Filum Ho, CEO, Apollo Studios.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, embracing automation has become an essential strategy for staying competitive and driving growth.

Automation not only streamlines processes and increases efficiency, but it can also open up a treasure trove of valuable business intelligence insights that were previously hidden within manual workflows.

Let's delve into how automating just one part of a business can unlock a world of data-driven decision-making opportunities.

Automation: A gateway to digitization

When businesses implement automation, they inadvertently undergo a process of digitization. At Apollo Studios, we recently witnessed this when helping an insurance industry player better automate email requests for policy statements.

This was achieved by using what is known as Robotic Process Automations (RPAs) or Bot Workers. These are snippets of intricate code that transform traditional labour-intensive tasks — such as invoicing, account reconciliation, employee onboarding, stock processing, and many more — into instantly automated processes.

But RPAs can be tailored for almost any manual task.

For example, before automation, the insurance company’s employees would typically respond to emails and calls from other brokers requesting policy statements and schedules for their customers. While this manual process was functional, it lacked the ability to capture valuable data insights.

Automation revolutionised this process. By building a seamless bot worker to take care of this process, this insurer enabled brokers to submit requests through specific forms via email. The robot that we built then processes these emails, validates the policy information, and extracts the relevant data before sending it back to the requesting broker. This automation not only saves massive amounts of time but also enables the digital capture of other key data points, unlocking a goldmine of business intelligence.

In this insurer’s case, the robot identifies the source of emails — whether they are from competing insurers or other brokers. And by tracking and aggregating these sources, the company gains insights into the competition's attempts to win over their customers.

Such digital data opens up numerous possibilities for analysing customer behaviour, identifying trends, understanding pain points, and predicting future needs. With a comprehensive digital database at their disposal, companies can further generate real-time analytics, empowering them to make well-informed decisions that drive business growth and customer satisfaction.

As businesses embark on their digital transformation journey, automation serves as a stepping stone towards becoming a more data-driven enterprise. These technologies empower businesses to move beyond automating repetitive tasks and further enable better decision-making.

For SMEs, automation is a game-changer

Just like the insurer I’ve referred to, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can also significantly benefit from automation and business intelligence insights. For example, automating supplier invoice processing, customer email sentiment analysis, and other repetitive tasks can lead to enhanced efficiency, cost savings, and improved customer experiences. This is especially valuable for smaller teams.

While AI and BI might sound intimidating to SMEs, businesses can start small and make tangible progress.

The bot workers that can carry out these jobs and, in turn, unlock further valuable data points, are also not prohibitively costly, thanks to innovations that we at Apollo Studios have made in this space.

And as we move forward, there’s no doubt that more businesses will recognize the potential of automation as an essential tool for driving digital transformation. Embracing automation and leveraging the insights it provides can be a game-changer for businesses, paving the way for a future where data-driven decision-making is the norm.