01.17.20

4 Robotic tech trends set to make headway in 2020

BY ADRIAN VAN DER MERWE 3 MINUTE READ

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is a hot topic at the moment, but there’s still a  lack of knowledge and understanding of what it actually is – and what it means for business. This  tech revolution is something of a silver bullet that is set to kill off a number of jobs – solving for a host of needs  in various industries, but with a very real knock-on effect for the people that the technology will  replace.

The average boardroom lacks the 4IR general knowledge required to reap the benefits of employing 4IR  tech. It’s not just down to the CIO to understand the nuts and bolts – the entire leadership needs to  understand what 4IR entails for both the present and the future of the business. The lack ofunderstanding is one of the reasons that the market has been slow to adopt automation. However, forecasters predict that this is set  to change in 2020.

Early Adopters
Having said that, there are companies which have seen the potential benefits and wholeheartedly  embraced automation. They’ve already been through an entire implementation lifecycle and come  out the other side realising that they’ve goverened their automation processes like they would have  an IT system – and now it’s become inflexible.  This is a conundrum because one of the benefits of automation is supposed to be flexibility – you  employ people for their ability to be flexible, so you expect systems which are designed to make  their lives easier, to be flexible as well. The challenge is implementing flexible automation that is  responsive to the changing needs of a business, without overgoverning. These early adopters are  grappling with the problem of how to become agile again. On the up side, those who are only  considering implementing automated processes now, have a plethora of data to draw on, thanks to  those early adopters – which can only help accelerate the curve of acceptance.

Intelligent Automation
Many software vendors have woken up to the fact that automation platforms have come in and  bridged the gap between their software and other systems – and they don’t like the idea that this  has made their software seem more a necessary evil than a necessity. They’ve started building bot  capabilities into their core systems to help add value, which is actually great for the industry.  Look at ERP systems – they are required to manage scale, but they’re seen as a necessity rather than  a tool that changes the way a company does business. Automation, AI and machine learning are the  tools  which aid that change – so to see them becoming a fundamental part of the base software, is  hugely encouraging.

Embracing Bots
Oddly enough, consumers are more accepting of bots than companies are. Consumers readily adopt  automation in processes on things like their smartphones, because there are immediate time-saving  benefits. From a corporate perspective, there’s a resistance to ‘handing over’ processes that can  actually be automated to deliver great benefits to the company. That’s probably down to the fact  that consumers see it as a time-saver, while a company sees it as a cost in terms of a job being made  redundant.
What companies need to realise is that the very benefits their people see in terms of time-saving  and ease, in their personal interactions with technology, are a micro-scale example of what is  possible within the enterprise – and embracing that can have myriad benefits for the company,  when applied at much larger scale.

RPA, AI and Machine Learning Come Together
The ease of use of AI and Machine Learning means that anyone with a good data scientist can  actually start using the tech to improve their processes – but when you combine those two with RPA  (Robotic Process Automation), you can do so much more, so much quicker.  Within our own business, we’re seeing the benefit of the combination of these three technologies to  deliver IA – Intelligent Accounting. The combination is enabling  accountants to lift more than their bodyweight in terms of work. Automated Accounting is also  possible with an increased adoption of the tech, with the result being the delivery of business and  industry insights which weren’t available before.  The massive trend for 2020 is companies discovering how they can fit these three tech jigsaw pieces  together to deliver maximim benefit. The power lies in the flexibility of the tech – we can now  demonstrate the benefits of an automated process within days, at a fraction of the cost of an entire systemic overhaul.

10.11.19

How AI, robotics and blockchain are transforming the business landscape

BY ADRIAN VAN DER MERWE 3 MINUTE READ

Technology is changing the face of business faster than industrialisation did. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is well underway and consumers and businesses are already using and benefitting from incredibly complex technology every day – even if they don’t know it.

The shift to cloud services has opened up incredible tech to even the smallest SME, reduced the cost of ownership and standardised processes for businesses – particularly in the finance function. Big companies have built customisation into their systems as a legacy because the software they historically ran their businesses on didn’t cater for their unique business model or requirements. Cloud solutions have evolved to cater for nuance – but, with that said, what cloud providers have done is figured out that there are only so many finance functions within a business, and standardised those solutions.

So now, instead of businesses customising software to suit their processes, they’re standardising those processes to capitalise on the scalability and cost-saving advantages offered by cloud functionality. The impact of this boosts the bottom line because it reduces the need for an in-house development team – you don’t need people to maintain customisation if there isn’t any. Support and infrastructure are outsourced and upgrades – for better or worse – are accessed automatically.

The switch to cloud has also made world-class tech available to the SME market, allowing smaller businesses to compete with far bigger players because they’re running the same background tech. This switch to standardised cloud solutions has meant that it’s easier to adopt Robotic Process Automation (RPA), too. The software vendors themselves are building RPA into their tools because they’re aware of the fact that those tools don’t integrate easily into other products. This has allowed solutions providers to open Process Marketplaces, where vendors can simply go in and download, for example, the piece of code they need to log into SAP. That standardised login is available to everyone, for free, and doesn’t require any development. That has made RPA a lot more accessible to organisations and allowed them to adopt it more easily.

When businesses hear ‘Blockchain’, they think ‘Bitcoin’ and may not believe that the tech has any role to play in their operations. But what Blockchain really is, is Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) – and that’s something that can revolutionise just about any business. Where, before, transactions had double entries, DLT allows for triple entries – meaning that external parties can verify transactions. The integrity of the transaction can be confirmed at source or destination, instantly – meaning that the timing of transactions need no longer delay business processes. The three-way verification offered by DLT also allows for more transparent monitoring of transactions – there’s a much smaller chance that something like the Steinhoff debacle would have happened if transactions were based on DLT. I’m not saying that DLT is instantly going to wipe out fraud and corruption, but with such incredible transparency, it’s going to be a lot harder to hide.

DLT is also going to change – or completely eradicate – industries that exist to broker deals between two parties, like the banking and legal industries. For example, we only use conveyancers because we don’t trust each other to complete transactions. They act as the middlemen in transactions and often charge eye-watering fees. The transparency and accountability offered by DLT can make such an industry obsolete – offering the same transactions, faster and at much lower cost. The application of this kind of technology is as relevant in the Third World as it is in the First. In Africa, for example, we can apply the same tech in ways that provide relevant solutions. For us, applying DLT and Smart Contracts to in unregulated barter solutions would work like a bomb. In many markets across the continent, people don’t use cash to transact – nor do they feel the need to.

In the presence of the right infrastructure, with access to tools like low-cost smartphones, you can make contactless payments and use DLT to quickly conclude deals in a system behind a user-friendly interface without either side ever knowing they’re using Blockchain tech. All this tech is readily- available and cost-effective – and it’s changing the way we all do business, every day.


Adrian van der Merwe is the CEO North Wind Digital