In today’s technically-enhanced world, advanced technologies such as automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence play a vital role in the day-to-day operations of any organization. Organizations across the world have been gradually migrating from their traditional business process to a much more agile automated as well as digitalized process that optimizes overall operations by replacing repetitive work processes. Other than operations, automation also helps organizations reduce production costs, enforce efficiency, and much more.

The pandemic worked as a catalyst for the digitalization process, where companies had to upgrade their existing work process to adapt to a digital work environment. Founded by Erik Gillet, Boundaryless Automation is an RPA consultancy specializing in intelligent process automation and advanced analytics. The firm helps organizations in their digital transformation journey and, over time, has built a well-deserved reputation of being one of the most reliable RPA organizations among its loyal base of clients.

In an exclusive interview with CIO Insiders, Erik Gilet, Founder of Boundaryless Automation discusses the organization’s offerings, his future roadmaps for the organization, and much more.

Define Boundaryless Automation as an organization and its position in the IT services and consulting domain.
Boundaryless is a niche consultancy specializing in intelligent process automation and advanced analytics. Started in 1999, initially we made attempts to become an internet based search portal company. However we abandoned the idea once Google became hugely popular.

We kind of revamped the organization around four years ago with more focus on process automation and advanced analytics. Five of our team members have been awarded as 'Most Valuable Professionals' globally by RPA market leader UiPath, which is a testament to the firm’s deep knowledge in these domains.

In the past, I led business transformation for some well-known banks and multinationals. We worked with major consulting firms, who often sent us junior or inadequate consultants. When I started Boundaryless I wanted to change this, and offer experts. This is exactly what we do: we offer experts, and we care about delivering great results. Client feedback is extremely positive, and more organizations are starting to notice us.

What is the kind of value proposition delivered through your RPA solutions portfolio? What are the challenges you often solve through your solutions for clients?
Coming to the value propositions delivered, we deliver against the entire automation journey from business analysis to implementation and support. This being said, our three major strengths are intelligent document understanding, test automation, and Finance transformation. In addition, if other RPA companies cannot deliver what is needed, we are often called in by the clients as a last resort to remediate a problem.

Coming to some of those instances, A French multinational asked us for a code review of bots delivered by other vendors. This helped to improve performance and the ability for IT to support. We helped the organization to set RPA coding standards to prevent repetition of the problem. Another instance was a call for help to overcome technical challenges in automated processing of foster parent applications.

In short, we helped a USbased child welfare organization to reduce processing time from 5 hours to 10 minutes. The biggest win is that we helped reduce the backlog of foster parent applications. Instead of going to an orphanage, more children now find a loving new family.

Could you elaborate about your approach that leverages process analysis and automation?
Process redesign and automation are complementing capabilities. If you do one without the other, you are missing a trick. We essentially ask three questions: what work should be done? How should work be done? Where should work be done? We recently looked at a new employee onboarding process, where the form has 97 questions. While we could have automated the process as is, we worked with the organization and reduced the number of questions by more than 60 percent.

What is the future roadmap envisioned for Boundaryless? Where is it headed for the next five years?
Today we mostly help organizations scale up their automation programs, helping them to find high impact process automation opportunities. Clients are also looking for different collaboration and pricing models: offering a catalog of proven automations, managing bots as a service, and a pay-per-use pricing model. The best way to think of this is like a staffing service that offers virtual employees, something the firm is looking forward to. We have also been working in the child welfare sector, where we have created a hosting solution for child welfare organizations, as quite often, these organizations lack the IT resources to oversee and build their own automation. So we are basically managing that for them.