| |July 20178CIOReview IN MY OPINIONAUTOMATION ­ A Panacea to Solve World Hunger?By Viji Varghese, Head - Business Excellence & COE Head ­ Automation, ANZViji runs an operation that is a blend of a human, and a digital workforce: he leads a team of around 65 specialists in areas spanning Automation, Business Transformation and Business Support. He, therefore, manages the full life cycle of Automation.itting in my balcony basking in the early morning sun over the misty skies of In-dia's Silicon Valley, Bangalore, I realise that not a day goes by without the rhetoric "more with the same"! All of this without impacting quality. The reflexive reaction of asking for more headcount and increasing seating ca-pacity had long disappeared from the table. Oh! Also, by the way,the bark follows ­ "No complex Six Sigma processes or multi-year deployment plans for replacing core systems."After a stab at a lot of options, we realised that the only way to create a fungible workforce fast enough was to deploy a digital or a hybrid workforce i.e.to deploy robots, which work at a user level mimick-ing human action. This primarily is what Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is all about and that's why we explored it.These software robots require mini-mal technical skills to build and can be quickly deployed to automate the `as is' manual tasks. RPA is a rapidly evolving market and is considered, at the moment, to be premium priced, given the amount of focus being generated by the industry. Where applied effectively, it introduces significant savings. RPA is here to stay. Organisations should start plan-ning how to bring this technology in, in a controlled manner. RPA is not just about reducing head count. Many use-cases are exploiting RPA to assist knowledge workers to become more efficient and provide higher value services to customers. In short, RPA makes our service proposition better for customers, people, organisations and control. Since RPA is an application or software robot that can be con-figured to perform tasks normally performed by a human - using rule-based processes - the reality is that 70-80 percent of rule-based processes will be automated. Consequently, the jobs in question are high volume, highly repetitive and mundane ones that are better suited for robots, which can work tirelessly and continuously without making errors. Humans will always be necessary to resolve issues, develop and maintain the technology. It is a myth that RPA will re-place humans by automating 100 percent of the processes resulting in massive cost reductions. SViji Varghese
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