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I have always loved technology. When I was young, growing up only a few kilometers from where the Universal Robots headquarters is today, I remember finding a bug in a soccer video game I played, and I tried for months and months to make a better game. Even though it turned out to be much harder than I thought, and I ended up with nothing, it got me into coding, which was a learned skill that followed me for many years ahead. 

I believe that especially now, in these times of hybrid and remote work, it is more important than ever to incorporate the automation undertaking as part of a larger program within an organization. You need to have direction and motivation as well as resource and budgetary commitment and these are all things a wider program can assist with.

Over the past 20 years, back office outsourcing has been the go-to solution for large enterprises looking to save costs on repetitive, labour-intensive work. Next to cost reductions, a big benefit of moving the back office to low wage countries used to be the availability of a large labour force that allowed easy scaling. Countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and India used to be very popular countries to go to.

Most businesses suffered, some businesses failed, but for those who survived the ravages of the pandemic, what lessons have been learned and, perhaps more importantly, what plans are now in place to make businesses more resilient moving forward? History is littered with pandemics; following bird flu & swine flu, and COVID-19 has arguably been the worst since the Spanish flu. But what next?

McKinsey Digital has found that implementing RPA can result in an ROI of between 30 and 200 percent in just the first year! Sounds great. But how can you achieve such a result, and where to start?

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.

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.

Did you ever meet someone with real anxiety? It’s tough. There is no real reasoning behind it. Panic is at the door. I used to work at an airline, and a common fear is the fear to fly. It could be a combination of multiple anxieties, like fear of heights and claustrophobia. Or an irrational fear the plane will somehow malfunction and crash when you are on it. Just explaining that a plane is a safer way to travel than driving a car will not do the trick.