IT infrastructure was established and governance was set-up, and it took us six months just to deploy the first two processes, on five bots. With the foundations set, however, they scaled fast. Just four months after the reset, they’d achieved 173 deployments to automate 17 large processes by orchestrating 60 bots. The initial financial targets were met and the investment in RPA achieved a positive ROI in just seven months. The improvement in customer experience (increase in Net Promoter Score to world-class 78%) was also a very pleasant surprise, which has helped shift the focus from just back-office operations to addressing customer interactions. The client is now scaling to cover the entire organization, using hundreds of bots.

What does the future look like for DigiBlu?

In January, we inaugurated our Robotic Operations Centre (ROC) in Cape Town, which provides a differentiated proposition for outsourced services as an alternative to the traditional BPO model – one that isn’t based on labor arbitrage, extends the reach of the service offering and is super responsive. The ROC will provide for remotely managed implementations and operations (a cloud-delivered Digital Workforce) as well as Business Processes-as-a-Service (BPaaS), for clients worldwide. We shall reinforce success in our SA heartland - where we get to try out many innovations - and expand into the rest of Africa. We have recently launched a new DigiBlu business in London, will be launching BPaaS offerings in the US and will be operating out of Hong Kong by year end.