Radhakrishnan R, AVP – Solutions, Infogain, speaks about how leveraging Automation has been positively impacting their business and the solutions they offer to their customers.
Automation and RPA, with its many known impacts and advantages, is a very focussed area and tends to have the highest management attention. To help and address the need for RPA and automation deployments, we have a dedicated CoE, delivery team and other organisational support function teams that help address our customer’s problems. ”
Radhakrishnan R, AVP – Solutions, Infogain
1. What all opportunities does RPA as a technology bring to you as a solution provider?
Being in the technology space, that too a solution provider is similar to standing at the edge of a precipice that is ‘evolution’. Keeping with the curve is not enough, but we need to look for ways to improve the business outcomes for our clients. Believing in “Engineering Business Outcomes” has created some very interesting opportunities for us.
Some of the benefits around RPA include cost savings, increase in employee productivity and reduction in errors. This gives us the opportunity to look at a business problem in a more holistic manner using RPA, conversation interfaces and cognitive automation.
We adopt the ‘Automation First’ approach and that is designed to help the clients by – Assessing possibilities of automation, Creating an Automation Blueprint, Setting up an Automation CoE, Building a Process Pipeline, Automation Factory (Dev) and Managed Services.
Infogain was recognized to be one of the first to deploy and Integrate Automation Anywhere RPA Platform to Google Cloud for a leading digital hospitality marketplace, providing the client a robust platform for cognitive and on-demand automation.
The developed bot worked alongside human counterparts to reduce the manual effort needed to procure the publicly available information by 50%. As a core task, Infogain had to manage a large number of property listings for the client. Property agents had the task of gathering new property information manually which was not only time consuming but also error-prone. To resolve these challenges, Infogain, working in partnership with Automation Anywhere, designed an intelligent Bot that utilizes Google Cloud’s AutoML Vision Object Detection APIs which automatically identifies amenities by looking at the pictures available publicly. After the Bot gathers the info, the agent adds pricing and basic information to complete the listing. The API ‘intelligent’ Bot helped double the listing activations and reduce the turnaround time by 70%.
Infogain’s Automation Practice has deployed over several hundred bots to the technology, retail, travel
2. What is your take the adoption of RPA technology in the Indian market?
RPA is cost effective, improves customer experience, lowers operational risks and improves internal processes. And, as per Forrester, RPA Market will reach $2.9B by 2021 and RPA has become a favoured buzzword in the Indian context too. With such advantages, the Indian market is set to see large scale adoptions that will span across industries and verticals.
BFSI is leading in RPA adoptions, but there is an immense room for growth in other verticals such as manufacturing, insurance, telecom
3. Highlight some of the use cases where you have already deployed RPA solutions? Tell us about the challenges being faced during the deployment of RPA solutions at the customer end?
We have deployed solutions for many of our clients across domains that include – Retail, Insurance, Hitech, Travel & Hospitality.
Some of the use cases are – Managing Currency Rates, Bank Reconciliation, Account Payable / Receivable Processing, Automating Claims Processing, Standard Journal Entries, Audit Compliance Reviews, Pricing Administration, Trade Promotion, Store Specific Planning, Price Comparison across competitive web sites, Automating the ticket cancellation and refund process, Onboarding of 3rd party vendors and Guest Data Processing.
Technology adoptions are never sans challenges and some we faced during the deployment of RPA solutions at the customer end have been Unrealistic Expectation of the client from the overall program, internal readiness, Ownership of the program – Business vs IT and Identifying misfit processes for automation.
4. How have you geared yourself to address the burgeoning market opportunities?
Automation and RPA, with its many known impacts and advantages, is a very focussed area and tends to have the highest management attention. To help and address the need for RPA and automation deployments, we have a dedicated CoE, delivery team and other
5. Since this is a niche segment and requires specialized skill sets, how much of your focus is on up-skilling and re-skilling in this technology?
Infogain’s Automation Practice has deployed over 500+ bots to the technology, retail, travel and insurance industries. Infogain’s RPA offerings include RPA fitment and adoption; and reusable automation frameworks, core activities cover build development, bot testing, build CoEs and bot support.
As we grow and work with larger and global enterprises, it is important that our people are well versed with current tech, plus we are also hiring regularly. Infogain has a robust training program where employees are encouraged to participate and build their skills further. Our strategy can be defined as a twofold strategy, where we promote training of the current employees and secondly hiring laterals. We have a dedicated training centre for RPA, where new employees are given basic training, vendor certification, real case study and then assessed before being deployed on projects.
Also, Infogain believes is helping engineers when they are still in college. So, under ‘Campus Program’ part of our college recruitment (Campus Cell), Infogain runs interactive sessions for aspiring engineers where Infogain leaders share their experiences, success story, insights of corporate. This has been a key to make students understand the depth of knowledge and skills they need to work on to prepare themselves for corporate work.
6. Which RPA vendors you are currently working with? What kind of handholding
Infogain works with leading RPA vendors such as Automation Anywhere, UiPath and BluePrism. All these vendors have elaborate training programs and customized programs for partners. In addition, there are certifications which
7. Going forward, how are you looking to capitalize on the growth that you are witnessing in this domain?
RPA is just the beginning of the automation journey. To put together a complete solution addressing certain business needs, we need to have a holistic approach and look into other sophisticated areas such as cognitive automation and seamless attended automation as well. Our roadmap is to make investments in these areas and get to
