Alin Niță: Good evening dear viewers, I am Alin Niță, your host for this beautiful evening. Last year and earlier this year we talked a lot about the two words that practically dominate the information technology spectrum. It’s online and digitisation. When we talked about online, we’ve had many broadcasts on the subject. We looked at the outside of an organisation, of a company so that it goes to market and sells its products. But here we see that digitalisation also plays an important role. And if we talk about performance, if we talk about efficiency, we have to think about both to be able to bem profitablei. It is said that many people who innovate are lazy people, because they are always looking for ways to work less. Tonight we’re going to talk about digitisation and more than digitisation, and you’ll see what I mean during the show. In particular we talk about digital transformation and robotisation. Here we are talking again about robots, about the internal processes and workflows that your organisation has. To be able to discuss all these things we have invited two dialogue partners tonight. I’m Aurelian Iuscu, managing partner at Business Future Solutions, who is an expert on internal processes and how to optimise them, but I’d like to add one more thing. I come in to mind the words he said at one point: “I like to talk about eliminating waste from organisations.” Good evening, Aurelian!
Aurelian Iuscu: Good evening Alin and thank you for the invitation.
Alin Niță: And he is with us for the first time in the studio and we thank him for joining us.to join us, Mario Popescu. Mario Popescu is CEO at Tailent, a company that has been involved in developing its own process automation platform using robots. He’ll tell us more about what it’s all about. The company has implications both in Romania, America, South Africa and Asia and I thank him for being in the studio with us.
Mario Popescu: Good evening and thank you very much for the invitation!
Alin Niță: I would like to ask you both – when you hear the word digitization from organizations, what are the first ideas that come to your mind? Aurelian?
Aurelian Iuscu: The first idea that comes to mind is the desire to eliminate waste. In general, wanting, you have some tasks in your daily work that fall into this category. by waste, which impacts the lack of productivity and if we go further, what every shareholder or company manager wants is that decrease in profitability. So we tend to put our shoulder to the wheel to increase the profitability of a company, which can also be done through this area of digitalization.
Alin Niță: Mario, what is your word digitization when you hear it from companies? It’s my time, I want to go digital.
Mario Popescu: Interestingly, it is a concept that can be slightly different from one organisation to another. The first thing actually means on the one hand present, necessity, and on the other hand it means future. Adaptation to modernity.
Alin Niță: If we were to look at the work processes and go from there because any organization through work processes, basically, integrates the activities it has with what employees have to do with the end result they have to achieve. From the perspective of this digitisation, although it is much more than the idea of digitisation, I want to discuss this aspect. How should organisations look at these processes and workflows, Aurelian?
Aurelian Iuscu: In general, looking back a bit, during the years that we have been dealing with this part of process optimization, we realized that, in general, this part of defining what you want is very important and I would dare to compare it to the foundation of a house. If you manage to make a definition of what you want, to put, let’s say, that basic foundation, then you can go up vertically with many more floors and here comparing, I would look at the time axis, companies went on this side of self service center, they centralized this side of activities that were repetitive, those that now lend themselves very well to the automation side, and then they went to an area where they said OK, centralization and a single core doing this sort of back-office activity for several satellites of the company works very well, but it would be interesting to outsource it. After that, still looking at the time axis and taking it a step further, they said, “That’s very interesting, but it seems like standardizing processes would lead to better efficiency.” After which, now I would already dare to say it’s that ace up the sleeve, who comes and says so: RPA – Robotic Process Automation, which comes in and somehow tries to do automatically those tasks that we used to do repetitively, were boring, thus leaving the human resource to be able to move into an area of creation, of innovation, and that’s what we might be able to talk about tonight.
Alin Niță: Mario, how about that saying: “Sir, this is robot work.” What does this RPA mean? It’s the definition, let’s say, for our viewers who haven’t had any experience with these types of solutions – Most of the time they are seen as robots. But what are those robots? What is this RPA?
Mario Popescu: It’s a very good comparison because that’s the essence. The repetitive and boring actions in the life of each of us. We can talk about any kind of position, because any kind of job involves repetitive activities. It’s repetitive actions that give rise to the Romanian saying “robot work”. Nobody wants to do this work, nobody is happy to fill in forms, to move data from one place to another. Nobody is happy to do that part. That’s what RPA is all about. Basically, robotic process automation does this: it automates processes or delegates this repetitive work from humans and takes it out to nisome components of robot software, which does that. They’re designed to automate well-defined tasks and to take these things away from humans so that – as Aurelian said earlier, that’s exactly what I think is the essence – people can focus on the more creative parts of their position, of their job.; se bring more value to the company and also have more satisfaction with their day-to-day job.
Alin Niță: Our viewers are probably wondering: does such a robotic solution suit me? Who is suited to such a robotic solution?
Mario Popescu: In general Robotic Process Automation fits, let’s not say for 100%, but for the most part for most jobs today. We can do a little exercise and think about how each of us goes through our day, whatever job we have, especially in the last year. Most people have been pretty much trapped in the walls of the house for work, and I think we can do an imaginary exercise to think about how the day goes from the moment the work day starts until it ends. Certainly there are a number of things that really annoy us I would say, sometimes, that we have to do certain things. I can talk about the hotel industry, for example, where a receptionist may stop writing data by hand and automatically take some data from identity documents. I can talk about companies that have specialised people, and one of their tasks is to enter data from bank statements. This is robot work, exactly what I was saying earlier. Nobody wants to do that, collect the data, look line by line in the files that come from the banks and enter them into a software system of that company. There are very specific examples where Robotic Process Automation fits in and, as I said, it’s agnostic of the industry itself. It’s more about the software, it’s about the software that is basically used by us as humans in our day-to-day jobs and that’s where it comes in to make our lives better.
Alin Niță: And how can I figure out, Aurelian, if those processes that I have, bring value, an automation and a robotization of them so that I invest in such a solution?
Aurelian Iuscu: In general, the projects that we launch with this automation target go through some filters. In general, the most correct approach and from the perspective of a project in a larger, medium or small company is in a structured way like this. In general it is very good to start from the macro process map. These are those business processes, management decisions, followed by the identification of operational processes and supporting processes. In general, in this area of support processes, there is a very good chance that 80% of them are amenable to automation. When we look at those criteria, the most important arguments are those where I have a high process repeatability, i.e. I do that process very often. It’s very important that there are stable inputs and if possible in an information flow manner, i.e. not on a handwritten paper, because then it’s quite difficult. If we have standardised process inputs and now, after a year of pandemic, we are coming into an area where everyone has got used to using this area that we call information flow, i.e. the process inputs should be on the information side. From this perspective, I would like to reiterate that it is very important that the process is repetitive and very high volume, that the inputs are standardised and that there are not too many exceptions. And this is the part where our biggest challenge is to identify those areas of exception, to take them to a standardisation area. After that, identifying on a certain grid gives us the answer if the process lends itself from 80 percent upwards to be robotized we make the decision quickly to be robotized, i.e. to be automated, if it’s under, then you should look carefully, make some optimizations so that you increase that percentage of decision making.
Mario Popescu: There are some that go to 90% or even 100%, where you don’t even think about it. I would like to give an example, let’s not be very technical from the viewers’ perspective. If a bank wants to make a query at the credit bureau, this means that it takes a copy of the company’s CNP or CUI, it goes and enters access to a ministry’s website and then it takes the information and enters it in a database. For this repetitive work that a human does in a minute, a minute and a half, the robot needs a second – two, three at the most – and then productivity increases.
Alin Niță: What you said at one point, it can be robotized or automated, but of course the robot is also a code that is written in a certain way to solve through a certain approach, a certain problem it wants to solve. What’s the difference between automation and robotization, so to speak, given that it’s possible that for a certain function in the process you have a simple application that solves something for you and not a little robot. When we say robot, we don’t necessarily mean someone dressed up in iron like that, sitting there and doing certain actions. And here I have a question – is the robot something physical?
Mario Popescu: The question is very good because I notice that people still don’t distinguish between software and hardware. There is this tendency when we hear about that robot, our mind goes straight to something hardware, to a Star Wars robot, to things like that and then we have to consider the software component. The software robot is more invisible and non-intrusive in the first place and its main feature is automation, that was the beginning part of the question and it’s very good. Automation is not from today or a week ago. Ways of automating processes have been going on for a very long time. It’s about the form that automation takes, dressing it up with a software bot. This software robot comes on top of the existing infrastructure at that company, it comes on top of the software applications that are already there and it doesn’t make a mess, so to speak. It fits on top of the existing infrastructure, it doesn’t require change, change management and very complicated processes to put it to work and then that’s primarily its main part. Then the software bot has a great feature of providing a communication channel between applications that were not designed to work, were not written with the idea that they would have to communicate with each other at some point and then the software bot can interact on one side with an application, it can take data from one application and integrate it into another application. It can take and collect some data from application 1 and take some reports into application 2 then for example.
You can find out more about digitisation by watching the full programme. If you want to watch the whole show, play the video:
