Cloud RPA allows for the real-time availability of an automation platform: Atul Soneja, Global Head of Edge Products and Infosys Nia

EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys, has recently launched AssistEdge Cloud RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to help enterprises future-proof their businesses with greater speed, scalability and security through hassle-free and rapid process automation. Atul Soneja, Global Head of Edge Products and Infosys Nia, shares his perspective on the huge growth demand for RPA

Some edited excerpts from the interview:

The BFSI sector is among the first sectors to adopt automation. How do you see this sector leveraging RPA?

As early adopters of technological innovation, the BFSI sector has leveraged RPA to create a real-world impact in terms of enhanced productivity and reduced cost of operations leading to superior customer experiences. Intelligent Automation has helped banks unlock value across the business value chain, accelerating time to market. There has been consistent growth in the adoption of automation across the BFSI industry, and banks have long moved from minor pilot projects to end-to-end automation.

One of our clients, a leading US Bank, was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a single process where they were reimbursing clients for fraudulent transactions and not reclaiming it back from debit card and fraud monitoring providers. AssistEdge addressed this business pain point, and in 12 weeks, an automation process was designed and implemented, which saved USD 1.2 million within the first year from a single process alone. Moreover, the process completion time reduced by 80%.

The latest tech adoptions by enterprises have been in the direction of intelligent, scalable, secure, and reliable platforms to realize the full potential of automation. The next phase of innovation in automation will be the evolution of intelligent RPA through the integration of AI and ML technologies. This will enable a powerful blend of the human and digital workforce to reach the highest level of human-empowered automation that we at EdgeVerve call as ‘Automation Singularity’.

Automation often requires high infra cost. Can process automation happen on the cloud?
Businesses need to focus on perceiving Intelligent Automation as a long-term value driver instead of a cost center. Infrastructure costs have long been a cause of concern for CXOs. However, the tech landscape itself is going through a constant metamorphosis enabling the management of automation of any scale and complexity on the cloud with stringent governance and compliance framework. Cloud RPA allows for the real-time availability of an automation platform, with access to bots anytime, anywhere.

RPA delivered on the cloud is an illustration of a SaaS-based (Software as a Service) solution as the infrastructure, setup, maintenance, and support are being provisioned as services by the RPA vendor. This allows the clients to take the hassle out of infrastructure installation and ongoing monitoring of the bots.

AssistEdge Cloud RPA revolves around deploying streamlined, secure, scalable, and flexible automation solutions for enterprises. It accelerates time-to-value through AssistEdge RPA and industry-leading RPA delivery capability, coupled with Cloud efficiency.

We have implemented AssistEdge RPA on Cloud for one of the largest global healthcare technology companies for their finance and accounting function. The outcome — 13+ SAP-based, as well as other diverse applications were automated with a 24*7 bot execution schedule.

With large enterprises, scalability is often the biggest roadblock while choosing an AI/Automation solution. How is EdgeVerve solving that problem?

According to me, there are two essential reasons why scaling automation is a challenge for many enterprises — not choosing the right processes to automate and/or getting stuck in the POC or testing phase due to the inability of the RPA platform to scale.

EdgeVerve’s AssistEdge is a true enterprise grade cohesive automation platform that enables enterprises to seamlessly traverse between attended and unattended automation, thus achieving scalability. Identifying the right processes for automation helps enterprises attain automation at scale. With AssistEdge Discover, enterprises can easily tap into a custom-made automation blueprint that maps processes on ‘value’ and ‘feasibility’ of automation. This enables enterprises to start small, but start right, carving a path for long-term, result-oriented automation, promising to deliver sustained scale.

With more than 70% of our customers being Global 2000 enterprises and accredited highly by global analysts by leading analyst firms, EdgeVerve has delivered on scalability to its customers across multiple dimensions. These include the number of bots in production, processes automated, transactions processed, applications integrated, and the reach across several countries worldwide.

Keeping scalability in mind, EdgeVerve is one of the first-ever company to roll out outcome-based models in the RPA space to help customers achieve significant business value.