Blue Prism is participating in a webinar from leading sourcing analyst, Horses for Sources. We would be delighted if you could join us Thursday 25th April at 15.30pm UK time for “A Tour of Robotistan”. The registration link is as follows:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/199783926
Agenda:
Interesting piece from NS Ramnath in which he argues that, despite early warnings, large corporates can get complacent about innovation, allowing new ideas like software robotics to threaten their established business model.
You can read the article on the Forbes India website.
There is a strong argument that globally, automation increases wealth and creates jobs. Even those that refute this, surely have to admit that automation can reduce offshoring and create jobs in the UK and US. In the case of services industries, this means the BPO sector, and specifically the part of the BPO market that has used “labour arbitrage” to move work to lower wage destinations such as India and The Philippines, for example.
The impact of automation, and particularly robotics is raging around the world at the moment. In addition to coverage in the NYT and The Economist, British Computer Weekly is also joining the debate with this – Will software robots really decrease offshoring and increase UK jobs?
I gave a speech at Intellect’s Automate Britain launch on 30 Jan. Here is the transcript.
My name is Alastair Bathgate. I come from a process improvement background. This is me in 1985; in charge of Time and Motion at an NGA and SOGAT82 unionised print factory. (If you want to learn about labour relations in the context of industry automation, take a TARDIS back to the post Eddy Shah 1980s printing industry.)
Having spent so much time stressing over minute improvements in manufacturing, a career move to a bank drew a stark contrast in the apparently relaxed attitude to process efficiency and product quality. I remember an article in the internal staff magazine where a team leader was trumpeting the significant increase in productivity created by the installation of a brand new mainframe terminal, the cost justification for which had taken several accountancy man years and the IT lead time approximately 6 months. The year? 1988. It was the second ever piece of end user computer equipment installed in the 200 FTE savings administration department at Bradford & Bingley. I worked in a fledgling O & M department.
Today, I am CEO of Blue Prism, a British software company pioneering software robotics for the back office. I founded Blue Prism to address the frustration operational managers have in making simple process improvements and the observation that the only way to address the problems was to employ staff…somewhere in the world.
I thought it would be good to start with a little history of robots in manufacturing.
Last week’s Economist ran an Outsourcing and Offshoring Special Report which contained an article titled Rise of the Software Machines. Mentioned alongside Blue Prism was IPSoft which caught my eye because complementary to Blue Prism’s back office focus, they are creating front office robots, that actually speak to customers. And more than that, they use autonomics to learn how to communicate in context. The website is worth a read, especially if you are a mathematics geek.
Analyst firm, Horses for Sources, who are driving most of the adventurous thought leadership in the global outsourcing industry, have taken a look at Blue Prism and made their views public on their lively and provocative blog.
In a humourous post, James Slaby argues that robots will drive down processing costs for BPOs and reduce the need to offshore for cost saving reasons. If you get the automation strategy right the economics are “jaw-dropping”.
“Outsourcing has always been about people, process and technology. Scratch that. It’s about process and technology, with people an optional extra…..” – Read the rest of the blog post here.
Let’s be honest, banks, and especially British banks, are not having a great time right now. I doubt that Bob Diamond will be the last casualty of the LIBOR manipulation affair. Stephen Hester has his own problems, and I would imagine that whether he takes a bonus or not will be the last thing on his mind right now.
There is often little that can be done to correct problems of the past. No use crying over spilt milk, as the saying goes. But who clears up the mess when a BACS tape is wrongly processed? Who refunds bank charges when a software upgrade puts batch processing behind and wages don’t make it to customers’ accounts? When a regulator rules that a regulated product was mis-sold, who organises the refunds? Operations of course!
A great example of this is PPI. Banks were ruled to have sold inappropriate payment protection insurance policies alongside loans and other forms of credit. Now, certain UK banks have created and staffed specific divisions to handle the PPI complaints. A fundamentally simple process – read complaint, check PPI was sold, evaluate whether compensation due, calculate and issue refund, write to customer – is consuming hundreds of jobs. Whilst this is good for the Indian offshoring industry, enlightened banks are using technology, such as robotic software, to automate these rules based tasks so that refunds are evaluated more accurately and more quickly. This does more than reduce the number of onshore and offshore staff required. It enables regulator deadlines to be met, customers to be dealt with faster, balance sheet provisions to be more accurate.
An interesting post from Karl Flinders today: How is technology changing BPO?
Karl outlines a range of technologies that are revolutionising the BPO sector and enabling BPOs to deliver new services to their clients more economically. So, the CIO of a BPO is in a powerful position, and the client is happy to benefit from reduced costs?
I am tempted to take the argument a stage further.
The “perfect storm” that Karl describes “as customers want to cut additional back office costs due to continued budget pressure, and at the same time suppliers are trying to create additional services and the revenues that go with them” could drive a new type of behaviour. New technologies “such as cloud computing, business analytics software, social media platforms and process automation software” are so easy to adopt, perhaps the corporate customer’s CIO will work out how to insource the work at the expense of the BPO contract.
Add to the mix political pressure (especially in the US) to repatriate offshored jobs, and the perfect storm could be very windy indeed.
More Blue Prism customer press coverage in British IT journal, Computer Weekly today. This time Shop Direct.
Two things leapt out at me from this article:
1. Shop Direct initially evaluated Blue Prism as an alternative to human beings and, specifically, to avoid offshoring.
2. An internal capability has been set up where business operations teams automate processes with minimal IT support bringing a new agility to managing the back office operation.
In short, Blue Prism will not appear on your integration or middleware architecture chart because it is a business application that is used by operational teams to automate their own processes: The “long tail” of process automation that is never going to make it onto the core IT program because of resourcing, economic or temporal reasons.
If I told you that Blue Prism was a software company with an “integrate anything” platform linked to a scalable and secure orchestration and execution engine, I’m sure you would glaze over. By listening to customers we are understanding how to express more simply what we do. Our website has changed quite a lot recently to help reflect this.
Just reading through a “Outsourcing Business” pullout in The Times today. Lots of interesting stuff about Business Process Outsourcing and offshoring trends.
A common theme is how BPOs have used offshoring for labour arbitrage, or as one article puts it “Race for the bottom as companies cut costs”.
One new angle being explored, supported by a Blue Prism sponsored piece, is whether robotic software is going to start taking the place of offshore staff as a way of bringing new economics to delivering business processes, whilst increasing quality and speed.
The full pullout is available online. It’s worth more than a quick scan.
