“Focus on low-hanging fruits in intelligent automation initiatives,” says automation expert

PEX Network spoke with Yulia Neroslavski, RPA domain lead at American financial services provider Payoneer, who reflects on her past experiences and successes with robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation (IA). Neroslavski shares her top advice for IA implementation and offers her expert predictions regarding the future trajectory of IA.

Neroslavski also offers a sneak peek into what to expect from her session at PEX Live: Intelligent Automation and RPA 2022, during which she will discuss accelerating digital transformation through IA and RPA alongside experts from The Coca-Cola Company, Siemens Gamesa and AP Moller Maersk.

PEX Network: Would you like to share any success stories you have experienced with IA?

Yulia Neroslavski: I have been working with Payoneer for more than three years and as RPA domain lead my main responsibilities involve creating cross-departmental RPA projects.

The most recent project that I am proud of is a "document understanding" project. It is an automated solution for document recognition through optical character recognition (OCR) and the extraction of necessary information by using pre-trained machine learning (ML) models.

One of the use cases we have for this project at Payoneer is for validating the address provided in a document against the one provided in the registration step by our client. This project is definitely a success story because it is one of the first IA solutions built into the core engine of our processing system.

Although in the preliminary stages we did not know where to start because we were overwhelmed by the capabilities OCR and ML could give us as a company, we are now very happy to see how it runs in the background, leaving fewer and fewer cases for manual review.

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PEX Network: What is your top advice for organizations looking to implement IA?

YN: My advice for implementing such solutions will be to try and to stick with the ‘low-hanging fruit approach’. This means choosing the better scope or most valuable player for this project that will bring maximum value in the shortest period of time, enabling you to spend minimum effort on the implementation. It is a very positive and progressive approach which can help to avoid some of the obstacles that companies typically face when starting to implement IA.

Typically at the very beginning of such initiatives there are either very high expectations, such as a demand for 100 percent automation for example, or very low belief in the success rate of the solution. This is especially remarkable when this is the first such project in the company. The ‘low-hanging fruit approach’ will set a visible target and expectations will be more real.

The pulse of such projects is very sensitive and people cannot be always motivated and inspired when results are only slightly visible. If the scope has been defined correctly then once the first results are received, there is much more desire to continue and scale because stakeholders are not exhausted and are instead encouraged to get to the top.

PEX Network: What key developments do you see happening in the IA space over the next couple of years?

YN: From my experience, artificial intelligence (AI), ML and other IA tools have become much more available for implementation on a daily basis. Sometimes it looks like the variety of IA solutions is outpacing our needs’ rate.

We have not managed to automate all our routine tasks yet and we should always examine all existing options for how and what to implement as an automation solution. This is important in order to help us, human beings, have more effective, productive and better lives.

PEX Network: What can attendees expect to learn from the discussion you will be taking part in on accelerating your digital transformation through IA and RPA?

YN: I will be happy to share my success story regarding the huge document processing project taking place at Payoneer. I hope they will find some insights that can help them make the right decisions on their own, regarding the way to adopt IA and RPA.

Despite the fact that you may be working hard on the implementation, there is always a place for magic when a bot, AI or ML is doing your routine work instead of you. When our reality provides such great opportunities, why should we not take them and use them to our advantage?

To hear Neroslavski discuss IA and RPA alongside experts from The Coca-Cola Company, Siemens Gamesa and AP Moller Maersk, register for PEX Live: Intelligent Automation and RPA 2022.