THE Budget 2022 announcements and the latest annual review unveiled by Enterprise Singapore have made it clear that building digital capabilities and driving innovations will continue to be key priorities in Singapore. In particular, the need to improve productivity and upgrading of capabilities through technologies such as automation, the cloud and analytics have been top-of-mind among many business leaders here.

Indeed, Gartner lists among its top strategic technology trends for 2022, business imperatives such as the deployment of autonomic systems and hyperautomation; we foresee that more organisations in Singapore will jump on the automation bandwagon this year.

After all, automation can enable your staff to work faster and better, and to dedicate more of their time on creative and value-adding work.

Yet, despite its increased popularity, most businesses in Singapore do not fully understand automation, and have been missing out on the full value of this powerful tool.

Automation is not just RPA

Popular approaches to automation these days include Robotic Process Automation (RPA), process mining, Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), workflow automation, and more. However, RPA has dominated the headlines in recent years, and has become synonymous with automation in general. In reality, RPA is only the "first mile" of the automation journey that supports use cases based on a single or small group of tasks.

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Imagine this: If we draw an analogy between the human body and business processes, tasks such as saving documents from e-mails to a shared folder, or copying and pasting data are done by the likes of our hands and legs. RPA enables us to train the "hands and legs" of our daily workflow processes to complete discrete tasks.

These tasks can be mindless and time-consuming, and the typical value proposition of RPA is that these repetitive tasks can be automated by robots, saving time and improving productivity.

However, as the pandemic accelerated the march to the cloud, many companies started to realise that a technology designed mainly for repetitive desktop tasks has many limitations. In fact, Gartner noted that "task-based RPA alone is not a Gartner-recommended approach for sustainable business value".

After all, your hands and legs can do their tasks independently, but they do so in silos and cannot complete a series of tasks in an intelligent and coordinated fashion. To do that, you need a central nervous system that connects and coordinates the rest of your body.

Understanding process automation

What truly elevates an organisation's workflow is automating the process that not only involves tasks, but different people and systems as well. Business processes are tightly intertwined throughout a company's operations. Simply automating a small element of a bigger process using RPA can drive some efficiency, but multiplying that automation across the end-to-end business process is what delivers exponential results.

A good example would be the automation of order-to-cash management. If your business closes a deal today with a purchase agreement signed, there are subsequent steps that need to happen in a certain order. These include ensuring the services purchased are provisioned; the signed agreement is saved in the right folder; the revenue is recognised in the finance team's system; and that billing happens. Imagine if all these are automated, including areas such as marketing, customer support, employee onboarding and offboarding, and much more.

To enable end-to-end automation, organisations need an integration platform. We can map it back to the human body analogy. When your brain commands your hands and legs to move in a coordinated way, you need a central nervous system that connects the brain with different parts of your body. This central nervous system enables your whole body to coordinate, leading from one action to the next. In the automation world, this system is an integration platform that activates and orchestrates processes at scale.

End-to-end automation is cross-functional, and involves different people and data across applications, databases and functional areas. Success is therefore not merely measured by hours saved, but in terms of business impact achieved, such as days sales outstanding (DSO), order fulfilment cycle time, or customer satisfaction. Everything in the process flows automatically, just like processes in the human body.

Leading automation strategy with a central nervous system

It would be a mistake to confuse RPA for the central nervous system necessary to orchestrate entire processes. Beyond the "first mile" of the automation journey, the next 100 miles will follow the continued push towards the cloud, where robust automation is needed, not only for better efficiency, but also innovation and growth.

An integration-led approach to automation should leverage a suite of technologies to retrieve data from different sources, and has the intelligence to dictate how the processes and integrations should behave across a multitude of applications and systems. This approach will prioritise your automation investments, ensure that you are choosing the right tool for the right part of your automation, and orchestrate process automation that triggers actions across your tightly interwoven business applications.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Businesses today are forced to take a piecemeal approach to automation, and surround themselves with a patchwork of tools, for lack of a better approach.

Each of these tools, such as iPaaS that syncs data between applications, RPA that automates the work of invoice-processing staff, or API management that enables mobile or custom applications are additional middle-ware tools that have become islands of automation that are disconnected from each other. Instead of creating a more connected enterprise, many organisations these days are actually creating new silos instead.

That is why the key to delivering end-to-end automation is bringing the various forms of automation and integration together on one platform, and orchestrating them to provide that exponential value. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts - central to this proposition is the ability to seamlessly integrate those automations at both a technical and process level, to break silos and connect across the slew of applications used in the entire business process.

Companies like Grab where employees and devices are highly fluid, have put particular focus on the priority to automate processes to reduce manpower. With an integration-led, end-to-end automation platform, Grab can now query their directory 30 times faster, save more than 200 hours of IT time each week, and build integrations in a 10th of the time it takes to code. These in turn have also eliminated human errors and enhanced employee experience.

While your organisation may not be ready to implement an end-to-end automation yet, you will be better positioned to drive both short-term and long-term value throughout your automation journey in the years to come if you take a more holistic view of your automation strategy and can use the right tools that best fit your needs.

The writer is founder and managing director of Workato, Asia-Pacific and Japan