Workplace Architecture Combined with RPA Proves a Potent Partnership

At the 21st North American Shared Services and Outsourcing Week 2017 delegates gained two really important insights from the various sessions, workshops and site tours on offer. The first was around the impact of modern office architecture ; the second around the transformative power of RPA .

Modern SSC spaces are now being designed so as to offer fluid, flexible workspaces and encourage collaborative teamwork. There is no need for permanent desk anymore. Instead, these centers provide workspace on an as-needed basis to employees who otherwise work from home, or “at Starbucks".

This reinvention of the workplace is driven by five megatrends that are changing the business landscape:

changing demographics and and social shifts changes in global economic power rapid urbanization climate change/resource scarcity and last but perhaps most significant: new technological breakthroughs. Designed to support an agile workplace, everything about modern day service delivery centers is fluid, adaptable, and collaborative. Employees can book workspaces through an online “Hotelling” app – in advance, or on a “check-in” basis – whether single desks, collaborative group spaces, or meeting rooms. Modern, café-like spaces support fresh critical thinking or brainstorming, small rooms support private work, and web- and video-enabled conference rooms connect centers with the globe.

As a result, work is shifting from mainly cubicle-based to mainly collaborative, with the guiding principle being that "every seat should work as hard as it can". It also means that centers don’t have to plan for 100% capacity, but can operate, as so many do, at around 75-80% capacity. Where space allocation becomes a problem, facilitation groups intervene to sort out space challenges by shifting bookings around – much like a hotel group might try to reallocate rooms. It's an inspiring vision of the future of work.

Building flexible people models based on skills specialization is a key strategy to leveraging a limited resource (people) – but so is making better use of economics. And this is where RPA enters the picture.

In a world of “scarce talent” (and with staff costs constantly rising) RPA is the key to productivity. Across any number of functional services, robotics is being deployed to automate not just specific process steps, but also target end-to-end processing.

Security concerns around RPA can easily derail a project. And yet there is a strong case to be made for the fact that robots keep better track of a process than humans do. At any stage of a breach, it's a simple matter to check the log book and identify what happened – something that is not nearly as easy to audit in the case of human activity. Another common hurdle is the fact that most IT security policies won't issue a user ID to a non-humans, but that simply means the policies require updates – not that the projects are nixed.

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A resource challenge for those thinking 'big' is around solution platforms that can scale up. One option is to work across multiple different RPA provider platforms, however, thereby distributing the workload. The additional advantage is that you don’t have to take on the operation and maintenance of these robots – not difficult, but nevertheless requiring a separate skill set, organization, and set of processes.

For those who want more hands on support, third party RPA integration consultants will help to identify and implement opportunities. This becomes significant as speed of adoption is a differentiator, and ensuring you have all the enabling resource you need to succeed will be an important factor in planning. And while 90% of the functionality across different RPA providers is often similar, vendors differentiate themselves most obviously in their architecture – whether data center-based, desktop-centric, etc. One of the insights we gained last week was that vendors differ enormously in their ability to handle external sources of data – for example in OCR capability. Some deal well with unstructured PDFs, some don't; some specialize in desktop robotics, others in enterprise solutions. The "right" decision will always depend on what the enterprise wants to achieve, and how.

One challenge, as we learned last week, is that robots tend to be dedicated to certain processes. So when they finish their work they cannot simply switch over to another process. This means that some of robots are running at only 30% capacity. However, with so many vendors pushing for cloud-based robotics delivery, it's feasible that within a year this issue will simply have dissolved as businesses become more comfortable in dealing with the perceived security risks of cloud-based services. Indeed, many IT experts believe this would be a perfect solution to underutilized robots. Buying robotic services in a cloud-hosted environment means paying only for services consumed – and nothing else. In that respect robotics may follow the well worn path of other technology solutions, that moved to the SaaS model.

10 Other Uses of Robotics a popular robotic self-service solution called Altyrx , is a powerful data mining tool that extracts data from multiple different systems. RPA can be used for controls testing across a number of different third party finance technology solutions. once a pilot is successful, try and figure out how to shift benefits to the end-to-end process to maximize the use of robotics. the impact of robotics is easily limited by "the quality of the systems you are trying to consume ". Proof of Concept exercises can easily morph into Pilots – the differentiator is the extent to which the business is committing to RPA. the BPO model is being compromised by the adoption of RPA. Labor arbitrage will no longer be a decisive factor, but BPO providers are being slow to initiate RPA driven value. It's up to the customer to drive this discussion. RPA can be most effectively leveraged where Global Process Owners exist. as a result of RPA, the challenge in outsourcing will be to move to outcomes-based contracts as opposed to FTE-based contracts. a key, RPA-driven, BPO dilemma is how to deal with intellectual property.