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Beyond RPA! Connecting the Dots & Achieving Higher Order Straight-through Processing (STP)

1 Straight-through Processing – Why Organizations Hesitate to Adopt It? 2

1.1 STP and Automation 2

2 HOST your STP 2

2.1 How HOST Works? 2

2.1.1 Addressing Complex Conversational Processes 3

2.2 Enterprise IT Application Portfolio Complexity 4

2.3 Higher Order Straight Through (HOST) Architecture 4

3 Conclusion 5

4 Author Info 6

Table of Contents

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Straight-through Processing (STP) is an absolute need and essence of all organizations as they spend millions for improving the speed and efficiency of business operations. STP gets even more critical for organizations with complex middle and back-office processes like in telecom, manufacturing or even capital markets. Even for the insurance industry, where STP is considered as the holy grail, it hovers around 60-70% at the best for different product lines.

In addition to process complexity, many enterprises have multiple IT systems and platforms (sometimes overlapping) in place to support business operations. The age-old processes and scattered IT systems pose a challenge to scalability for supporting higher business volumes. Despite trying different IT transformation initiatives like platform consolidation, enterprise integration, business process management etc. to improve on STP, organizations seem to have failed because of business process complexities, high cost and, risks. It takes years for an organi-zation to optimize and redesign business processes and transform supporting IT systems to realize the value of STP. Thus, considering organi-zation’s operating model rigidity and business impact, not many really risk adopting it.

1. Straight-through Processing – Why Organizations Hesitate to Adopt It?

With rising cost and continuous business pressures around delivering KPI and performance, automation has proved to be a worthy candidate for achieving moderate STP (with improved efficiencies) without going into the risk of churning the universe through transformations. Though automation allows organizations to improve operational efficiencies, it doesn’t deliver comprehensive STP solutions — thanks to the multiple different IT systems (on different technologies and platforms) needed to provide a complete business process. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be a solution to deliver automation on repeatable manual intensive tasks, but it is more centered around application automation instead of process automation (a key need for STP). Any RPA platform works very well in executing STP within an application but has challenges where multiple applications exist on various platforms. There is hardly any platform that can orchestrate and manage virtual agents/ bots across multiple IT platforms and human touchpoints to deliver comprehensive business value.

1.1. STP and Automation

Most organizations have seen discrete automation in call center operations to reduce workload, but it now needs to be integrated seamlessly across multiple processes (aka applications) and business lines to deliver efficiency and scalability.

As depicted in Figure 1 below, HOST brings together the elements of automation, application and data integration, and, process management to deliver STP spanning across multiple disjoint IT systems and processes. It allows call center operations to be seamless and straight-through in a non-intrusive manner irrespective of multiple applications that organizations might be using.

2.1. How HOST Works?

Citing the criticality of STP in fostering business growth, there is a need to look beyond RPA and explore better high-end options to keep proper balance between business goals and STP implementation. To achieve this objective in a strategic and time-bound manner, Hexaware has developed an in-house framework ‘HOST (Higher Order Straight Through)’ by utilizing its experience and expertise in STP. The prime aim of HOST is to stitch business operations, IT applications and, underlying infrastructure together to deliver significant operational efficiencies and STP.

2. HOST your STP

Achieving Straight-through Processing requires complete integration and transformation of business processes, application platforms and, people. This involves considerable effort, cost and, business risk. Even if an organization embarks on a transformation initiative, the as-is business and applications still need to be supported by using current practices for a considerable period until the transformation has attained a level of maturity.

Automation now needs to focus more on delivering ‘process efficiencies and business value’ instead of just removal of manual tasks. STP as an essence of automation is the key now.

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HOST framework is capable of spanning across a combination of platforms to orchestrate RPA virtual agents, API & integration endpoints, batch jobs and, long-running process executions to deliver STP. It ensures that RPA is not just a disjoint point-in-time solution to reduce manual labor but also provides end-to-end process automation integrating all scattered IT systems and end-points. This enables businesses to optimize process cycle time and cost on an average of 25-35% without going into large and risky transformations.

Call center operations typically include multiple IT systems to support underlying business process. These business processes may require multiple interactions with customers, workflows and, decisions and toggle across multiple applications. Thus, call center agents are required to manage “conversational state” while working with customers across the lifecycle of the process and systems. This so-called “conversation-al state” is the data and knowledge intrinsic to operational processes and exchanged between multiple actors in the process. It is a very signif-icant part of process-flow decisions but is seldom captured holistically in IT systems. This is a primary reason why automation is often siloed in IT systems and is not implemented at the process level.

2.1.1. Addressing Complex Conversational Processes

Figure 1 – Higher Order STP – Integrated Automation through Ops, Apps and Infra

Figure 2 – Intricate Web of Systems & Processes Involved in a Conversational Process

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Though RPA platforms can help to achieve some process automation and STP, its feasibility highly depends on the maturity of underlying applications. There is hardly any organization which doesn’t carry legacy application portfolio, critical business on a bunch of ‘batch’ process-es, standalone applications that deliver a fragment of business operations, integration landscape that is spaghetti and technical in nature and, data that is manually processed. Every enterprise will have some support functions delivered out of Excel, standalone databases or, informa-tion/ approvals exchanged via email templates (or Lotus Notes database). Modern web applications are easy candidates for doing RPA. Even mainframes can be automated through emulator commands but its desktop applications (VB, Delphi, Oracle Forms etc.) are challenging because of screen-scraping (and its unreliable, error-prone nature).

Most application portfolios suffer from rigidity of change, thanks to the underlying technology platform. For an application portfolio to support STP, it needs to have certain characteristics like:• RPA solution through screen recording, scraping, browser-based JavaScript executions• Triggering of IT system/application execution through integration, API, messaging, event streams etc.• Triggering of “Batch Services” through automated script execution, job monitoring and scheduling and, input data preparation • Ability to extract data automatically (system response, transaction data) and trigger action

To bring an application portfolio to participate in STP, the application portfolio needs to be transformed to support the above characteristics (which is costly and risky) or to use automation platforms. Unfortunately, standard automation platforms don’t have many capabilities towards integration, messaging, events or, batch processes and hence, need separate mechanisms to deliver end-to-end automation.

Considering any automation is best done when non-intrusive, legacy platforms need separate frameworks to enable them to participate in automation. This is exactly where HOST can help. It provides a complete integration, batch and, messaging backbone to an interface with any applications in a native protocol to enable them to be automated. HOST acts as a bridge between RPA automation platforms and legacy applications. It manages interactions between RPA and legacy applications during any automation script execution.

2.2. Enterprise IT Application Portfolio Complexity

HOST framework can be envisioned as a platform based on an integration engine that extends its core capabilities to managing conversation-al state, process orchestration, automation-path decisions and, bridging RPA and legacy applications.

As depicted in Figure 3 below, HOST will orchestrate processes by mediating with Hexaware’s AutomatON automation platform (or any other COTS platforms like UiPath, BluePrism etc.) to execute across multiple remote agents. STP is managed by HOST (which internally uses an open-source integration engine) and it executes automation by delegating it to the automation platform (AutomatON, BluePrism, UiPath etc.)

2.3. Higher Order Straight Through (HOST) Architecture

The call center agents (CSA) will have multiple handoffs with other operations teams and the conversational state is typically maintained across Excel files, emails, case-management comments etc. for sharing across teams and to take appropriate decision on the next set of actions. So, even if individual IT systems are automated (using RPA), the CSA has to manually decide on further execution path (aka IT system module/ function or even scripts) depending on the conversational state. Now, to replace a human CSA, a virtual agent/bot needs to manage all the conversational state and decision-making along with orchestrating automation scripts on all the participating IT systems (and gathering response/ result from each system). To tackle this challenge, HOST brings in a dedicated automation orchestration and management platform to work alongside any known RPA platforms for managing decisions, control and, conversational state.

The need for an agent to take further decisions (like which application to use for a specific customer interaction) depends on the conversa-tional state and a lot of tacit knowledge (coming out of SOP). Pure play RPA can only automate IT systems but will have no knowledge of or control over process and decision-making based on customer interaction. So, automation is left to mere removal of few manual tasks within IT systems sans any bearing on process improvement, cycle-time reduction or better customer experience. Here, HOST as a framework uses “event processing” to understand the context by mining emails, Excel and, other structured documents generated as a part of business opera-tions/process. This is then used to determine further execution. HOST then orchestrates chaining and implementation of multiple virtual agents (RPA scripts) exposed as API by using rule-based decisions coming from all conversational events.

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Figure 3 : Process Orchestration with HOST

Straight-through Processing is the need of the hour. With organizations in the midst of constant change and rapidly evolving digital journeys, there is a dire need for a flexible solution that can navigate across systems, be it legacy or new-age SaaS applications. The solution should be capable of orchestrating across applications & infrastructure boundaries as the use cases can vary from being front-end customer-oriented to back-office employee-oriented or could also be purely IT-support-oriented.

Hexaware’s HOST framework showcases how to connect the dots across disparate systems and siloed automation initiatives. It speaks about innumerable possibilities where processes can be orchestrated across system boundaries and drive digital journeys. HOST leverages the power of integration and automation, which are essentially the key components for achieving a higher order STP.

3. Conclusion

The platform is also capable of using internal APIs of off-the-shelf automation platforms like UiPath (Orchestration API) to trigger all the virtual agents and queries for response post automation execution.

Custom connectors can be used for any organization-specific data gathering like retrieving content from email (including attachments), reading from shared stores (databases, mapped network drives, shared Excel files etc.) for process input/output information (or conversa-tional state). Disjoint processes (or automation scripts) will be executed using EDA and those events (like database entry, SMTP inbox alert, file listener etc.) will be monitored for triggering action.

4. Author InfoP dheeraj Kumar is a Solutions Specialist with more than six years of experience in IT. At Hexaware Technologies, he is a part of the architec-ture & solutions team which focuses on automation, enterprise integration, application transformation and digital transformation consulting.

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