September 8, 2020 - Blog

Cut Costs and Increase Efficiency with Productivity Apps

Simon Wragg, Head of PeopleSoft, Version 1

Introducing Version 1's Suite of Productivity Apps

COVID-19 has had a huge impact on all of us. Many people have lost their jobs, many others have lost their lives or loved ones. Society as a whole has been hugely impacted, and we can already begin to see the long term impacts on our psyche. I for one find myself shocked at the lack of social distancing when I watch programs recorded before this pandemic struck! How can they stand so close together?!

But COVID-19 has also had a devastating impact on business. Even beforehand, CIOs were under pressure to “do more with less”. Now it has become an absolute must for (almost) every organisation

In order to assist our clients in navigating this new landscape, we have developed the Smart Action Suite as a set of productivity apps which we believe solve real problems facing our customers and will help them achieve their cost optimisation goals.

Increasing Productivity and Cutting Costs

The Smart Action Suite is a collection of enterprise productivity apps which are designed to address many of the common challenges our customers face, as illustrated in the graphic below.

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Hyperautomation and the technology behind Smart Action Suite
Hyperautomation is the use of tools and technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation to automate more and more of the end to end business process, whereby cognitive AI capabilities and intelligence are embedded into Robotic Process Automation. Coined by Gartner, this is called out as one of the top ten technology trends for 2020. You can read more about Hyperautomation in a recent blog post shared by our Head of Technology and Innovation.

It’s all about productivity…
Hyperautomation is an IT buzzword, which only lives in the lexicon of IT leaders. When we talk to our customers, we’re not asking them if they would like some “Hyperautomation”! Instead, we’re asking them what major challenges they face. And when we frame how hyper-automation might help them address those challenges, we always have to frame this in terms of the business benefit derived from this technology. And when you think about it, it’s all about productivity.

So yes, The Smart Action Suite uses cutting edge tech under the hood, but ultimately, that’s beside the point and irrelevant to IT leaders. What really matters is that this solution can be applied to help organisations focus on higher value tasks and deliver real savings for your business.

Examples of where we have applied the Smart Action Suite

To understand this in practice, let’s talk through a real example of the Smart Action Suite.

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For the Legal Ombudsman of England and Wales, we used Robotic Process Automation technology to demonstrate how this innovative technology could automate the manual case input process and result in substantial cost savings and productivity enhancements.

We then focused on understanding how we could automate the entire pre-assessment phase using Machine Learning to add that additional level of intelligence required. However, as we stepped through the CRISP-DM process, we encountered the age old issue of data quality and missing data. Normally, the story ends here as we lack the data we require to build a high performing model.

Using our Smart Text capability, we can instead fill in the blanks and extract additional insight from the unstructured documents which accompany each case file. This ability to harvest additional actionable insight using cognitive text analytics allows us to unlock additional value and levels of productivity which could not previously have been possible without significant change.

This has been a fantastic opportunity for both our organisations to explore the power of disruptive technologies. I’ve been truly inspired by the energy, optimism and enthusiasm of all involved, and the confidence it has given us. Anything is possible!

I am immensely proud of what we have achieved together. It’s been exciting, bold, and ambitious; everything innovation should be!

Learn more
We’re really excited about the potential for Smart Action Suite and how it can help show how IT can make a real difference to our customer’s business.

You can learn more about the Smart Action Suite by visiting below.

Feel free to also contact me directly on LinkedIn.

The Smart Action Suite

In collaboration with our customers, Version 1's Innovation Labs have built the Smart Action Suite, a set of enterprise-ready productivity apps focused on addressing common challenges many organisations face, using innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation.

Find out more below on how the Smart Action Suite can increase productivity for your enterprise.
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Find out more about the Smart Action Suite

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