<aside> <img src="/icons/robot_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/robot_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> Definition This thesis covers research on workflow automation from the perspective of someone building in this space. To define workflow automation - it is the use of technology that replaces tasks that may be simple or complicated that typically require manual effort or back office work to complete.
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Our experience from working at a Bank (ICICI Bank) two payments and lending companies lends to the fact that operating complex products and workflows is an art. Usually you have a combination of tech enabled and manual process enabled hybrid processes but complexity slows you down greatly affecting decision making. This is similar in healthcare and mobility as well as I quickly realised from my co-founder (read medical coding, transcription, etc) Adit and Neeraj who is deploying AI performance monitoring systems at manufacturing companies.
The Back Office Conundrum
The back office even at tech enabled companies is present not because managers love operating cost centers but because there is so much unstructured work that humans must be involved. At startups and scale ups this problem is even more problematic because founders don’t want to operate a sweatshop but are very quickly put in the position of throwing duct tape in the form of back offices on broken processes → enter the business ops or operations lead. Very quickly human beings improve productivity by a lot but there are costs because reversing the process of manual to automated involves trying to learn from human beings you are going to automate which is pretty messy.
While individual tasks and processes are likely to be solved through NCLC solutions, as a process scales and is mission critical for a business the following three strategies play out:
Typically done for core processes for tech enabled companies
Discussed in The Incumbents & The Challengers
Off the shelf solutions to solve a certain problem like Hyperline for billing, Quickbooks for accounting, Epic Systems for healthcare.