Unlocking the Power of an
Intelligent Enterprise

Every industry has its ebbs and flows in business. Still, the winning formula for organizations to stay ahead of the curve is by embracing digitization enabled by technologies like IoT, Automation, and AI to cope with new challenges and take advantage of opportunities.

Doubtless, by now, you’ve seen and heard that disaster is a laboratory for innovation. The same goes with the global COVID-19 pandemic situation, where many businesses are forced to re-look at their business strategies. But the one thing that remains the priority for organizations across the globe is customer experience, agility, and seamlessness.

These unprecedented changes have torn up various business models, giving birth to many bold new competitors that are taking the market by storm. That means ‘digitization’ isn’t just an industry buzzword – it’s an essential process for any organization that hopes to thrive in the new world.

Let’s dive in and learn how enterprise digitization can change business forever.

The Key to Unlocking Business Growth

The digitization process seeks to leverage digital technologies to enhance customer experience and business processes, thus meeting customers’ changing needs and the market.

Moreover, it helps the organization become more agile in improving the speed of response, standardizing processes, eliminating manual processes, and using data in a much more intelligent way than ever.

Sharing his views in a recent event by EdgeVerve, AdvantEdge, Radhakrishnan Anantha, EVP- Chief Executive Officer & MD, Infosys BPM, said,

A quick look back

If you look at Gartner, they refer to the 3Vs – volume, variety, and velocity – as the three defining properties or dimensions of (big) data. Volume refers to the amount of data, variety refers to the number of data types, and velocity refers to the speed of data processing.

Complex and unstructured data has always been a concerning factor for organizations, especially the large and medium-size. According to an Accenture report, “Nearly 80% of data in the enterprise is unstructured – work descriptions, résumés, emails, text documents, research and legal reports, voice recordings, videos, images, and social media posts.” ² In the past, organization revenue was impacted by wrong calculations and inaccurate understanding of data, which resulted in significant losses at times. During the third industrial revolution, businesses focused on ERP, CRM, and SRM that acted as a strong foundation for running any successful business.

Though these pillars are still applicable and essential, value does not exclusively come from ERP anymore.

However, in the fourth industrial revolution, things are pretty different.

Moreover, they can save time, money, and effort, thus eliminating manual and time-consuming tasks.

IDC’s research finds that by 2023, driven by the need to become resilient, 65% of organizations will invest in highly configurable ERP applications infused with artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve greater autonomy in business operations. ³

Pave your way to becoming an Intelligent Enterprise

You must have got an idea to be digitally resilient in today’s competitive and changing environment and become a true Intelligent Enterprise. You need to adopt digitization by leveraging the power of intelligent technologies.

A recent survey found that nearly 80% of business leaders believe it will be essential for organizations to become intelligent to achieve future success, but only 17% of companies consider themselves intelligent. Further, it states that 17% of organizations identify as fully Intelligent Enterprises. This implies that the race to become an Intelligent Enterprise has got off the block, and, importantly, others still have the opportunity to join the race and still emerge winners. ⁴

There is no denying that everything depends upon performance, and if it is rightly monitored and analyzed, then success is on your way. Hence, if you aim to be the front runner in your business domain, you must make sure that the performance of your enterprise solution is flawless.

However, on the other end, many enterprises are still in the dilemma of shifting their infrastructure to this new environment. Some of the factors holding back their decision are investments, time, and effort that are required to transition the workforce skillset.

But as CXO, you need to understand that the benefits, in the long run, will outweigh these temporary drawbacks.

Now the question is – Are these the only motive behind organizations trying to become intelligent efficient? And if yes, then what other strategies are organizations adopting?

Let’s understand this with a real scenario, wherein Philips, a global leader in health technology, adopts digitization by automating and revamping its finance processes to meet rising customer expectations.

Philips’ roadmap towards the Intelligent Enterprise

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected business-critical functions across enterprises worldwide. From impacting the way we work and provide services to our customers, it has forced us to rethink every business strategy.

So, to retain a competitive advantage and bring agility to the business, Philips was looking for a way by which they could transform their finance function without compromising on speed and quality.

“Back in 2017, when we were deliberating refreshing our tech strategy, RPA was one element we were evaluating like how to implement it in our processes. At that point in time, we got in touch with Infosys BPM and EdgeVerve team,” says Arvind Subramanian, Chief Accounting Officer, Philips, in a recent EdgeVerve event, AdvantEdge.

They took up the challenging task of automating finance operations as a part of the Hoshin program from 2018 to 2020. “At that point in time, we had no clue what it would yield, but we said let’s try to automate one million hours because we didn’t want to put a dollar value to it. Our idea here was to really drive quality sustainability but also to improve the speed, especially in the closing and planning process,” added Arvind.

This was one of the most complex finance transformation programs in the world. Collaborative efforts led by Philips Finance leadership, supported by Infosys BPM process and technology knowledge leveraging AssistEdge Platform delivered significant business benefits.

High impact benefits delivered through Automation

To further explore the benefits experienced by Philips, EdgeVerve commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) Philips realized by deploying EdgeVerve’s AssistEdge RPA platform. As per the report, some benefits realized were:

1. Touchless Automation by standardizing and simplifying process globally eliminating 15,000 person-hours per annum with 72% reduction in AHT
2. Automated dunning process resulting in 21% better collection (~ € 6M incremental benefits) within 3 months of implementation
3. 21 AssistEdge RPA Bots created to continuously check all data postings in SAP, thereby ensuring data quality. Total effort saved 78,000 hrs per annum

He also added, “What we didn’t realize were the softer benefits which we, later on, encountered like knowledge management becoming much easier than before, and also when the pandemic hit us in 2020, the importance of Resilience came into the limelight”.

Intelligent Enterprise — the key to lasting business resilience

Post pandemic organizations were forced to focus on recovery, resilience, and competitiveness. And organizations that invested in resilience have been able to survive the pandemic much better than those that didn’t. The pressing need was to look towards faster apt utilization of digital technologies. The organizations that had kick-started their journey earlier to become an Intelligent Enterprise benefitted far more significantly than those who just started.

Even Gartner predicts that 90 percent of large organizations globally will have deployed RPA in some form by 2022 as they look to digitally empower critical business processes while recalibrating human labor and manual efforts. ⁵

Their trend report also showed that “By 2025, 50% of enterprises will have devised artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration platforms to operationalize AI, up from fewer than 10% in 2020.” ⁶

Where do you go from here?

Building an Intelligent Enterprise is not an easy feat. It’s not something that happens overnight. It requires planning, strategy, and patience. With the speed at which digitization is becoming an integral part of every business, intelligent technologies are growing.

But earlier you start something, the better you are at it. Of course, it also depends on many factors like organization structure, offerings, management, process, etc. So, what do you think? What is your strategy to become an Intelligent Enterprise? Please share your thoughts with us.

Disclaimer Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the respective institutions or funding agencies

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-09-30-gartner-says-sixty-nine-percent-of-boards-of-directors-accelerated-their-digital-business-initiatives-folloing-covid-19-disruptions
2. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/search-and-content-analytics-blog/search-unstructured-data-analytics-trends
3. https://www.financialexecutives.org/FEI-Daily/November-2021/Business-Resiliency-Enabled-by-an-Intelligent-Ente.aspx
4. https://www.wipro.com/content/dam/nexus/en/service-lines/analytics/latest-thinking/state-of-intelligent-enterprises.pdf
5. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-09-21-gartner-says-worldwide-robotic-process-automation-software-revenue-to-reach-nearly-2-billion-in-2021#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20Increased%20Enterprise%20Interest%20in%20RPA
   &text=Gartner%20predicts%20that%2090%25%20of,human%20labor%20and%20manual%20effort
6. https://www.advsyscon.com/blog/gartner-it-automation/