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You most likely have seen that Youtube video where we are taught some leadership lessons around starting a movement. The lessons are clear. Don’t give up if you have a rock solid story. This dancing guy had some failures as well in making people more enthusiastic about his passion: dancing in a particular way. But his focus and joy, and even being a bit of a geek about it, did the trick.

Insurance can profit hugely from automation like RPA. But to do so, a few conditions must be met. It is important to align automation initiatives with business strategy and goals, while at the same time keeping projects within reasonable limits. And, most importantly, execution has to follow the same principles as change programs. People are at the centre of enabling and unlocking the benefits of this technology. They need to embrace the ‘what’ and ‘why’ to make automation programs go beyond task automation to enterprise-wide automation.

Business is becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. Technologies and working methods are currently available to support the decision-making process and deal with the new challenges. In particular, process and data mining is a highly effective tool for CFOs.

In this article I continue sharing learnings from process mining implementation. This is the second part of the series

Most financial managers are interested in automation and robotisation for the digital transformation of their finance and accounting tasks. Once the fashionable effect has passed, the initial costs and the complexity of implementation may have dampened enthusiasm and confined these projects to large groups with resources and a real strategy. But the COVID crisis, lessons learned from large companies and the ongoing search for productivity and cost reduction as well as new technology and service offerings have reshuffled the deck.

Maybe you experienced it yourself: after a long flight (do you remember those days) you left the plane and walked through the airbridge. You saw some commotion in front of you. Customs officers are walking upstream. You see them coming in your direction. And then you see what the commotion is all about: they brought their sniffer dog.

One of the many questions I almost always get when talking to organizations about RPA -the other one I covered in the column about Automation Anxiety-: Isn’t RPA just a band aid?

Over the past few decades, we have already started to witness the automation evolution take place, with the global market size of industrial robotics forecast to increase to 18.62 billion dollars by 2025. Now with the ongoing pandemic acting as a driver for uptake, with two thirds of business leaders using automation to respond to the impact of COVID-19, more and more businesses are looking to automate their processes and take advantage of innovative technology, particularly with social distancing measures in place.

As more and more organizations accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and adopt process mining to analyze and monitor their business processes, academic research has started to address the business application side of process mining as well.

An increasing number of organizations is working on optimizing their processes. And RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is, amongst other things, a great process optimization tool that can facilitate the journey that companies are on. Implementing RPA, however, is a journey onto itself and I believe one of the cornerstones of being successful is ensuring roles and responsibilities have been well defined.