SSON Report: Can You Still Afford to Ignore Robotics? Why the Digital Workforce Is Australia's New Reality

How Australia's service delivery centres are recognising new automation solutions as an opportunity

One of the most notable trends in Shared Services delivery right now is that of robotic automation. Just two years ago, SSON's annual survey highlighted "don't understand/not evaluating" as the most common description of RPA. In this year's State of the Shared Services Industry, the tables were turned to "implementing or planning to implement."

No matter where you are positioned in the world, technology’s ability to travel at speed is once again asserting itself. Shared Services centres all over the world are setting up pilot schemes to test this new opportunity characterised by the automated, robotic processing of manual transactions.

The simple version of robotics – Robotic Process Automation – is the plain vanilla version based on the user interface, or desktop automation.  More recently, we are also seeing Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, wrapping cognizant, artificial intelligence and machine learning capability into what is now more often referenced as Intelligent Automation. 

A strong and significant distinction is also being made between the discrete desktop automations that work as, effectively, a short-term Band-Aid to fix an otherwise cumbersome process, and the more holistic enterprise-platform-based robotic capability that offers the ability to scale up in the longer-term.

Download the full report below.