Anyone embarking on a major change in life would welcome advice from someone who’s already been through it—and that includes digital transformation.

In our final webinar for Intelligent Automation Month, a series of digital events ABBYY sponsored during September to explain the power of intelligent automation, we invited leading innovation experts from global companies to tell us about their journeys: lessons learned, success stories, and what they’d do differently.

Joining us on the panel was Shanx Tripathi from IBM Consulting - financial services sector, and Swaraj Padma, head of automation at international real estate and investment company JLL, along with ABBYY’s own Senior VP of Product Marketing Bruce Orcutt.

With recent research by ABBYY identifying “vague automation goals” as the top reason for automation projects to fail, I was keen to know how IT leaders determine where to start their automation journeys.

Knowing where to start

As one of the biggest commercial real estate companies in the world, JLL had a multitude of forms, documents, and contracts that were being processed manually. The need for automation became clear in their efforts to improve document-centric processes in all aspects of the company—but equally as important was the need for a scalable solution and tech stack that could handle their continuous growth.

The company decided the best place to start would be payments processing, where employees were still receiving invoices by email and manually punching in the data. The success of automating this small part of the finance department helped JLL realize the need to go further and automate the entire AP process end-to-end. This not only resulted in improved efficiencies, said Swaraj, but generated money for JLL through virtual payments and provided greater visibility into their financial operations.

It helped finance to foresee monthly expenses, improved cash flow, and streamlined financial reporting like OpEx calculations. What started as a small use case for invoice data capture just kept growing, eventually expanding into major operational efficiencies providing far greater benefits through end-to-end processing.

As an IBM Consultant, Shanx has delivered change programs with leading companies such as Toyota, Proctor and Gamble, and Intel. He believes automation is not just about use cases but is rather a mindset, starting with basic things like considering how the innovation team will operate, whether to use project management tools, or how to track your own progress and report to leadership. He says you can’t digitize the life out of a client-facing process when your own operating model is pathetic. After all, the ultimate goal of any business is to serve its customers. Therefore, it's crucial to focus first on client-facing experiences and work backwards from there. If your internal operations can’t support the ideal customer outcome, you must address that underlying issue.

Reimagining the process: financial services client onboarding

Shanx recently worked with a leading bank on automating client onboarding; not personal or individual customers, but institutional onboarding where there are many challenges such as KYC compliance and other strict documentation rules.

He discovered the industry average for onboarding was between 60 to 70 days with the bank providing him with nine different process maps of how it works. However, instead of automating the bank’s current system, he decided to implement an entirely new one that enabled onboarding to be completed in a matter of hours rather than months.

It’s not about taking an existing process and automating it, he said, but “reimagining what you were trying to do in that old process to begin with.”

The importance of staying on time

One of the biggest challenges of undergoing digital transformation is staying on target with your timeline and meeting the designated KPIs. Research commissioned by ABBYY showed one-in-five abandoned their automation project completely (22 percent).

We asked our innovation panelists the key to sticking to timelines, and according to Shanx, the simple answer is “procurement.” He believes it’s the mundane tactical thing which often gets short shrift when people are very excited by the whole transformational agenda. His recommendation is to have the procurement lens parallel to the operational and work lens and ensure a strong partnership from the start. He’s also a firm believer in agile methodologies, which are key to meeting deadlines.

For Shanx, meeting deadlines is heavily dependent on diversity in your automation tools, as oftentimes no single platform caters for an end-to-end solution.

He believes that maintaining clarity in documenting your true end-to-end process and having the right kind of tool attached to each fragment of that newly imagined journey will help you stay on target.