A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This statement is relevant for a cognitive automation journey too. For some companies, this first step seems too hard to make, but the experience of Unilever, Merck Group, Deacero and other companies proves the opposite.
Even being convinced with the arguments and ready to start, many leaders are still cautious about cognitive automation as each promising digital innovation possesses unknown risks. In a discussion with Frederic Laluyaux, the CEO of Aera Technology, experts shared their experience of using cognitive automation platforms to make the life of pioneers in this journey easier and predictable.
The key advantage of cognitive automation is introducing the ability to make faster and better decisions, shortening the decision-making process from months and weeks to days and hours. In the contemporary era of speed and agility, this capability becomes your strong competitive advantage. With the cognitive automation platform at hand, you can start fully interconnecting all the processes and decisions in your enterprise, even if you’re a multinational supply chain that faces constant market changes.
With the cognitive automation platform, you can implement the necessary changes into decision making without breaking the existing people-oriented culture. Employees will still have all the decisive power — but with the intelligent data at hand. This is especially good for forecasting, as people use tons of their experience by relying on unbiased and objective data.
Old habits die hard. The main challenge for the cognitive automation platform’s implementation is the need to prove that statistical data is better than numerous manual plans. In this regard, a corporate leader should guide the change management, or the move towards trusting the change and stopping acting the old way.
It’s helpful to tell your workers that cognitive automation lets them ask themselves the question about what brings more value, instead of arguing on data quality and logic behind insights.
For a complex portfolio, a cognitive automation platform lets you meet customers and make the right products for them. This way, you establish the foundation for scaling, as in order to reach the size of big companies, you should change the way you’re doing things today. And relying on data science is a safe ground to jump high and grow fast.
The cognitive automation platform constantly offers recommendations for your employees to act, which reshapes the entire working process. In particular, the solution lets your people work faster and with more quality to serve clients better.
Again, change management is the key to unlocking this benefit. But once you convince your people that cognitive automation is an opportunity for your enterprise to fully transform, they won’t need to struggle with tons of data to make decisions. The innovation will call them to demonstrate their best, brightest, and most valuable skills instead.
The introduction of a cognitive automation platform is a very important step for true digital transformation, which learns together with your business and reveals its best in the long run. However, there are some advantages that come relatively fast, based on the experience of experts and practitioners.
These are:
● Address market changes at an early stage
● Make decisions faster and see that the process can be completely automatic
● Build another way of doing business, closer to the best industry examples
● Optimize and improve management
● Create a better customer and supplier experience