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Management Corner: • From the CEO• Editorial

Tech Talk • Automation – Is it paving or

breaking the way to excellence in service delivery?

Analyst Zone• Automating Healthcare via AI,

RPA and CPA • Manufacturing Automation

Minimizing Human Intervention – Where to Look for Numbers!

Expert Column • By Tomoyuki YAMATO,

Resident Partner – Bengaluru, World1 Solutions

Quotes of the Month

Table of Content

AMASSAMASSAn Infoholic Mouthpiece

Edition 11 ◆ December 2018

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From the CEO

The last issue of our Newsletter on ‘The Smart World’ has

been highly received by our readers and audiences, spe-

cial mention to the two very insightful guest columns by Mr Joy

Rajan Cheruvathoor, Former CMO – L&T Smart World & Com-

munication BU and Ajay Gupta, Global Head – Smart Cit-

ies, Tech Mahindra Ltd. The digital world ruling it in every cor-

ner, we decided to touch every facet of it with our rich in-house

analysis and by speaking with experts in this industry. Thus,

our topic for this edition is ‘Minimising Human Intervention’.

Let me share another good news with you all. We have just tied

up as Research Partner/ Knowledge Partner with quite a few very

prominent Summits happening in India and California in 2019. They

include the IoT World 2019 (California), Connected Vehicle 2019

(Bengaluru), Global Digital Forum 2019 (California) and India m2m

+ iot Forum 2019 (New Delhi). Being the last issue of this year,

I promise you to provide more insightful information on a consis-

tent manner. We are all at the cusp of an interesting change, at

least we are dreaming of it. How are businesses going to get im-

pacted, will all the technological change really lead to disruption,

or replicating successful use cases in real world scenario seriously

help? This and much more in the ‘New Year’ edition of AMASS.

Till then, happily glide though the current issue of our Newsletter.

Management Corner

Sreenivasan K RCEO, Infoholic Research

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Editorial

Who reigns superiority: Manual effort or automation?

“Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where

to put the machine” – pointed out Eliyahu Goldratt. Tech vi-

sionaries have had different versions on the future of au-

tomation, some perceive it to be a pathway for a shin-

ing future, while others find astonishing black holes in

minimising human intervention (read automation). Debates

take place in extreme; it’s grossly the new-age of internet

where changes are imperative, evident and complementary.

Terms like AI, ML, IoT are gradually invading different indus-

try verticals, leaving very little space for human involvement

and intervention in a business process. To stay on top, we

all want to build a scenario where we are capable of han-

dling bottlenecks and become smarter in the overall journey.

Don’t you want capable machines to monitor your home envi-

ronment and provide you a soothing atmosphere after a very

hard days’ work? Its not all that deterring! Deploy it wisely.

Management Corner

Sunanda GanguliAM – Content Marketing & Strategy

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There are numerous repetitive business functions which can be automated using simple rule-based

systems. This not only reduces the time and effort for the given work rising from bottlenecks in a given workflow, but also minimize potential human errors. Thus, in this increasingly competitive digital busi-ness environment across industries, organiza-tions are initiating various best practice initiatives enabled through RPA, for enhanced customer experience. This involves providing self-service tools for customer support with in-built BI and analytics tools or chatbots and intelligent virtu-

Tech Talk

Automation – Is it paving or breaking the way to excellence in service delivery?

Shiladitya Chaterji, Senior Research Analyst - ICT, Infoholic Research

Increasingly, businesses are implementing automation as their next phase of evolution within their digiti-zation strategy to minimize the human component from mundane and routine processes to enable high-er operational efficiencies as well as re-align human resources to complex decision-making processes. Organizations across industries could be segmented under operational automation (typically manufactur-ing, heavy industries) and process automation (business process based BFSI, Healthcare, Utilities among others) depending on the technology and solutions that are being deployed to minimize human intervention.

Service Automation

Process Automation

al assistants for real-time customer engagement. However, the process should not stop at provid-ing customers with a front-end digital engagement platform. Organizations must engage in monitor-ing the entire customer support lifecycle, which in-volves gathering customer requirements through various digital channels, to seamless resolution of their pain points. To enable such an environment, several organizations are leveraging GRC technolo-gies for best practices that ensure automated poli-cy management for “process orchestration” which are compliant with external regulatory guidelines as well as in line with business objectives. Most impor-tantly, organizations must also be careful about their multi-channel environments, thus an integrated well administered service automation for redundant work-flows will yield huge dividends for businesses espe-cially that function closely with the service industry.

Considering the high emphasis placed on transactions and reporting with

increased digital interfaces, financial firms are exploring automation solutions to mit-

igate risk and avoid fraudulent money laundering activities. The evolution of FinTech has heavily im-pacted the finance industry delivering solutions that automate various customer-centric processes through digitalization and automation of business processes for internal operations. The disruptive solutions from RegTech and InsurTech vendors are adept at offering customers on-boarding and fraud detection, eliminating various human-induced er-rors. Deploying robo-advisory agents for verifica-tion process will help organizations in monitoring the payments as well as reducing the risk of fraud-ulent transactions and non-compliance which can

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incur high penalties. The automation of such redun-dant and yet critical tasks help organizations save time, cost and efforts at the same time. Automation of several day-to-day activities will be the focus area for many industries, while human resources will con-centrate more on strategic activities. Automation of business functions and integration of automation tools with other enterprise applications are the key focus areas of vendors offering automation solutions.

In the case of automotive indus-try, fully autonomous vehicles,

with level 5 automation based on SAE standards, are expected to eliminate human interventions in vehicles completely in the future. However, it requires more R&D and time to develop a fully autonomous vehicle. Most of the major automotive companies, including Ford, Honda, Toyota, Volvo and Daimler has set plans to have fully autonomous cars on road by 2020. But most of them would still be limited to driving in highways and devel-oped countries with better transportation infrastructure. Reliability of an autonomous vehicle is measured using disengagements. A disengagement could be defined as a deactivation of autonomous mode when there is a failure in autonomous technology, and the driver takes manual control of the vehicle. Based on the Au-tonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports conduct-ed by the State of California in 2017, companies like Waymo and General Motors (Cruise model) had less-er disengagements. Disengagements in autonomous vehicles are expected to drop further with advance-ments in machine learning by automotive companies.

Summing up

Key factors driving the impetus to automate in-clude the necessity to enhance user experience – be it the provider of goods and services or the end-customer. While in the long term, environ-ment, health and safety will continue to be com-mon underlying theme for organizations investing in automation solutions, short-term objectives will likely be centred around time and cost savings.

Enterprises with large budgets and equally large requirement

for automation seems to be capital-izing on robotics innovation in their business operations and processes. For instance, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has placed more than 100 floor-scrubbing robots’ machines to work, with the help of Brain OS (the artificially intelligent platform that runs the machines, developed by Brain Corp) in the U.S. In 2018, the company also claimed that it will add more 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots to its stores across the United States. Brain’s robots have smart sensors that allow it to collect infor-mation, which can be uploaded into a store’s cloud-based platform. For instance, as the robot cleans, it could also collect data on which shelves are empty. Furthermore, Lowe's, an American retail company in order to minimise human intervention and improve customer service experience, has deployed AI-en-abled robots (LoweBot) in its stores to improve in-store customer service. Shoppers can ask robots — by speaking or using a touch screen — where to find items they require inside the store. The robots also enable store customers to ask some basic customer service questions that would otherwise need to be addressed to a human worker. AI-enabled robotics start-ups (UBTECH Robotics, Geek+, Robot 3T, Brain Corp, Coolso, and Youcan Robotics among others) focus on research, development and analysis of algo-rithms that can learn and perform intelligent behaviour with minimal human intervention pushing the limits of autonomy and cognitive capabilities in machines.

Specialized AutomationOperational Automation

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Analyst Zone

Automating Healthcare via AI, RPA and CPA

Victor Mukherjee, Assistant Manager – Healthcare, Infoholic Research

Currently, the foremost factor which is minimizing human intervention in the healthcare industry is the advent of AI in healthcare automation. Despite its lack of hype, AI implementation to automate ele-

mentary tasks in manoeuvres and administration is expected to result in improved patient experience, quality of service, better project implementation, as well as subordinate costs. As healthcare and IT lead-ers are working to recover clinical results and hospital processes, understanding the emerging technol-ogies is important. Innovations in domains such as electronic health records (EHR), revenue cycle, and operations are expected to empower AI implementation in the healthcare industry in the future. More-over, the industry is undergoing major modernizations in the field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Cognitive Process Automation (CPA) to diminish human errors during real time healthcare delivery. While RPA allows macro level task automation, regulating tasks which have a static workflow and prede-termined rules, CPA is built on machine learning, natural language processing and speech recognition.

Faster data to enrich EHRs

Smarter billing processes for

payers

Adapting stuff-ing for dynamic emergency and

ambulatory services

Less chance of human error, hence increas-ing quality and

consistencyImproved or-

dering process within the EHR

Impact of Automation in Healthcare

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA modernizes, streamlines processes, increase efficiency and reduce up to 50% in cost of health-care delivery. RPA is expected to contribute to healthcare savings by precisely recognizing the health-

care claims which don’t meet the requirements and hence recuperating significant amount of money. Ac-cording to McKinsey, 36% of the healthcare tasks (managerial and back-office) are amenable to automation.

UiPath, which is headquartered in New York with offices in London, Paris and Bucharest, offers ad-vanced, scalable and extensible RPA solutions customized to back office, IT management, customer service, finance and accounting requirements. UiPath’s RPA solu-tions include accounts payable automation, claims processing automation, contact center auto-mation, finance and accounting automation and healthcare payer automation into BPO, Finance& Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecom, Manufacturing, Pub-lic Sector, Retail & CPG industry verticals. The automated tech-nologies offered by the RPA ma-jor are Desktop Automation, Web Automation, GUI Automation, Screen Scrapping, Citrix Automa-tion, Mainframe Automation, SAP Automation and Excel Automation.

Pegasystems located across North America, Europe & Middle East, APAC and South America offers intelligent process auto-mation platform across Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Government, Manufacturing, Energy & Utilities domains. Pegasystems offer Ro-botic Automation and Intelligence solutions through Pega Robotic Desktop Automation, Pega Robot-ic Process Automation and Pega Workforce Intelligence. Pega Bots intends to offer real-time AI, end to end automation, low code speed, cloud choice and multi-dimen-sional scale technology offerings.

Softmotive enterprise automation “Processrobot”, focuses to elimi-nate costs, enhance productivity, and accelerate business perfor-mance. ProcessRobot can be easily deployed on an economical setup with effortless collaboration between all business stakehold-ers integrating data from excel, MySQL and other databases. Softmotive’s RPA solutions are applied to Finance & Accounting, Insurance, Telecommunications, Health Care, Call Centres and Banking verticals. Softomotive of-fices are located in UK (London), USA (NYC), Greece, and India.

CPA has been implemented in various processes till date, from digitization of EHR, to conserving inventory, dealing with unstructured data and addressing regulatory and reporting challenges, across the healthcare industry. Cognitive technologies are being applied by health plans

to systematize prior authorization, which was otherwise manually rig-orous, time consuming, and expensive exercise. With regard to popula-tion health, CPA is considered to help identify patterns in data via au-tomatic analytical techniques, that can be applied to produce informed predictions. Hence, health plans can better comprehend, forecast, and influence the health of patient population. Health plans are likely to ac-cept CPA for defining product strategies, sustaining provider networks,

marketing and sales, and patient engagement in the future.

As task-level computerization with RPA is being gradually mastered across healthcare organizations, it is imperative to focus on the next prospect. RPA assistances in healthcare is expected to attain its dip, mainly due to majority of the decisions in the healthcare domain need to be executed based on framework and with additional level of instinctiveness and sophistication. CPA is positioned to convey this commotion to healthcare, where intelligent data recovery and optimization happen faster than ever. Workflows are ex-pected to be more efficient and the specialists will have the freedom to emphasis on more value-added work, eventually minimizing the nuisance/complexities of the end-to-end healthcare delivery process.

Cognitive Process Automation (CPA)

Conclusion

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Manufacturing Automation Minimizing Human Intervention – Where to Look for Num-bers!

Ankur Kalra, Manager – Chemicals & Materials, Infoholic Research

There has been lot of discussion and hype on robots replacing humans by taking over their work and replac-ing them in manufacturing industry. However, the actual data stands debated at many levels, and there

is no clear vision available for the common mass. The technology of automation has been largely demonized by the policymakers and statisticians who have been building theories on job losses and overall manufactur-ing value growth as direct indicators. So, let’s first understand what minimizing human intervention means.

Process Automation is first step wherein informa-tion technology (IT) meets the operational technol-ogy (OT) and the basic processes in the industry are automated using me-chanical robots or tools.

Connectivity and Infor-mation Sharing is the next step in the process wherein the collected in-formation while automa-tion took basic jobs and parallelly collected the op-erational and performance data details. The addition-al devices are added to collect the information on floor and this information is collated at central unit for further assessment.

Assessment & Analyt-ics is the next step where-in the collated information is analysed to identify the areas of improvement and value additions. The as-sessment for the collect-ed information not only provides the improve-ment areas but also the potential opportunities.

Facilitating Decisions is the next stage wherein the identified opportunities and improvements areas are looked from synergy view and decision rela-tion to strategy forward is decided. There have been instances wherein additional employment areas are added as result of this complete activity, although the employment opportunities don’t grow at pace of organization-al productivity growth.

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In practical world, there have been very few examples wherein the labour force has been re-

placed by the robots. These numbers are very small, and their impact varies greatly across indus-

tries and geographic segments. So, let us try to understand where these numbers appear and what

is common element behind it. Our study of industries and examples of human intervention minimiza-

tion indicate the few areas where the automation is actually changing the scenario on the factory floor.

Deemed Dangerous Work Areas are one of the biggest

adapters of automation and robotics. The task related

to hazardous or potentially toxic material handling has

been risky job which is priority for robotic replacement.

The organizations want to reduce the incidents’ rate due

to human error and automated robotics is most suitable

solution to this. Both, large conglomerates and smaller

companies, are using the automated robotics to improve

on the measuring parameters of incidents and safety

measures and thus are adapting more and more robotics.

Capacity Utilization is another area wherein the au-tomated robots were enabling the additional hour productivity to the existing capacity in the minimal observation needed tasks. Multiple stories shared by new start-ups such as Hirebotics, provide numer-ous examples wherein the use of automated robot-ics helped in rapid scaling up utilizing the current ca-pacity in non-working and non-operational hours.

These are just few areas wherein automated robotics is making a difference. The technical limitations such as strategic

thinking in artificial intelligence, data storage & processing limitations, and slow connectivity infrastructure have result-

ed in relatively limited areas of automation implementation. The chemical industry, wherein the standardized process-

es have already adapted to the robotic automation, there is long way to go for it in other industries. The technological

development and the acceptability will decide when and how much the machines will replace humans in workplace.

Productivity in repetitive jobs is the prime area where the automated robots are making big ways and re-placing humans. However, there are only limited ar-eas available in the actual production lines wherein the human dexterity and mental flexibility is not need-ed. Here in such jobs, the repetitive activities which were making the job boring for employees are tak-en up by automated machines, freeing employees for more critical tasks while minimizing the human errors which appeared because of boring nature of activities.

Demographic Strategy is another area wherein the lo-

cal institutions are looking for answers to the resourc-

es problem. Markets such as China and Japan where

the working population is aging, and young genera-

tion is relatively smaller, the manufacturing institutions

are looking for future strategic options. In such a sce-

nario, automated robotics are the most viable option

along with ensuring the consistent quality productivity.

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Expert Column

By Tomoyuki YAMATO, Resident Partner – Bengaluru, World1 Solutions

Tomoyuki YAMATO moved from Singapore in 2016 but is

originally from Japan. World1 Solutions is a cross-border

business professionals managed by Indian & Japanese

management. It executes Make in India / Skill India / Dig-

ital India / Startup India programs partnering with Japan,

Belarus and other regions. The company offers original

services such as “virtual CIO” to semi-automate existing

operations; “virtual Expat” to offer pre-entry market expe-

rience, and “Innovation in India!!” for JUGAAD R&D, etc.

Most of the operations in India are still highly depen-dent on manual works. I believe “human intervention” certainly contains some positive aspect, i.e. JUGAAD, but it may not the expected context in this column.From my personal experiences as resident in Japan and Singapore, I would agree that India needs “mini-mizing human interventions”. Still there are some miles to achieve “Skill India” in every aspects of the society.300km per hour high-speed railways project in be-tween Mumbai-Ahmedabad, with “Shinkansen” tech-nology from Japan, is under development. Launch-

ing date, i.e. either 2022, 2023 or later, is one of the major concerns fre-quently pointed out, but I foresee further con-cerns in maintenance operation once after

successfully launched. Shinkansen insists lots of “Takumi-no-Waza”, artisan’s work. Record as “no fa-tal accident over 50 years” in Japan operation must be an appreciated fact itself, but it doesn’t mean its quality can be perfectly duplicated and real-ised under condition in India by Indian engineers.

Skills among individual operators/ engineers as well as its management structure includ-ing sensitivity on preciseness, working cul-ture, etc. are quite different from those of Japan.Now training for engineer trainers for Shinkansen has started. Since “Takumi” of Japan, the artisan of those technologies or techniques, are mostly senior ages, communication can be done only in Japanese lan-guage. Hence the training program had to been started from language studies. I have quite a doubt on this ap-proach, too much dependency in human interventions.

Seems railways route operated over 100kmph in India as of now is only one, i.e. Delhi – Agra Express. Even within far less average speed, i.e. 60-70kmph, still tragedies are happening sometimes.

As “virtual CIO” oversee to improve strug-gling Japanese operations in India, I’m encour-aging and promoting “Semi-Automation” as realistic and affordable solution under current circumstances. Not like full-automation which requires massive ro-bots, drones or any larger facilities replacing human resources, semi-automation is aiming maximising human activities in collaboration with certain ma-chines or tools, i.e. IoT devices, IT applications, etc. From the opposite perspective, minimizing human in-tervention in traditional manual works. I knew from my experience that Indian talents are capable enough to catch up certain level of technical skills once “appropri-ate” training opportunity has given. Meanwhile, train-ers, i.e. Japanese in most cases, are not much aware of the basic condition in Indian engineers currently based upon. They tend to simply duplicate completely same approach which has done in Japan in history.

Targeted goal must be right but since the ap-proach is often not appropriate, Indian engi-neers may lose the context, especially details required in level of sensitivity, punctuality, etc.“That level” of preciseness cannot be taught only via verbal communication. It requires certain experiences at real site but there’s no Shinkansen in India so far. Why don’t we leverage with technologies in here? There are various equipment or tools which will work collaboratively with human resources by min-imizing human intervention to raise their quality of works. Not only for Shinkansen, Japan is ready to share its rich experiences and know-hows to devel-op those. I see lots of areas for Japan - India col-laboration toward “semi-automation” of the industries.

Not like full-automation which requires massive robots, drones or any larger facilities replacing human resources, semi-automation is...

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Quotes of the Month

Automation will significantly change many people's lives in ways that may be painful and enduring.

Automation is great for prof-its, but it's a real potential trouble area for society.

- Moshe Vardi

- Chieh Huang

Technology, through auto-mation and artificial intelli-gence, is definitely one of the most disruptive sources.

- Alain Dehaze

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