Turbocharging business processes | CIO

One of the few certainties in this world is that customers will always expect more from their service providers, and that whether they remain customers depends greatly on whether that expectation is met.

And it isn’t just customers whose expectations are rising. Employees have witnessed what modern technology can do to enhance internal services and processes and may be quietly asking why these innovations haven’t been brought into their own workplaces.

For service-based organisations – and service functions in any organisation – the need today is to be constantly striving to improve service quality.

Unfortunately, this need comes at a time when margins are tightening across many industries, and when the cost of the skilled humans who can deliver improved services is rising.

All these factors mean it is more important now than ever to ensure that people are being utilised to their fullest, and that means not spending time performing low-value or repetitive tasks.

Thankfully, a solution does exist, in the form of process automation. And it is a solution that is becoming both more powerful and more accessible for all organisations.

Automation for the people

For more than 40 years Tungsten Automation has been helping organisations automate processes to deliver better services for customers and staff alike.

Previously known as Kofax, the new identity represents a significant evolution that has seen the company both migrate its automation solutions to a cloud-based platform while also incorporating numerous aspects of artificial intelligence relating to content, decisioning, and generative AI, to improve functionality.

Today Tungsten Automation provides organisations with the tools needed to create digital services that are consumed directly by customers, or to re-imagine internal services to ensure staff can maximise their productivity and spend the most time helping customers.

This has the dual benefit of not only improving customer service but also improving staff engagement, leading to higher productivity and reduced churn.

Automation can also eliminate many of the errors that occur during manual processes such as data entry, while also providing new tools for combatting fraud when applied in finance applications.

Automation in action

Across Australia and New Zealand today numerous organisations have benefitted from automating processes using Tungsten Automation.

At the construction company McConnell Dowell, rapid growth had created challenges when scaling specific processes. At the same time, the company was under pressure to follow the path to digitisation which has become increasingly important for its sector.

The company had been using paper-based processes to manage invoices, but as the number of invoices rose to between 40,000 to 45,000 each quarter across multiple sites, a new system was needed to alleviate the loss of paperwork and the time that people spend chasing down specific documents.

By automating invoice payment processes using Tungsten Automation’s Total Agility solution, McConnell Dowell was able to eliminate the loss of invoices while also linking its invoicing processes seamlessly into other systems to support business growth.

A similar situation was faced by the New Zealand-based automotive company Giltrap Group, where rapid growth was placing strain on many of the company’s manual processes, creating operational inefficiencies placed significant barriers to future expansion.

This was evident in the processes used by dealers to order parts, as the need to re-key data into manufacturers’ systems while also navigating complex warranty claims processes led to numerous errors and lost time.

The Giltrap Group’s IT team selected Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology from Tungsten Automation for a pilot data entry project that would modernise a process that had been costing staff up to two hours each day. Tungsten Automation was used to build a software robot that automated the data entry task and reduced the human component to just seven minutes while eliminating the risk of human error.

The company has since applied Tungsten Automation across other areas of its business, including warranty claims processing, and has achieved similar results, with more projects on the horizon.

Conclusion

As market pressures drive organisations to accelerate service delivery, new solutions are needed to eliminate slow and error-prone manual tasks and ensure that services are being delivered smoothly.

For those organisations that choose to embrace automation, the benefits can flow quickly in the form of saved time and money, significant reductions in error rates, and increased straight through processing.

And for employees, that means greater productivity and a more engaging working environment, while customers will notice the difference in terms of better service and customer experience.

Hear more organisations like these tell their stories about benefiting from automation at the Tungsten Automation Summit – May 16 in Sydney.