In the contemporary times, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has evolved into more than just a script-based process. RPA incorporates all sorts of data from the frontend that involve Machine Learning and Automation Capabilities that bring much more powerful results to the table. Boundaryless is one such RPA company which is onboarded by a group of professionals who have deep expertise in the domain. The inherent ability of the professionals at Boundaryless to solve some of the pressing real business problems has seen several experts in the company being included in the UiPath’s published list of “Most Valuable Professionals”.

Recently, CIOInsider got in touch with one among the many top Professionals in the company – Lahiru Fernando, Development Lead Asia for Boundaryless. In the exclusive interaction that followed, the veteran Process Transformation Specialist, having a rich vein of over 25 years of expertise working for some of the top global MNCs before starting Boundaryless, gave us a deeper understanding about some of the key applications of RPA undertaken at the company.

In conversation with Lahiru Fernando, Development Lead Asia for Boundaryless

RPA is starting to manifest a glimpse of the future already. The market opportunities are humongous. Where is Boundaryless positioned in the current industrial automation industry? Which are your target segments?
In the current environment, a lot of

companies operate with remote workers. Business leaders realize that manual processes are not so great. In addition to that, customers expect faster response times and better service.

Some of our activities at Boundaryless focus on improving back-office operations; for instance, in a large financial service organization (a client), with the combination of RPA, a data analytics and a reporting tool, we target to automate 80 percent of the financial tasks. We believe that the same can be achieved for the Finance function across industries. Most people in Finance spend days sourcing, combining and cleansing data before it can be used for reporting purposes.

By taking the mind-numbing work away, the Finance professionals are freed up for more exciting things. They have more time for in-person interactions and can be true business partners. This applies similarly to many other functions where RPA capabilities help automate repetitive work. With our understanding of business processes and context, we can automate repetitive work. This way, employees spend more time on activities that humans are better at.

also look at possibilities for process redesign. To paraphrase Bill Gates: “if you automate an inefficient process, you will only magnify the inefficiency.”

If you look at the organizational process today, the question to ask is: “if we would redesign the process again, with all the technical capacities that we have today, would we design the process the same way?”. If you do not ask this question, you are missing a trick. We help organizations to rethink how they deliver the best to meet their business and customer outcomes.

To illustrate: we recently delivered a project for a large mobility provider. They entered new registrations using a webform. We suggested to skip the webform and enter directly into the database. When we tested 70 applications, the processing time improvement was astounding: the processing time went from nearly two hours to 30 seconds.

What are the opportunities that you foresee? Which are the areas that Boundaryless is going to invest in and what’s in-store for its future roadmap?
Today, our focus is on advanced analytics and intelligent automation. What we see happening is that companies are moving from pure RPA to include AI capabilities: document understanding, predictive analytics and some are even combining cognitive capabilities to create virtual workers who assist the team with repetitive activities such as booking supplier invoices or claims processing.

We have developed a virtual helpdesk employee to help with user passwords and access rights. It is a chatbot that you can contact via WhatsApp. It solves the problems that remote workers with password or access issues cannot enter into the system to contact the helpdesk. Password and access requests makeup close to half of IT helpdesks’ workload. Nowadays, one need not contact the helpdesk for these.

Looking into the future, we are investing in ‘voice-operated robot automation’. Today, we have Alexa and Siri in our personal lives. Why not ask a digital assistant to perform an action or create a report for the office too?