Many business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and enterprises have explored automation for their operations, but in silos, automating only a few tasks or processes at a time. There are complex challenges that hold them back from bringing together human and digital workforce (bots with brains) to run smarter operations. Hexaware claims that Automate Everything is the new cupid for BPOs. But what is Automate Everything? Is it a framework, a mindset, a suite of services, or a technology solution? Can it genuinely help BPOs achieve end-to-end enterprise-wide intelligent automation to drive strategic benefits and maximize straight-through processing (STP)?

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome listeners. This is Sanjog Aul, your host and the topic for conversation is Automate Everything The New Cupid For BPOs. Many business process outsourcing, that is BPO companies as well as enterprises have explored automation for their operations. They have done so in silos, automating only a few tasks or processes at a time. They often struggle with bringing together human workers and intelligent digital bots to run smarter operations. Hexaware claims that Automate Everything is the new cupid for bpos which can help them achieve end to end enterprise wide intelligent automation to drive strategic benefits and maximize straight through processing that is stp but what is Automate Everything? Is it a framework, a mindset, a suite of services or a technology solution and can Automate Everything genuinely deliver as promised? To discuss this I have with me Chinmoy Banerjee.

Sanjog Aul:
Chinmoy is the Executive Vice President and Global Head Business Process Services at Hexaware, a consulting firm focused on transforming IT solutions and solving complex business problems using a combination of human creativity and intellect. Their three pronged strategy of Automate Everything, cloudify everything and transform customer experiences enables enterprises fast track into the digital era. Hello Chinmoy, thank you for joining us.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Thank you Sanjog, Good morning and thanks for having me.

Sanjog Aul:
So Chinmoy, my first question for you is that you are a BPO company and talking about automation. Wouldn’t more automation to fewer of your people serving a customer would lead to a revenue loss?

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Sajog, thanks, it’s a great question to kick this off and incidentally, a BPO leader Talking to a CIO Talk Network host something that BPOs usually don’t do given their focus on the CEO and the CFO world. First off, we aren’t just a BPO company, we are a technology company solving business problems through the lens of customer experience first and of course using levers like automation and cloud and certainly there are various services internally within Hexaware aligned to solve said issues. As you said from an internal perspective, I’m the leader for the BPO business and also have go to market responsibilities for automation. Externally, however, as Hexaware I’m focused on certain industry verticals solving business problems like why do we have lower STP rates in let’s say reconciliation or payments or why does someone have daily sales outstanding higher than industry? Now back to your original question. Why talk about automation when it leads to lesser people servicing a customer and thus leading to revenue loss in 2020 really, automation and the talk of it is literally, I would say all pervasive and ubiquitous in 2015 2016,

Chinmoy Banerjee:
however, when Keech, our CEO, decided that our strategy will be to lead with automation and do the best for our clients, it was not so common. Very uncommon in fact, and we persisted knowing that it would lead to cannibalizing our revenues. We felt that doing this would lead to some losses in terms of revenue in the near term, but clients would see what we are doing and act as great referrals for us and either give us more work or enable us to get more work from other clients and in the ground level, we enable this by changing our culture qualitatively. What does it mean? We said that people who came with automation ideas and executed on them are MVPs really and in fact more valuable than people who just manage large teams. The culture of I’m important because I have hundreds of people working for me was systematically targeted by us. Our but channel, which you can see on YouTube, gives a lot of pointers as to how automation really works, but incidentally stands for bottoms up disruption gives a lot of practical ideas that have been implemented at the ground level quantitatively. We enabled it by saying cannibalizing your customers revenues will not be penalized when your growth targets are measured

Chinmoy Banerjee:
and of course we are enabling all of this through providing colleagues with ability to upskill through continuous training programs. So essentially, even as a BPO at a tech company, when we look at automation and when we know that automation will lead to fewer of our people serving a customer in the near term, ultimately we feel that it’s the best thing for the customer to do and essentially better for us in the long run. Hope that answers your questions.

Sanjog Aul:
Very good, detailed answer. Thanks so much Chinmoy. So my next very logical question will be what does Hexaware mean when you say automate everything?

Chinmoy Banerjee:
What does automate everything mean? It literally means that automate everything that can be automated in a business, it’s more contextual, it’s more conceptual, it’s more directional, it’s a way of thinking and the thinking itself behind this principle of automate everything has evolved over the years across different businesses. Examples abound from using RPA used to automate certain processes, let’s say in FNA or HR, to business process management tools in other situations. Test automation for example, has been prevalent for a while to automation across IT ops, ASM infrastructure to now you have customer experience automation using the likes of virtual agents and virtual bots. These are all happening across enterprises as various levels of maturity and adoption costs. So the first intent for us when we say automation, Automate Everything is to look at it in as holistic as manner as possible across all the above layers, ops testing, infra apps, data, customer experience transformation and literally using all the levers or tools that are best in class at that point in time. So our point of view includes for example a six by six that explains all of them in great detail. Especially on Automate Everything we want to call out data and analytics.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Data for example is now available in vast amounts due to digital transactions, IoT devices, social media and customers really need to establish automate processes and our Automate Everything approach treats data as a fundamental layer to drive better insights, operational analytics using ML and ultimately drive business value for customers. Process data, for example is coming through process mining tools that automatically discovers and enhances target state processes. So Automate Everything literally means across all these dimensions using the best in class tools and look at it holistically. Certainly it’s not an easy best practice to do because client structures are not aligned just like within the organizations like us, which has different fiefdoms and businesses. Clients also have a CEO organization, a CIO organization, not talking together and we feel that looking at all of this holistically in an integrated manner has tremendous value. The offshoot of that is we look at a process end to end, not just the front office or the back office, but look at it end to end and therefore look at STP rates holistically.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Most organizations today are really far away from the 80% mark. Unless you are in banking or insurance where the rates are much higher, the opportunity to automate and look at STP is much higher. The second principle really is that all things being equal, we should look at automation continuously, not automate for the sake of it, but automate if it brings business value and then create more digital workforce and make it a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement and continuous cannibalization. Create a virtuous loop if you will and the final point on automate everything is when we say it, we always mean we will use best in class products and not get tied down to some homegrown tool or tools. We of course prefer to work in partnership with certain products, but across the various dimensions of automation but intent is to evolve. The philosophy of automate everything is to evolve and continuously keep clients interests in mind and continuously keep on the path of continuous improvement.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Back to you Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul:
So how do you BPO operations and your core idea which is Automate Everything go hand in hand?

Chinmoy Banerjee:
So that’s an interesting question as well. BPO and Automate Everything sounds a bridge that seems a little too far to cross. Even when we look at a deal that is just BPO, there are very few deals which is just BPO today. It’s inevitably embedded with some technology or other, whether it’s a technological asset or it solves some problems but when we look at BPO overall, our point of view is that we look at firstly identifying the business problems and the risks associated with the process. Even though the customer might be just do right shoring and gain cost efficiencies, we insist on looking at the business problems first. Then we say, hey, what do the clients actually want and in most places it’s a client’s client that is the relevant party, if you will, to understand what do they actually want. Then we look at moving away from just looking at ops and silos by that the client might be actually wanting to do BPO just for the back office. We insist on looking at IT end to end and taking processes that are not part of the scope for outsourcing, but very key to understand the process end to end, including the front office and the back office and then say ops and IT have to be looked together.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
You cannot look at OPS and IT separately, even if it is just a BPO engagement and all of this starts when we are actually assessing the initial deal itself during the due diligence phase, if you will, and not just after a deal is done. Then of course we have to provide cost benefits, but almost make this secondary if you will. PPOs, our point of view should be expertise led. That truly brings in more business efficiencies and more domain. From that perspective, looking at automate everything, what does it mean for the customer? So for example, does it bring in more flexibility in a BPO contract? Examples could be it can’t be just people based or FT based pricing, but actually outcome based or transaction price. We’ve heard this term gain sharing for many years and gain sharing usually gets stuck or falls down because of the lack of transparency, right because it’s not a true partnership. Again, we feel automate everything plays very well with this transparency and gain sharing concept.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Then the last two points I would say is we will look at it from an expertise led resource mix rather than the usual pyramid structure. Essentially BPOs today are led by people who run people. So we would want to look at people managers and say you’re a thing of the past, makes the people managers and everyone from the top downwards, including someone like me who runs the BPO as a business, be an expert in some area within our BPO offering. So big change in today’s culture because if you look at all the marketing talk of the billion dollar BPOs and if you sift through that, it’s all mostly about people running people and finally, when we look at Automate Everything, we would want to look at how, how does it drive business efficiencies and how does it actually drive revenue enhancement? Not just saying from a business efficiency perspective, hey, can I help you increase your working capital but also saying as a service unit for the customer, can I actually generate revenue for you and maybe even make the billing that you pay to me because I’m delivering a service redundant because I am able to generate revenue for you in addition to the cost saving that I’m able to do for you? All of this we feel brings BPO operations and Automate Everything hand in hand and ultimately we provide a sustainable service that can only come from an automation LED approach. Back to you sir.

Sanjog Aul:
The way you described Automate Everything Chinmoy, it surely comes across as a fascinating concept, but how well does it work in real life? What were the learnings for Hexaware and customers who tried it? Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll dig deeper when we come back, so please stay tuned.

Speaker C:
Are you holding back from embarking on your transformation journey due to the uncertainty of business value and associated risks? What if you had a partner who could contractually guarantee cost, time and effort saving and new revenue potential from day one? Introducing digital managed services by Hexaware. With its unique model, Hexaware Turbocharges your digital transformation across both front and back office operations and delivers it at lower cost, reduced effort, improved efficiency and higher straight through processing while opening new avenues of revenue generation contractually guaranteed from day one. To learn more, visit hexaware.com today. This is CTN Brandcast on CIO Talk Network.

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome back. So Chinmoy Automate Everything. A fascinating concept indeed. Now, how well does it work in real life or did it work in real life and what were the lessons did you and your customers learn during these real life tests?

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Thanks Sanjog. It certainly is a fascinating concept and we arrived at this as an evolution as I was trying to explain before, and it’s still evolving. All good things absolutely needs to evolve. We were also lucky in 2016 to have started this by co creating with some of our anchor clients. We initially started this off with something called digital managed services which essentially brings together operations and automation, the tools at that point in time, which was very prevalent and we started working with a bank, for example, who had a bunch of stuff in the payments area with over 100 people that was delivered. This was in 2016 and we said, hey listen, we can take the hundred odd people that is doing payments work for you in a vendor situation already in a low cost location in India and actually using automation, get it down to about 50 odd people and 20 odd bots. So that’s how we started the journey, using digital managed services as a construct

Chinmoy Banerjee:
but that was very well received by a bunch of banks and customers because they said, hey, listen, if you can guarantee something like that, it is giving us the ability to unlock value, which is over and above labor arbitrage, which a BPO has already done for us over many years. So that’s how we started but that was still a PBJ, Peanut butter jelly sandwich, an example. We bought together a few concepts, created a package that really excited customers but with Automate Everything, we’re trying to create something which is like the pizza. When the pizza really got unleashed into the world from Italy and everybody was like, oh, wow, this is awesome. It is still using ingredients and stuff that has been around for a while, but it is really pushing the frontiers even more and this is more challenging and there are a lot of lessons learned and I’ll attempt to share some of them through.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
So the first one is creating cultural awareness. That’s super critical. You cannot impose the model on your teams and certainly you can’t impose this on your clients and most difficult is you cannot impose this on the analysts and advisors. Right. Who traditionally people have been used to managing deals using Excels that generally ask, hey, how many thousands of people you have and how many millions of units do you possess? So big learning is that just fixing the cultural awareness in your team itself is not enough. You have to evangelize this enough and hopefully this is one such attempt for us to evangelize.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Innovators indeed have to ply a lonely road. The second thing is the commitments in transformation really suffers on the ground due to lack of synergies between Ops and IT and we see this in most of our examples. For an insurance customer, for example, we started off by saying that, hey, we will transform but the operations guys actually had different ideas on the processes that they want to automate and the technology, in this case RPA, that they want to use but we figured once we started that the technology guys did not want to use RPA, just wanted to fix the core platform itself. So alignment between Ops and IT on the client side and various segments of IT like apps and infra becomes super critical. If everybody is not aligned on the client side, it becomes very difficult. Change management is something that a BPO intuitively doesn’t sell

Chinmoy Banerjee:
but you cannot automate everything unless you have change figured out. Important element that we have learned over the years when we try and sell automate everything or we try and sell digital manage services. The third is internally as a service provider or even externally. When you do automation you say, hey, you know you can do more with less and inevitably, however you want to cut it, you end up releasing people and it’s easy to say that you will use them in other engagements but whether you are a service provider or you’re an end client, you will actually need to grow in the same areas for them to feel well utilized because people are the most important resource even if you want to automate or if you want to do transactions faster.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
So for us to be able to train them and use them in a fungible manner in other clients in other domains become super critical for this to become sustainable and I would say you cannot transform using resources who aren’t high quality big learning. You cannot say I will have the same rate that The BPO industry charges, $10, $12, $13 an hour and be a transformation led and expertise led BPO. You have to necessarily then be very selective and picky in the deals that you want to transform and you want to play in and let go of many deals because there are many situations where customers or service providers mouth the right words but will decide on old school scale and price. Nothing wrong with that really. If you want to continue playing that game, let’s take a quick example. I gave you an example of a bank, I gave you an example of an insurance company.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Another example that I would like to give here as part of learning is of a retail chain in the US Last year that we did automation in the finance and accounting world and here we started with accounts payable. We looked at EDIs, from EDI to cognitive, OCR to RPA to actually platforms like Media Flow in order the attempt was to make the STP in accounts payable over 90%, well over 90% and they had 14 ERPs and 14 platforms forms and then we said hey listen, how can we take your accounts receivable and use NLP led bank statement entries and finally as a consultant, how can we guide them to enable them to close their books fast? How can they use more tools like Blackline for example in GL? Lessons learned here were many. So we felt that along with the CIO who we were working with, the business stakeholders have to be in the project from the start, during the sales process and not once the project has actually second is while integrating all these technologies that we were speaking about. RPA, machine learning, point solutions, the blueprint, the end state should be clear to the customer implementers and point solution partners and many times we or the service provider will have to really push back on customers to the top management to ensure that the ground realities are apprised at every stage. Bigger lesson was challenges, maybe a lot, but we should not restrict thinking big as Automate Everything is truly meant to be the bedrock of innovation.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
You will not get to it on day one, but it’s a journey and it needs a lot of courage, leadership, pushback and an ability to stand firm for this to really be implemented today, given where it is. Back to you, sir.

Sanjog Aul:
So what preparations do organizations need before they embark on this Automate Everything journey and what’s a good readiness check before they get started and finally, how can they proactively get ready for any anticipated pitfalls?

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Quite a few to be honest and I’ll try and list the top three, four of them. In terms of how do we feel an organization is ready. I think the first and the most important point is that the buying has to happen at the C suite as close as possible to the top. I know it’s not possible to get the CEO aligned all the time because of access issues and the time that the CEO has, but as close as possible to the top, preferably the business head or the CEO or the COO and there has to be alignment between IT and ops and business. The second is from a readiness perspective or prep perspective. They have to nominate a leader from their site.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Increasingly we are seeing in client organizations, in enterprise clients, they have an automate everything leader. They might call that person by a different name, but his job is essentially to look at automation across the organization and not just in silos. Possibly he would have a small core team to face off because once the client wants to do this, and whether they do it themselves or whether they do it with a service provider, it is a very involved assessment and having a team from their side really shows readiness and commitment. Three have a very well defined ROI mechanism where the ROI, the eye of the ROI is just not about cost, but it’s about risks, it’s about business value, it’s about business benefits, it’s about revenue enhancements, whatever is relevant for the customer. The business problem that the customer is willing to solve. The I should have those components included and it should not be just upper cost. I think given the stage where the automation journey is today, and we are just not talking about automation in silos, it’s best if at least during the initial due diligence phase or the ideation phase, they engage with an external provider today. So for example, our point of view, the way we are approaching this and it’s a mix of obviously trying to get more business, but more importantly evangelizing this idea is that we say, hey, we will invest in the DD provided

Chinmoy Banerjee:
the top three, four things that I mentioned are ticked off. There is alignment, the suite is aligned, there is client is very clear about the business benefits and we will invest and do the due diligence and come up with a book of work and the client can then say, hey listen, out of this book of work. So for example, we did that last year with a very large pharma and healthcare company and we did the assessment alongside the customer who put in a few program managers from their side and we came up with over 50 ideas. Some of them the client said, hey listen, we can solve this on our own. Some of them they gave it to us. For example, we worked on automating finance processes using ML. We worked in ML programs in their translation services area, translating stuff from 50 languages to English but some of the ideas, they kept it in house. They did it themselves. So for example, aspects of infrastructure automation, they said they will execute on their own some ideas, they took it to an existing vendor who was servicing them in that area and took it to them and got it implemented from that other vendor

Chinmoy Banerjee:
but essentially today it’s a very large customer of ours, but where we are not doing everything for them, we are their idea generator. We executed some areas, we don’t execute in other areas but essentially we are helping them evangelize this across organization and the last point I would say is this not for everyone. If you don’t have scale or you don’t have alignment, it is still better off to understand that this is a concept. Automate everything that you want to go to but you’d want to start off with one area or two areas or whatever is convenient. So slow steps is the best way to get there unless you’re totally aligned and you can tick most of the boxes.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Automate everything today is still very much on the evolution. Back to you Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul:
So how do you recommend an organization stay on this continuous evolution task of automate everything?

Chinmoy Banerjee:
So same principles, how do you stay on a continuous improvement path for anything applies here as well. From our perspective, her point of view is if you don’t keep improving, someone will certainly eat your lunch. Your customers, whether they are of a service provider like us or customer of a bank or insurance company, will always look for better products, better service, more value. That’s just the nature of things, isn’t it? From our perspective, how do you stay on this continuous evolution path? Really, if I break it down to quantitatively and qualitatively, I would say quantitatively we need to define what automation means today. We know what it meant a few years back. We do know that it has evolved because of better technology, especially with COVID and the new work from home acceptability. Our point of view now is that the next one year adoption will be five times more or four differently. It will be what would have otherwise taken five years to do.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
So you have the right catalyst, the right tailwinds. So continuously being aware of the art of possible in terms of automation and adapting is important and having metrics that measures that dynamically, more so, from a quantitative perspective, qualitatively it means aligning the carries of the team to keep them interested and not losing that to the culture of me too and people managers very tough to do. You cannot keep giving the same process or the same book of work to your team and say hey listen, you have to keep producing 10% year on year. It’s exceptionally difficult to do. It also means to evaluate if automation is achieving the right results. We don’t want to automate for the just for the sake of automating and please automation gods if you will, or please the revenue gods or please your partners. The principle for us is hey, is it bettering customer experience? Does it reduce risk? Does this enable people to focus on more complex stuff and drive business efficiencies? Essentially, is this making our end customers life a better place? Only then the automate everything and the continuous evolution makes sense.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
So that’s how I think. In essence if you look at it, we can set parameters that are qualitative, which are more important and of course quantitative so that the bonus and their motivations are all aligned. Thanks Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul:
Once again thank you Chinmoy for sharing your thoughts and insights about how BPO organizations and enterprises can leverage automate everything to drive strategic benefits and maximize STP.

Chinmoy Banerjee:
Thank you Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul:
And listeners I invite you to find related conversations on our website@ciotalknetwork.com.