How Nokia achieved significant asset turnover gains with intelligent automation

Ahead of his participation on the panel discussion on how to get serious with business transformation and automate at scale at PEX Live: Intelligent Automation and RPA 2021, PEX Network caught up with Rajesh Rao, head of intelligent automation at global telecoms organization Nokia.

He discusses the greatest lesson his extensive career has taught him, shares an example of intelligent automation success at Nokia and offers advice for PEX practitioners looking to embark on their own automation journey.

PEX Network: Can you tell us about your career journey so far and the greatest lesson your career has taught you?

Rajesh Rao: I am fortunate to be in the midst of a fast-paced and rewarding career, building a portfolio that includes management, leadership and board positions in most functional areas. I bring strategic and operational expertise in technology and process-led digital transformations, automation, outsourcing and emerging technologies.

Currently, I lead the intelligent process automation group at Nokia. I am responsible for implementing emerging digital technologies enterprise-wide to deliver significant automation benefits.

In the context of process automation, one of the key lessons that I have learned is the importance of fully contextualizing the best practices available within or outside an organization to a problem. The devil is really in the details with this translation exercise for any successful and sustainable cross-pollination of best practices.

PEX Network: Could you walk us through a particular success story at Nokia involving intelligent automation and how this benefitted customers?

RR: By combining multiple practices such as business process management, robotic process automation, natural language processing and intelligent data extraction, we have fully automated the processing of customer purchase orders (POs). We are on an onboarding journey for all Nokia customers in more than 125 countries and POs in more than 100 languages.

The automated process, other than yielding superb asset turnover gains and cost efficiencies, reduces the PO processing turnaround time to a fraction of what it was previously and accelerates fulfilment to our customers.

PEX Network: Do you have any advice for organizations looking to leverage automation technologies?

RR: For any organization to succeed in their automation journey, it is important to approach it holistically. It needs to be as much a top-down initiative as a bottom-up one. Making automation a strategic priority and aligning it with the overall business strategy is pivotal to success in any organization by making it a key priority and giving it the requisite top management attention.

Similarly, development of internal capabilities and addressing employee skill gaps through training or acquiring skilled resources externally is key. Mixing ‘hard’ technical training for employees directly involved in automation execution with more ‘big picture’, less technical content but heavy on business context sessions across the enterprise ensures maximum interest and support for automation efforts.

PEX Network: What are your top tips for businesses looking to begin automating at scale?

RR: I am assuming that the organization has a healthy funnel for automation opportunities, an automation demand side that has target areas and a specific use-case deployment roadmap aligned with overall automation strategy and business priorities. There are many ways to structure successful and scalable automation programs.

Firstly, a cross-functional virtual team encompassing business, transformation, digital and IT focused on collaboration for demand management, execution alignment and coordination and benefit realization. A multi-layered governance setup that includes steering from top management will also help here.

Secondly, implement a factory-like model for delivering the automation with process-driven, high competency developers, architects and project managers, with KPIs that promote low cost, high quality and timely deliveries.

Thirdly, have a core lab-like setup that acts as the automation technology custodian and continuously evaluates emerging technologies, conducts proof of concept evaluations and pilots and works closely with various enterprise architect groups to assess compatibility with the organization’s technology landscape and future roadmaps. This setup should work with infrastructure teams to determine the right-fit deployment architectures, lay the groundwork in terms of onboarding of the selected technologies into the factory and support it in skills and competency development.

Lastly, institute a strong workforce transition mechanism for re-skilling, redeployment or outplacement of employees whose roles are partly or fully made redundant as a by-product of automation deployments. You need demonstrate that you truly care via human-centered policies and processes, or else you will lose the trust of the employee base resulting in lower employee engagement and flight of employees you want to retain.

PEX Network: How do you see intelligent automation technologies developing in the next few years?

RR: In the next few years, we will see further convergence of various emerging technologies to enable much more complex automation and improved consequent benefits to organizations.

5G and 6G-enabled internet of things devices combined with edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like TinyML will create automation ecosystems, not only for individual organizations but simultaneously leveraged by collaborative and competitive companies to drive ever higher efficiencies and change the way companies present to and serve customers.

Another close area to watch will be how quantum computing develops and becomes available for practical industrial applications. Quantum computing ‘hyperscalers’ are likely to emerge, just as cloud computing did, providing organizations computing environments to automate processes that are presently extremely costly and technically challenging to automate.

These technologies will fundamentally change the nature of how companies in certain industries operate – now is the time for companies to examine the business they are in and start pivoting. It is incumbent upon companies to understand these disruptive and fundamental changes in technology and prepare themselves by creating a future-forward business strategy and aligning their organizations and finances to their strategy.

Organizations that are prepared to onboard these technologies and manage to do so successfully will create a source of unassailable short to mid-range differentiation.