Robotic and IA Procurement May Be Enhanced By New Strategic Alliance

The Hackett Group, Inc. and Symphony Ventures have announced a global partnership designed to enable enterprise digital transformation by integrating The Hackett Group's best practices and research data with Symphony's strategic and technical capabilities in robotics and intelligent automation.

The partnership is expected to offer supply chain managers the ability to further improve the ROI of their Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Intelligent Automation and other digital transformation efforts in procurement, and other business services areas by combining Symphony's global leadership enabling digital transformation with The Hackett Group's deep empirical knowledge about how to assess and optimize processes for both efficiency and effectiveness.

The Hackett Group has also announced that it will launch a series of new “Digital World-Class” standards and metrics for various business services functions at its U.S. Best Practices Conference in Atlanta, May 1-3. The standards will detail the supplementary improvements to efficiency and effectiveness possible for companies that combine world-class performance with RPA and other digital transformation approaches.

As part of the partnership, The Hackett Group will help clients target their digital transformation efforts by assessing the automation potential of functions and processes, evaluating them against leading practices, and quantifying the overall opportunity. The Hackett Group will provide clients with evidence-backed best practices and insights, and its extensive benchmarking, advisory, and transformation work with Global 1000 companies will enable companies to focus on the areas with the highest ROI.

Complementing the insights of The Hackett Group, Symphony Ventures will bring to this partnership its extensive background and experience in assisting global organizations design, implement and support their digital operations strategies. Symphony works with leading digital tools and has mapped, modeled and implemented thousands of business processes in the world's leading organizations, including in Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Logistics, Beverages, Manufacturing, Entertainment and more.

The two companies have collaborated on a new Point of View research paper, “A Blueprint for Getting Started with Robotic Process Automation,” which is available free with registration at this link: http://bit.ly/2oS0ooi.

The research estimates that the total efficiency improvement achievable through holistic transformation using RPA can result in 50-75 percent cost reductions over baseline. The result will be a new “Digital World-Class” standard for process costs optimized in this fashion, which will be lower than those achieved by world-class companies in The Hackett Group's benchmark.

The research paper outlines six steps that are key to setting a rapid and successful course for integrating RPA into business services: think “transformation before tools”; define automation objectives; identify areas of high potential; establish the right governance; plan for transformation; and conduct a pilot or proof of concept.

David Rombaugh, Principal, The Hackett Group, told SCMR in an interview that the benefits of RPA to the supply chain can include improved vendor experience, lower error rates, and faster resolution time.

“By digitizing transactions, RPA can help companies gain greater insight into procurement & vendor analytics,” he said. “For example, RPA can dramatically reduce the time required to do reconciliation, by making sure it gets done right the first time. This can provide procurement staff with more time to dedicate to analysis.”

Pascal Baker, Chief Client Officer, Symphony Ventures, told SCMR that working with major logistics providers, his company has used RPA to reduce transaction times by orders of magnitude.

“Accelerating transaction times and accuracy count through RPA leads to significantly enhanced customer experience as well as employee experience when repetitive rules-based transactions are managed through automation,” he said.

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