Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is sometimes referred to as Software Robotics that emulate human actions interacting with digital systems. akaBOT’s Ginny Truc talks about potential for this capability in Malaysia.

FPT Software, one of the leading public-listed IT firms in Vietnam, started an RPA arm in Japan six years ago to fulfil a client need for automating a certain process. Since then, FPT Software recognized the potential of packaging that automation capability as a product.

akaBOT was created as a result six years ago, and Ginny To Truc assumed responsibility as Malaysia’s country manager when akaBOT entered this market late last year.

She sees great potential with Malaysia generally being very open to and aware of new technologies like robotic process automation.

Visibility into processes

RPA is not a new technology in the market, and Ginny observed that a majority of solutions are US- or Europe- branded RPA solution providers that “are not very popular yet,” in this part of the world.

Ginny believes akaBOT’s presence in this region fills a large demand gap especially because of the direct nature of their presence and activity in Asia.

“Our advantage is that we provide end-to-end automation solutions, as well as the licenses and implementation of solutions.”

But before akaBOT provides all these, there is an all-important consultancy step of defining suitable processes for RPA automation.

Besides this consultancy, there is also process mining services via a partner, maintenance services, and migration services to help businesses switch from one RPA solution to another.

Ginny believes akaBOT’s presence in this region fills a large demand gap especially because of the direct nature of their presence and activity in Asia.

Process mining is the all-important phase of looking at current workflow processes organization-wide to determine the ones that are repetitive and manually executed by business users.

A majority of business users may not have the technical knowledge to define the manual steps that they take and convey them in a step-by-step format. Process mining technology can help with that by monitoring user behavior over a period of time. This can produce holistic insights about complementary or interdependent processes, instead of giving information that is siloed by departments, divisions, or functions.

Ginny remarked, “There (can be) many different systems within an organization that do not communicate with each other (ie. HR, Finance, Sales, IT and so on), and it’s very common. And if there are multiple different entities that each use different solutions, RPA solutions can help to look at all (the different reports) and combine (the reports) together.”

Change management

Large companies or conglomerates with many business entities could benefit from such an RPA capability. For example, a plantation customer automated their monthly closing report process by standardizing across different estates and automating the tasks of data checking and data matching.

An akaBOT retail customer with 300 outlets also leveraged RPA to automate the monthly process of paying utility bills every month. In both use cases, lengthy manual processes were eliminated to save time as well as reduce errors.

Organization-wide change management programs can help facilitate RPA adoption, and akaBOT has a “fast to mass” approach of automating small, manageable processes quickly (within 3 months or less) to prove the value and return-on-investment.

Once the customer sees the benefits from automating that initial process, they are more open to automating additional processes on a larger scale.

This allows akaBots to get buy-in from stakeholders through a “fast” initial implementation, before expanding automation efforts to more processes or “mass” scale over time. It’s a way to pilot RPA and gain confidence before a full-scale rollout.

Being in the Malaysia market for less than a year at time of interview, Ginny had already observed and also welcomed the cost-conscious mindset of businesses here. “I think it’s going to be a great journey here,” she concluded.