Bits and Bytes 2022 Vol 1

Message from the General Manager - Dr. Magd Donia

On behalf of the entire KASP team, I’d like to extend my deepest appreciation to our customers for the trust they placed in KASP. This has been manifested by the impressive results KASP has achieved in 2021, especially considering the challengesposed by COVID-19 during the first eight months of the year. This is a great testament not only to the capabilities of and professionalism of KASP, but also the caliber of our customers who emerged from the biggest economic challenge in decades stronger and determined to resume their growth and road to digital transformation.

Some of KASP success in 2021 can be captured in numbers:

1. Oracle Fusion ERP:
• 3 full Oracle Fusion ERP implementations delivered.
• 3 support customers added.
• New major deal won in December.
2. SAP BI/Analytics/Forecasting:
• Several projects delivered, including the first ML-driven forecasting model in Kuwait.
• Several new deals won to be delivered in 2022
3. Mendix:
• Several Mendix deals signed with implementations underway.
• Several deals in the pipeline
• Revenue grew by 40% over 2020, manpower increased by 30%.

Dr. Magd Donia
General Manager, KASP

However, our true measure of success is customer and employee retention, success, and growth. In 2021 we retained all our customers and added several new customers in all lines of business representing top names in financial services, travel, and manufacturing. We added several members to KASP across all business lines and are currently putting together a dedicated Mendix delivery team which should be fully operational by February 2022.

I’d also like to express my gratitude and appreciation to the entire KASP team. Their professionalism, technical competence and dedication has been amazing throughout the year. Some of us have had to weather very difficult conditions imposed by the pandemic as well as personal challenges, none of which had any negative effect on their performance or quality of work. I’m truly privileged to be part of such an amazing team.

Our outlook for 2022 is very optimistic as we project more growth and investments to go along with it. I wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2022 and look forward to engaging in projects and conversations with all our great customers.

Why Its Time to Automate: Lessons from the Pandemic

Since the initial outset of the 2019 novel corona- virus (COVID-19) pandemic, the world has been adapting to living with the virus on a day-to-day basis. The ways we interact with each other and the ways that we conduct day-to-day business have been completely transformed in the blink of an eye.

Most of the world’s businesses simply were not prepared for a disruption of this scale. Companies find themselves strapped for resources to meet changing demands. Their long-term strategic initiatives have been derailed. In many cases, their operations were completely shut down when the virus hit. Leaders need to ensure that they’re never caught this unprepared again. They must harden their processes to withstand any interruption and guarantee business continuity.

At the same time, they need to take steps to build flexibility into their operations that will allow them to react to the changing environment around them, now and in the future. Automation can help leaders accomplish both these goals. So, leaders need to convince both the C-suite and employees to embrace automation as an enabler that will help them not only get through the challenges of today but also to thrive when the economy recovers.

Mr. Pathik Trivedi
Co-Founder and CEO Hybrid Workforces

How do leaders pull this off? The answer is very simple: " It’s time to automate".

From the experts: Use this opportunity to accelerate automation adoption.

We’ve been keeping a close watch on what industry thought leaders have been saying over the last several months about the impact of the pandemic on business and technology.
Three main observations have surfaced from industry experts and reports:

Agility and adaptability are essential for crisis response and planning.

Business resiliency and continuity were undervalued and are now in prime focus to ensure survival in changing markets.

Leadership must embrace automation and show employees its potential to increase adoption.

Why automation spurs agility and adaptability?

The pandemic is ushering in a tipping point that we call as the “explore and test" stage of recovery, followed by strategy planning, capturing of new business, and sustaining growth. Smart companies will rework their sales playbooks, rebuild business plans and reinvent marketing strategies. And whether they’re looking to rethink sales and marketing or to capture greater operational flexibility and cost efficiencies, companies are turning to digital solutions to help them.

According to trend analysis by DMEXCO, the community for key players in digital business, marketing, and innovation, two-thirds of companies globally say the pandemic is accelerating their digital transformation. And automation has a big role to play in this overall digital transformation. McKinsey & Company sees automation technology as key to providing the flexibility and scalability to meet business needs as companies move from playing defence into recovering.

In other words, McKinsey says, companies must think about moving forward on their automation strategies in weeks, not months or years. Business leaders need to develop multiple long-term strategies centred on automation tools and prepare for a variety of possible crises, with automation at the core of each response.

Reports from Forrester Research, indicate that companies must foster business resiliency through new technologies such as AI and RPA to avoid losing ground in future crises. Agile technologies will prove essential in making companies adaptable and fast enough to stay afloat during “grey swan” events, events that are high impact but infrequent such as pandemics and recessions.

By investing in automation technologies in the wake of COVID-19, business leaders ensure that their core operations are supported even if employees are unable to work at full capacity. They foster greater business resiliency by lowering dependence on manual processes and paperwork. COVID-19 will continue to trigger economic distress, and successful companies will look to AI to reduce labour dependencies in production pipelines, heightening their adoption of automation-centred crisis response strategies. Such planning will lessen vulnerabilities to future pandemics and human-centred crises by ensuring that core operations can continue even if human labour is disrupted by quarantines or other discontinuities.

A report by Forrester, explores how automation can provide a reliable backup to operations when onshore and outsourced labour forces can’t support them.

In the sage words of Managing in Turbulent Times author Peter F. Drucker: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic.”

The Digital Strategy article from McKinsey Digital warns that companies that hold on too hard to the legacy systems that sustained them in the past will struggle to keep up with the rate of change necessary to manage through the disruption around them. Simply put, the old way of doing work won’t work and the future of business promises a better way. Leaders must seize the promise of the future.

And it’s already happening. In the C-suite, chief financial officers (CFOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) are pushing for change because of cost pressures from the pandemic. They are seeking to build new capacities to carry the company forward with strained resources, while staying competitive in the market.

But leaders also must focus on the right digital transformation levers and technologies. And that’s where automation comes in.Because of automation’s ability to drive cost and efficiency gains at scale, Forrester states in The COVID-19 Crisis Will Accelerate Enterprise Automation Plans report that automation is a key strategic initiative during this crisis and future ones, and therefore should be prioritized in board-level discussions.

But by itself, leadership buy-in to automation is not enough. To fully capitalize on automation’s benefits, companies must also bring their employees along. Indeed, research reveals that the most effective strategic digital transformation projects are driven from the top—but also have a big “bottom-up” component that ensures that the workforce enthusiastically adopts the new ways.

Recent advancements in Intelligent Automation technologies have vastly expanded what’s possible to automate. What’s more, every use case seems to be as unique as the companies that leverage them. So it’s not surprising that many companies don’t know where to start when choosing automation projects.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer— but we’re seeing an emerging framework that successful companies are leveraging to determine what processes to automate.We’d like to share it with you the fundamental components of this framework:

Finding and prioritizing high-value automation opportunities via centralized governance.

Democratizing the generation of automation ideas by encouraging the workforce to suggest processes for automation.

Creating a hybrid model that combines these top-down and bottom-up approaches

We’d like to share it with you the fundamental components of this framework: By empowering your CoE to create and carry out a top-down automation strategy, you allow this central governance body to figure out which processes will drive the biggest value for the company when automated.

Where to get ideas?

The short answer is from business experts AND through science. First, make sure that the CoE includes champions from each department and team—who each have their own soft and hard incentives—to advocate for different business interests within your company. Advocates from your lines of business and finance will certainly be able to point to processes that have significant scale and/or cause the most pain for people in their day-to-day work.

Now prioritize the list

Once you have a robust list, your CoE can prioritize projects based on their potential return on investment (ROI) and efficiency saving.

Monitor, measure, improve

After automations are built and rolled out, your CoE can monitor robot usage and performance with a central Insight’s dashboard that Hybrid Workforces can help you build so you can track, measure, and model performance across your entire automation program.

No matter how powerful a top-down strategy might be, it can only get you so far without involving your people. Each person does their work in a unique manner. This means that the opportunities for automation can be as specific as the needs of each employee in your organization.

Individual ideas lead to huge collective productivity gains

On a single-employee level it may not seem like a big deal, but when you add up the productivity that can be gained, it is staggering.Imagine if every employee at your company finds a way to use automation to save one hour of work per day. That adds up to about 250 hours a year—approximately six full 40- hour work weeks. In other words, you’ll achieve greater ROI than would have ever been possible with a top-down approach alone.

Leverage employee enthusiasm to drive innovation and automation adoption at scale.

When you empower employees to submit their own automation ideas, you make it easier than ever for people to drive their own productivity gains. The bottom line: when you empower your people with automation ideas and strategy within a hybrid governance framework, you lay the groundwork for innovation at scale like never. The vision should be that you want your employees to be digital and be part of the change, this whole initiative is not an investment in robots; it’s an investment in people.

Top down, or bottom up? Yes. When you implement both a top-down and bottom-up approach to determining what to automate you’ll create a feedback loop that amplifies the use cases and benefits of automation and drives adoption forward quickly. So, we strongly recommend you pursue both paths to make which processes to automate surface organically in your organization.

COVID-19 and the economic crisis may have been a rude awakening—but anyhow, now we’re all awake. We all must build more flexibility, adaptability, and resilience into the ways we do business. And automation is key to making it happen.

By adopting automation technology now, you can not only address shorter term issues and problems. You’ll also position yourself better for the recovery post-pandemic—and for future crises that will also, inevitably, come your way. If you’re thinking that you don’t have the resources in house to drive automation at the level you need, know that the Hybrid Workforces team and our network of expert partners can help. We’re here to provide you with the tools, technologies, services and support you need to automate today and thrive tomorrow.