Category Archives: Automation

Anyone can now automatically prospect the vast network of LinkedIn and build a future customer base with ZappedIn. In a short span of time, ZappedIn's fame is spreading fast, and over 1,100 sales pros are already on board. Their experience reveals ZappedIn is good at shortening sales discoveries, and the automated tool is a huge time saver.

Three steps are all it takes to set up ZappedIn. Setting up an account takes just a few minutes, and the automated tool is ready to work, saving hours otherwise spent pouring over LinkedIn posts or profiles. The "Filter" function sets the focus right, narrowing down the scope to the ideal areas using LinkedIn's Sales Navigator. The user then begins to see the power of the tool, getting many qualified leads and sales conversations.

"Leave your repetitive prospecting tasks on autopilot in just a few steps. Our automation tool for LinkedIn has endless uses. It can be used by sales teams, recruiters, branding and marketing teams to automate their efforts," says Matthias Fong, ZappedIn's Chief Technology Officer.

The software's features show that it has left nothing behind. There is an automatic campaign creation with high converting templates, a customer success manager, cloud-based storage, laser targeting and actionable insights. With advanced filtering, one can use hundreds of criteria to filter people. There is free and unlimited chat support, regional time support, a product tour and a user manual, among many other features.

"Our team has collated data from thousands of campaigns and having conversations with thousands of customers, and we are here to provide advice to help you get results," said Matthias Fong.

Those looking to scale their sales process will find ZappedIn equipped with multiple A/B tests and multi-variant experiments to continuously help optimize their outreach. The prospects lists are updated with AI-based cleansing process within the ZappedIn dashboard, saving hours of time. For massive operations, there is reliable backup and top-level security.

Whether entering new markets or automating a sales pipeline, ZappedIn can be set to multiple marketing uses. The software requires very minimal technical knowledge and one can set up their automated campaign in a matter of minutes. ZappedIn has proven itself to be a gamechanger and can elevate the lead generation game for anyone.

About ZappedIn

We help you automatically prospect your ideal future customers on LinkedIn. Use ZappedIn to automate your outreach activity, shorten your sales discovery and close more deals.

Press Contact:

Charlene Lim, +6583718724,https://zappedin.io/

SOURCE ZappedIn

https://zappedin.io

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ZappedIn, the Top LinkedIn Lead Gen Automation, is Gaining Popularity with Unprecedented Success - PRNewswire

Your revenue operations team can reliably get inbound leads into the hands of your sales representatives in roughly two minutes, executing every step of your lead management process along the way.

Delays in your revenue processes, especially in lead follow-up, decimate funnels. Slow lead processing makes it 7x less likely youll ever qualify your leads. Most RevOps pros understand this, but lead management is a deceptively complex set of processes, oftentimes built on the back of a house of cards.

Note: If you havent heard of Jobs to be done, check it out, its worth a read.

Oftentimes these jobs are done asynchronously using a myriad of third-party tools, which despite everyones best intentions, leads to challenges with the reliability and speed of lead processing. These challenges are especially difficult for those on the front lines to troubleshoot.

Problems with orchestrating processes across multiple tools arent limited to lead management, either: If you work in RevOps, youve certainly earned some battle scars when trying to make the litany of software tools across your go-to-market org play nice.

On the one hand, the proliferation of SaaS means teams across the organization can find best-in-class solutions for their use cases. On the other hand, there are unintended consequences when adopting them, and dealing with that normally falls on the shoulders of ops. Likely, youll spend countless hours dealing with the various quirks of these tools, collectively increasing your technical debt more and more as time goes on.

Meanwhile, only the most well-resourced teams can allocate engineering resources to build homegrown solutions that resolve these issues. But nobody gets off easy. This approach has its own challenges. You must also account for the overhead homegrown has in terms of ongoing maintenance and adapting to changes as your go-to-market strategy evolves.

The reality is most of us heavily rely on purpose-built tools and native integrations from our SaaS vendors of choice. No matter how much your team has invested in technology, we still must deal with its inherent limitations. Maybe youre spending too much time on manual processes (such as list imports), answering an onslaught of messages from teammates regarding data discrepancies, fighting endlessly to squash out duplicates, or filing too many vendor tickets trying to understand whats happening inside the black box.

The bottom line is these gaps turn into roadblocks that cost your company serious money. The pain is even more apparent in a challenging economy, where tight budgets mean youre expected to justify ROI while your budgets get frozen, if not cut. Heres the harsh truth, 58% of business professionals say less than half of their applications have netted a positive ROI. Meanwhile, 66% of marketing teams dont believe they have the skills to use their existing technology effectively.

Ouch. Let that sink in. Do you have any idea how much money were spending on software here, folks?

Chin up. Dont worry. Theres hope! The fact is, this is all POSITIVE. Theres SO much room for improvement here if you work in RevOps. Its a great opportunity you can solve.

Everybody loves the RevOps hero.

Considering how hard it is to manage the revenue stack, its no accident leaders are radically rethinking their approach to better support their companys revenue strategy. Instead of taking a tools first approach and designing around limitations, smart teams opt for a process-driven approach, choosing open, API-first systems to fit into their stack.

Process-first thinking isnt new: weve always wanted to do things this way. Weve just lacked the resources and tools to deliver.

But friends, the times, they are a-changin! The lines between engineering and operations are blurring as practitioners are becoming increasingly technical. Theyre learning to leverage APIs to connect systems, write SQL to query data warehouses, and use JavaScript to instrument tooling. Building technical skills open the door for operations pros to be truly process-driven by integrating, orchestrating, and automating processes across your go-to-market organization, such as lead management. And how are they putting these technical skills into practice?

By learning to leverage General Automation Platforms (GAP) like the Tray Platform. These automation platforms close the resource gap for semi-technical ops professionals, empowering them to build multi-step, automated processes called workflows. These workflows focus on the job to be done first, not the technology vendor that does it.

Throughout this series of posts, well introduce a workflow framework that makes sure the lifeblood of your sales pipeline is in good, strike that, GREAT health.

Using a lead management framework built on the Tray Platform provides your team with control and visibility into every possible aspect of your lead funnel. You can quite literally measure your funnels reliability and speed at every step. Meanwhile, you will prepare yourself for a future in which Citizen Automators (thats you) build processes tailor-made to your organizations needs, without ever having to worry again about whether your software tools do that or wait for engineering support.

At the center of this framework is a workflow we call the Lead processing pipeline. The pipeline is responsible for orchestrating each of the essential lead management jobs to be done. From intake to creation to enrichment and beyond, you can use this process for any lead, no matter the source.

Before getting too deep into the framework, we wanted to introduce our process-driven approach and explain why we believe this approach is a smart choice that unlocks new possibilities for RevOps teams.

We host a series of deep dives into each of the workflows supporting the framework on the Tray.io blog if youre interested. We delve into the nitty-gritty details, so youll have a practical guide to building your very own lead management process on the Tray Platform. You can also get your hands dirty by requesting a trial of the Tray Platform here.

Read more:

Why automation is the future of lead management (and RevOps) - Search Engine Land

These days, there are a lot of different DevOps tools to accomplish a lot of different jobs. Almost daily another startup comes out with a new and innovative product or a newer (maybe even better) version of existing tools. One of the biggest innovations has been infrastructure-as-code (IaC). Giving infrastructure admins and developers alike the ability to create, manipulate and destroy infrastructure using code files changes the way we administer our environments. Though these tools are revolutionary and can solve many problems, sometimes they come with a whole new set of issuesas can any type of tooling, really.

Generally, IaC tools are run locally at first. When an infrastructure admin or developer is just starting out with it, they store the files locally; maybe in a repository, then clone the files to execute locally. This is perfectly acceptable and a very common practice. The issues arise when it comes to scaling this practice to a team; for example, with regard to visibility and governance. If everyone is running their deployments locally, the team doesnt have clear visibility into who is deploying what, when and with what variables. This is where IaC automation tools come into play.

There are many different types of tools to solve these problems. Some are better than others. CI/CD pipeline tools, custom-built automation platforms, purpose-built IaC automation platformseach has their pros and cons. Getting into all of that can be overwhelming and we could go on for hours about each option. But, were here to talk a bit more generically today. So, well save all of that for another time. For now, lets take a step back and talk about the top five must-haves for any infrastructure-as-code automation platform youre considering. Because each company and use case is different, well talk about these considerations in no particular order.

This first factor is pretty important. I know I said I wasnt discussing these in any real order, but this one should really be close to the top of the list for anyone looking into IaC automation. We talked about how automating IaC can cause visibility issues when you scale across a team. You may want to know who deployed what, when, where and why, for example. Usually, the reason you want that kind of visibility is that you would like to control all of these aspects. That way you can help limit waste, budget problems, security concerns and the like. You may want to provide self-service deployment access, but only within certain parameters; maybe only to certain people or teams. Having granular RBAC can help you design a security policy that makes the most sense for your organization and its needs. Some tools have this baked in, some take a bit of work to make it work. The point is that you should have some form of control over your deployment process.

Following the security thread: A lot of these IaC automation tools are SaaS platforms. SaaS can be very secure. But sometimes, for compliance or regulatory reasons, you may want to retain a bit more control over your deployments. This is where self-hosted agents or runners come in. This type of design allows you to keep your secretssuch as your cloud credentials and other sensitive variable informationsecure in your own way. You can use whatever secrets management solution you want, be it something from your cloud provider or another third-party solution. It also allows you to keep your code secure. All of these tools, when deploying your code, have to get a copy of that code to deploy. So, theyll do a Git clone or some kind of file copy process to get your files from where they are stored, to execute them. If this is a SaaS solution, then they will essentially have access to your code. Again, this may not be a huge issue for some, but it very much is for others. If you dont want to give a third party this level of access to your code and secrets, a self-hosted agent or runner can help keep it all secure and under your control.

This feature is a big one when it comes to workflow. Some may not even know how important plan on pull request (PR) is until they realize how easy it can make their life. This feature may be called something different depending on the platform. Plan on PR, PR plan, speculative plan, etc. Essentially, this means that whenever you open a pull request against a branch, your automation platform will complete a deployment just up to the plan phase so that you can see exactly what this code change will do. For example, if you accidentally add an extra 0 to a variable or code file, you may end up with 100 instances instead of 10. Ideally, youd like to know what was going to happen with a change before it is deployed, giving you the option to quickly fix a potential mistake before it actually goes through. In DevOps, you always want to fail faster and close the loop so that big mistakes are caught before they happen. That is why this feature is so important. And if the automation platform you choose is doing this correctly, when it runs this plan phase itll automatically update the pull request directly with the possible changes as a comment. This way, your developers can see what is going to happen before they try to merge the deployment back to the main branch for deployment to production. And if they take it a step further by adding service checks to the pull request, you can even configure it so that if the deployment plan fails for any reason, developers are actually blocked entirely from merging the PR back until it is resolved. All of these features help to enable the ability to work in a GitOps methodology. Dont get me started on the wildl misuse of the term GitOpsit is very specific. While one of the central pillars of GitOps is using your repository as your single source of truth for what should be deployed, its not just using Git to store your Terraform files; it is an infrastructure administration via pull request methodology. If you want more information about GitOps, you can read more here.

This feature is essential for most folks. But, depending on the workflow, it can be less important. Even if it isnt a must-have now, it may be down the road when you evolve and grow into new workflows. Continuous deployment is the ability for your automation platform to have a webhook or other connection to your source code repository so that it can automatically trigger a deployment process whenever you commit or push to the repository. This feature goes hand-in-hand with the plan pull request feature we just spoke about. To make that feature function properly, a CD feature would be needed, as well. Now, I want to make sure I clarify. Just because you have continuous deployment enabled doesnt mean it is just going to push to production in the middle of the day every time a commit or push is done. You should still be given the ability to pause the deployment process after the plan phase. This way you can validate that the plan looks acceptable before you approve the deployment. For some use cases, like developer sandboxes, you may auto-approve the deployments because you dont care about having to get validation first. It all depends on your workflow and processes. A good platform will give you the ability to control all of this.

This one is a bit of a wild card. It can mean a lot of different things depending on the situation. Essentially, what I am talking about here is the ability to integrateor at least be interoperablewith a multitude of other tools during the deployment process. There is a concept called continuous verification which means to shift some tools and processes left into the deployment process so that you can stay on top of problems before they start. In the PR plan feature section earlier, we talked about catching issues before deploying. This isnt just for resource configuration issues. What about security issues? Compliance issues? Performance issues? Or even budget issues? If your IaC automation tool gives you the ability to integrate the processes and tools you are using to validate these things into the deployment process, they no longer have to be an afterthought. You never have to worry about going over budget if you are constantly validating the budget each time you deploy. You dont have to worry about a security issue if youre validating security during every deployment. This type of functionality can look and be named very differently between tools. But as long as you have the ability to get all of these other groups (security, finance, etc.) involved sooner, everyone will be better off. Like we talked about before, in DevOps, its always better to fail faster. And integrating these checks into your deployments can help you achieve this.

Conclusion

Weve made it through all five! Weve talked about some basic security features. We talked about some automation workflow must-haves to make your life easier. And we even scratched the surface on some next-step-type things to look into such as continuous verification. That was a lothopefully this has been helpful for anyone looking into IaC automation platforms and you now have an idea what to look for. Some features may be named differently, but the ideas behind them are the same. If your platform cant do these, it may not be the right one for you. Or, maybe it is and that feature just isnt that important to you. As I mentioned, your mileage may vary. Every organization is different.

To hear more about cloud-native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the cloud-native community at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2021 October 11-15, 2021

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Top 5 Must-Haves for IaC Automation Tools - DevOps.com

In the U.S. and Canada, 43% of industry respondents either somewhat or strongly agreed that new technology adoption over the last two years has been critical for their business survival, according to the study.10.15.2021

In a new research study, entitled Hospitality Industry Report: Technology Trends, the Future of Restaurants and More, Lightspeed surveyed over 2,000 global restaurant owners, operators, managers and guests to see how the past year has changed their views on the industry, for better or worse, and how they plan to adjust and adapt.

More people, both restaurant workers and customers alike, are coming around to the idea of using technology to automate and streamline operations, notes Stephanie Resendes, a Content Specialist at Lightspeed. This is another trend tied to the labor shortage. Once seen as a job killer, automation technology is now necessary to fill the gaps and support a smaller staff.

Key findings on restaurant technology include:

Download the full report for more in-depth data and insights on the future of technology in the hospitality industry.

The rest is here:

Research: Half of Restaurant Operators Plan to Utilize Some Form of Automation Technology Within the Next 2 to 3 Years | - Restaurant Technology News

The CFO at one of your key suppliers is on the phone. She wants to know why your payments have slowed, with some invoices going unpaid for long periods. Your accounts payable (AP) team previously managed invoices efficiently to capture early payment discountswhats going on?

Automated AP systems are designed to prevent invoice management problems like this and reduce risk by increasing compliance with a companys fraud-prevention guidelines and rules. Its a booming market, with investment in AP technology expected to increase from $1.9 billion in 2019 to more than $3 billion by 2024, according to PYMNTS.com.

Different systems take different approaches to achieve beneficial ends, but they operate on the common idea that the more the process is automated, the fewer opportunities for human error and the better the companys compliance performance, say specialists in the sector.

From a high-level perspective, a state-of-the-art AP solution allows an organization to receive and process invoices in all formats from suppliers around the world, automatically and in a compliant manner, says Martti Nurminen, CFO of Basware, an AP automation developer.

With 100% invoice data available, in good quality, a company has a great foundation for an automated AP process. Ideally, the entire process, from receiving invoices to processing them, is automated, he said. That means less human intervention, more accuracy and, ultimately, more compliance. Indeed, one can call this process automated compliance in AP.

Rajeev Subramanyam, senior vice-president and general manager at Emburse Pay, cites the increased use of machine learning and artificial intelligence within the compliance process for improving compliance.

These capabilities include predicting key fields within an invoice to minimize the number of touches required from receipt to payments. The lower the amount of human interactions needed to process an invoice, the less chance there is of compliance issues being introduced, he said.

Another trend that Subramanyam cites is the establishment of deeper levels of connectivity and collaboration between suppliers and buyers within the AP system. Of course, this means more interactivity between the two parties, he said. But it can also increase the level of automation, and provides checks to ensure that transaction data and supplier information is up-to-date and accurate, improving compliance.

Ideally, increasing the level of AP automation shouldnt create new problems, Subramanyam said. Compliance issues generally stem from problems in approval routing and compliance rules being incorrectly applied to an invoice. Given that these rules are created by the finance department when the AP solution is being set up, if theyre done correctly, there should be no ongoing issues, he said. If any compliance issues are detected, it should be a relatively straightforward process to adjust the rules within the system.

To the extent the introduction of automation creates problems, it could stem from what Sanjay Champaneri, director analyst with Gartner, calls dashboard fatigue employees not learning or making mistakes using new workflows or new dashboards.

Should that fatigue set in, it slows the entire work queue down, he said. Consequently, its important that AP tools be built to still interact with the humans in a user-friendly way, with things like approvals being an example, he said.

CFOs can select from a range of AP automation solutions in what Champaneri calls an extremely fragmented market.

In just the API (application programming interface) accounts payable market, for example, vendors can offer three functional areas: invoice capture, processing and payment with compliance and analytic features.

Given this fragmentation, CFOs can start the selection process by determining which capabilities and features are most important to their organizations requirements and make a shortlist of vendors meeting those needs. Features could include the ability to handle complex routing rules, making vendor payments directly within the solution and the type of integrations offered with the corporate ERP (enterprise resource planning system), said Subramanyam.

Jason Boyles, director of product management for GEPs AP solution, believes that having a data-driven AP system is critical, particularly one that makes use of metadata. Paper invoices provide basic billing information. Those documents can be scanned but working with digital invoices offers multiple advantages from a data collection and management perspective because they can include additional metadata. For example, a digital invoices metadata can help route invoices, add accounting codes or provide other information to aid processing.

Most of it is printed on the invoice, but there could be additional things that could be passed along from the supplier. Boyles said. That will help transition from just the electronic version to a digital version, which is truly the automation of the metadata.

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Automation called key to improved AP compliance - CFO Dive

Although this segment is unique in how it caters to niche type risks, there are a great deal of redundant tasks, Martina Seferovic, managing director at OIP Robotics, told Insurance Business at this years Insuretech Connect conference in Las Vegas.

By implementing technology that automates data entry driven tasks, along with delegating some of the common manual tasks, innovation and creativity is sustainable, she said. Outsourcing those redundant tasks has proven highly beneficial to many.

OIP Robotics helps unite insurance and technology, with products that are tailor-made for the E&S industry, as the complex and unpredictable nature of the rapidly evolving space has made it more difficult to take off-the-shelf solutions and apply them to any MGA or carrier.

We implemented RPA, our very first solution to the market called Aries, into many UWA tasks throughout the policy lifecycle, from submission entry, up to policy endorsement, Seferovic explained. We also built Libra, which relieves the pain of managing the Lloyds contract rules, data standards, and contract compliance.

The latest product launched is Leo, a custom-made insurance CRM that is easily integrated with all the existing insurance management systems. Leo provides the ability to create a sales strategy to help grow the book, organize the teams, track productivity, and pull up hit ratio and loss ratio reports, per UW, per state or per carrier.

Many players in the space are still spending money on manual resources to obtain and analyze data, however, Seferovic noted that if you're able to build technology with E&S nuances in mind, you're able to sustain pace.

We've made leaps and bounds in the development of our technology, and that's certainly attributed to our in-depth understanding of our specific business, she mentioned. The E&S market is experiencing shrinking capacity and increasing rates, making an underwriting profit increasingly more difficult. When our industry struggles, so do our client partners, which drives our vision for developing innovative technology.

Seferovic highlighted that OIP Robotics focuses on overcoming clients' challenges by creating solutions that can help isolate core issues and position them to respond strategically.

If we can help a client determine a common characteristic with trending losses, then they can adjust their appetite or pricing accordingly, to remain a viable player rather than discontinuing offering coverage completely, she said.

OIP Robotics automation presents real-time access to the developments of policies, to support swift and flexible changes.

Our priority is to help our clients grow profitably and consistently, whether that is through our insurance-focused technology, our expert staff of underwriting support, or a combination of both, Seferovic added.

Read next: Data & analytics in a dynamic E&S insurance marketplace

Seferovic also noted that the E&S sector is experiencing employee generation transformation. With young talent coming in, senior staff are outsourcing non-critical tasks but, who you outsource to is critical. This is where OIP Robotics brings insurance-educated IT people to the table.

Our American Insurance Academy stands behind each and every employee, so tasks dont end up with a processor who does not understand your business, she said. Since E&S is free from rate, rule, and form filings, unlike admitted business, we can respond quickly to trends early on in their development.

Seferovic referenced the Great Resignation Phenomenon, where research says that 40% of employees are considering changing jobs.

Outsourcing reduces risks of employee fluctuation, said Seferovic. Seven out of the top 10 most wanted jobs come from technical fields, such as IT managers, data scientists, or software developers, and we provide some of the best digitally native staff who also knows insurance.

Continue reading here:

E&S is moving towards automation - Insurance Business

In an effort to streamline operations and automate certain tasks, Chevron Corp., a 142-year-old multinational energy company, turned to artificial intelligence-powered robotic process automation.

The company has seen increasing returns on its automation investments, while deepening its use of technology and expanding it to various areas of the organization. Today it has about 300 automations with more than 600,000 hours of work saved, according toVicki Harris (pictured), manager of application platform engineering services at Chevron.

Theres never appetitefor automation on its own becauseyoure changing someones process, but what there is appetite for is the results, she said. So, in addition to value, bottom line, cost savings,we have people who are just improving their workflow for themselves, and so theres also asense of empowerment for them.

Harris spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias livestreaming studio, during UiPaths Forward IV conference. They discussed the evolution of IT at Chevron over the past few years, the benefits brought by deploying the UiPath Inc. platform, the many use cases within the organization, and what the company expects for the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Chevrons automation journey began about four years ago, primarily involving proof of concepts. Because they proved their worth quite easily and quickly, the company decided to expand the program, according to Harris.

The automation provided by UiPath was then applied to the back office, first to the currency conversion work, which is often quite manual intensive in global companies. Soon, automation moved to other areas, reaching the oil well drilling mapping systems, which is part of Chevrons core business.

Youd be surprised.Some of those systems lookkind of like your ERPs; theyhave kind of the same challenges, Harris explained. So, as we extend outside of traditionalkind of HR, finance, audit practicesinto the rest of our business,the use cases are similar.

With a whole-house approach now, Chevron aims to continue pushing automation.

I wouldnt want toset limits on ourselves in terms ofwhat we can do,but certainly were looking attext analytics: How do we manage that document?How do we extract that data,use models to get that into our data lake? she stated. But theres still alwaysthe work of finding that lastmile of process; theres many parts ofour business still untouched, and so we dont want to let up on that.

For companies just starting their automation journey, Harris advises: Anybody whos concerned about ROI,its so simple, its so easy; you should be able to find itin your first year. Obviously, it grows,but if youre not findingsome return in the first year,I would say, take a look at what you needto adjust, because its not that hard.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLEs and theCUBEs coverage of during UiPaths Forward IV conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPaths Forward IV conference. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBEs event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

See the article here:

Chevron sees increasing ROI after automating processes from the back office to well drilling - SiliconANGLE News

HR technology has been thrown into the spotlight in the last 20 months: COVID-19 has changed the way we work, and so how we manage people in the world of work has had to change, too. Today, a Munich-based startup called Personio, which has built a big business out of how to address that issue specifically for small and medium enterprises, is announcing $270 million in funding on the heels of strong demand for its services, and to help it fuel its next steps. With this Series E, Personios valuation is jumping up to $6.3 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups HR or otherwise in Europe at the moment.

The funding is being led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, with new investors Altimeter Capital and Alkeon also participating. Index Ventures, Accel, Meritech, Lightspeed, Northzone and Global Founders Capital all previous backers were also in the round. Index and Meritech led the companys previous round, which was only in January of this year. That Series D round was at a $1.7 billion valuation meaning the figure has grown by 3.7x in 10 months, a mark of how fast Personio itself has been growing.

Personio today provides recruiting and onboarding, payroll, absence tracking and other major HR functions in an all-in-one platform aimed at European SMEs (typically 10-2,000 employees). It now has 5,000 customers compared to 3,000 in January. While Personio will continue to grow that range of tools, it will also expand into what CEO Hanno Renner describes as people workflow automation.

Essentially, this is about speeding up the process of doing HR-dependent work in other applications that may exist outside of Personio by automatically populating HR information and triggering actions within those apps, which might have otherwise taken much longer to complete manually. This could, for example, involve creating and issuing an employment contract, or turning access to certain apps on or off when a person joins or leaves an organization.

If Personios existing platform could be thought of as the Workday for SMEs a suite of HR tools that work together for the needs of SMEs in the same way that enterprises have with their own large, multi-faceted platforms aimed at them then the automation tools that Personio is now adding might be thought of as the companys answer to UiPath or ServiceNow for SMEs, using machine learning, robotic process automation and other techniques to take away some of the more repetitive busy work involved in tasks related to HR.

Weve been working on it for 12 months, and we now have 5,000 customers that we learn from using our product as it is, Renner said in an interview. The crux of the issue is about getting software in different silos to work together more quickly, so that when, for example, a contract needs to go out to a prospective hire, foot dragging doesnt mean the hire might sign elsewhere, or a fired employee cant still get into a companys IT system. HR processes go beyond HR. They involve other functions and departments. Delays not only waste time, they could have detrimental outcomes.

The pitch for Personio up to now has been that its part of the group of enterprise startups that have tapped a lucrative seam of customers, SMEs, by simply building products for them. SMEs as a sector is huge there are more than 25 million SMEs in Europe alone, accounting for more than 99% of all enterprises but it is often overlooked, because it is fragmented around a wide range of verticals and interests, with varying IT budgets that are sometimes very small or not there at all.

In the world of HR, Renner says that was an even more acute state of affairs. Most SMEs track HR-related data on Excel spreadsheets, or just plain paper. What we see is that day-to-day, 70% of SMEs dont have any kind of HR solution, he said.

But digital transformation hasnt completely overlooked the sector, and so more forward-thinking SMEs have gradually adopted sales, finance and CRM software, and that has trickled down to thinking about HR, he said.

Personio now believes that this will also help with its pitch to sell its customers automation. A typical SME, the company estimates, now uses on average some 40 different apps, with many of these needing data from HR systems to work. The idea is that Personio will now be able to provide those connectors to speed up how all of it works.

The company has a lot of growing left to do: When you consider that there are 1.7 million businesses in the subset of SMEs that Personio targets (10-2,000 employees), that is just a tiny percentage of the market.

It means that growth is likely to come to Personio, with or without the newer automation piece taking off, so the funding raised opportunistically, before Personio needed it will be handy. What the new technology does give it, regardless, is a window into potentially also providing automation services to SMEs beyond those of HR over time, and so this significant hike in valuation is likely related to that diversification as much as for the bigger opportunity to build more HR inroads into the SME space.

While small businesses are the backbone of the European economy, they have been underserved and overlooked by legacy players for too long. Personio democratizes enterprise capabilities and delivers a step change in productivity, simplifying HR workflows across the full employee lifecycle, said Neil Mehta, founder and managing partner of Greenoaks, in a statement. We are lucky to be partners with many of the leading private technology companies in the world, and I am confident that the Personio team is just getting started on their mission. Launching the People Workflow Automation category will deliver even more value to businesses across Europe. We are proud to join Personio at this thrilling stage of their journey and look forward to being partners for many years to come.

Longer term, that could involve going public but the emphasis there is on longer. Personio has now raised $500 million and Renner said that it is at least 18-24 months away from thinking about that next step. We are not in a hurry to go public, he said.

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Personio, an HR platform for SMEs, raises $270M on a $6.3B valuation, expands into workflow automation - TechCrunch

Given the ever-increasing and rapidly changing demands on local government that have been exacerbated by Covid-19 and a decade of financial pressures, its no wonder the common question we are asked is how we can help optimise and scale automation solutions, writes Simon Perks, head of robotics and AI at Agilisys.

Many local authorities have already adopted the simplest version of robotic process automation, removing tasks from colleagues and allowing them to focus on more citizen-centred experiences. Its fair to say, however, that the low hanging fruits that existed have been picked.

The challenge now, and what the focus of many should be on, is addressing authority-specific opportunities that are outcome-based. By defining what the individual challenges are this could cover areas such as adult and childrens social care as well as revenues and benefits the opportunity becomes clear to create a scalable workforce of digital workers that can carry out the work of colleagues to allow them to optimise their own work day.

The only sustainable approach is understanding and articulating the strategic nature of the journey

When it comes to successful automation, tactical implementations are unlikely to be effective for most councils. The only sustainable approach that will be effective is through senior stakeholders understanding and articulating the strategic and outcome-based nature of the journey. Adoption and skills gaps can then be addressed, ensuring effectiveness and therefore return on investment.

At the heart of this is a necessary shift in colleague mindsets, alongside senior leadership, to ensure organisations can achieve maximum return on investment. As well as leveraging the more advanced capabilities that are available in automation platforms today, these include a whole host of benefits, including process mining, integration with chatbots, the ability for an organisation to prioritise its own processes, in addition to the more basic functionality that has been more widely used today, including across finance, HR and IT service areas.

Helping local government to adopt and achieve the right mindset and build the skillset to address this challenge requires a change in focus. It needs a vision that highlights what the future of work will look like for those colleagues. And, above all else, it needs to address how and why human empathy and expression should and will be utilised in colleague interactions with citizens, rather than carrying out processes for processes sake.

Originally posted here:

Sustainable, scalable automation is all about human empathy and expression - Local Government Chronicle

Automating the manufacture and assembly of aerospace and defense components is no simple task. Parts are often complex, with a high/low mix of components that range from robust to micro in size, and this diverse range doesnt necessarily lend itself to automation.

Myriad skillsets are needed to automate these tasksand to lead the teams that bring them to fruition. They can be of the hard engineering variety: coding, robotics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, metrology. Often, they require certain soft skills, such as team building and leadership, and personality traits, such as tenacity, curiosity and creative thinking.

Two leading engineering executives, Nicole Williams at The Boeing Co. and Marie-Christine Caron at GE Aviation, oversee automation efforts at their respective companiesand possess these skills in abundance.

The women, whom Smart Manufacturing magazine this year named as two of the 20 women making their mark in robotics & automation, spoke recently in a related webinar (https://bit.ly/Robotics2paths)detailing how they got their start, the roles they play, the issues and challenges they face and what the future holds for the next generation of female engineers.

These women rose to their corporate positions through different life, academic and career choices.

For Williams, a life of math and science seemed a foregone conclusion. Her homelife was like an engineering playground: Her father and uncle were electrical engineers, and her aunt was a mechanical engineer. Around the house were electronics just waiting to be disassembled to see how they worked. Flat surfaces were home for coding magazines that allowed Williams to practice her budding coding skills, and prototypes of ornaments and musical cards that her father brought home from his job as a development engineer at Hallmark. (A childhood favorite was an ornament that displayed a 3D snow-covered holiday scene with a small train chugging through a tunnel.)

Ever since I was very young, Ive been interested in taking things apart, computers, programming, and problem solving, Williams said. Ive always liked math. It is consistent and dependable. It is not arbitrary or whimsical or changing.

Her mechanical engineer aunt taught her that mechanical engineers can work on anything from designing commercial products to medical implants to robotics and nuclear facilities.

I really liked the variety of projects that I could support. I loved learning new things, using my skills to solve different types of problems, both inside and outside work, she said.

Her interest in robotics began at the University of MissouriRolla (now Missouri S&T) where she worked with a SCARA (Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm) configuration robot to sort rectangular wood blocks from circular blocks and pick and place them as needed.

This academic project helped hone her programming skillsskills she said helped her get hired at The Boeing Co. in 1999.

Initially, Williams supported a development robot that was employed to handle a variety of parts. The gantry-style robot featured a large end effector that held spools of carbon fiber, epoxy material. The machine used B+ programming, and many of her early assignments involved creating drawings for this unit.

While working on these assignments, she absorbed other skills.

I learned about the patent application process and how difficult it can be and how long the process can take, she said. I soon became involved in programming with a [robotic simulation software] product called IGRIP, creating robot programming tools and simulation tools for robot programs.

She became adept at using a Boeing invention called RAC, or robot assembly self-control, that relied on a goal-based autonomy that over time would allow the company to improve its overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), first-time quality, and usability for both maintenance and mechanics.

In order to make automation as flexible as possible in an aerospace environment, we rely heavily on this goal-based control, she said. Rather than writing an explicit script of actions for the robot to complete or execute like in traditional robot programming, we give it a set of goals and rules on how to complete these goals.

In one project, a workcell featured localization using machine vision, the RAC goal-based supervisory controls and robot accuracy through kinematic calibrations.

We have specific kinematic calibration that we use for our robots. And then a complete use of OOP without any touchup, she said, referring to object-oriented programming. Thats something I think is pretty rare, to be able to take a program right off the NC programmers computer and go run it out in the shop without having to do a lot of dry running or adjustment.

It became Williams role to assemble all the models into IGRIP, which is programmed using a graphical simulation language and command line interpreter. Each individual program and robotic system had to be simulated to identify potential issues prior to production, she said.

One issue that presented itself was drilling holes into C-17 pylons.

At the time, I was the only one with the software and capability to bring all of the pieces together into the work cell, including the tooling, the part, the robot, and the end effector. We identified portions of the tooling that were blocking areas that the robot needed to access to drill [the pylons]. In the end, we ended up having to cut away part of the tooling to allow access for the robot end effector.

This project taught her an important lesson, and that was to bring all of the stakeholders together earlier in the process and to simulate multiple conditions and scenarios prior to construction. In fact, many of the simulations Williams created have been used in meetings with machine tool suppliers, helping all stakeholders visualize concerns.

This often affected the machine design and modifications, she said. Soon, I started to travel to train NC programmers on how to use the tools we had developed, and how to use the simulations in a production aircraft environment.

The idea of using automation and robotics as a tool that enhanced workforce flexibility and worker ease-of-use is a concept that would follow Williams throughout her career. It is a mindset that Caron also believes in, and which she has employed as she built her career.

Like Williams, Caron found science and math to be driving forces. But it was her prowess on the tennis court that quite literally served her well when it came time to study for a career in engineering.

I reached out to many of the universities in the U.S. that had a tennis program, and told them, Hey, I live in Quebec. I play tennis, and I want to study engineering, she said.

Before earning her tennis scholarship to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, she sent letters to 50 schools across the U.S.

With scholarship in hand, she jumped into a new life, in a new country, with a new culture, and learned to balance academics and athletics.

Those challenges got me to believe in myself and understand the fact that, even if you dont know what to expect, you can still have fun and succeed, Caron said. It grew my resilience skills and adaptation skills, and opened my mind to others and really get to know and really understand how I can be successful and how I fit in a team.

After graduation, Caron moved back to Canada and took a job at IBM, working on microelectronics. When you speak microelectronics, you speak automation because everything is so small and [assembly] so rapid that everything is automated. That was my first introduction to true automation and really got me to love the link between technology, logistics, and qualityto make the best product in the most efficient way.

Caron climbed the IBM ladder, and eventually was promoted to managing engineering teams. I went from being a technical person to leader, but I was always very linked to technology, trying to make the team be very successful.

After 13 years, she joined GE Aviations facility in Bromont, Quebec. This career jump would take her from a super precise, mini microelectronics team to super robust, but, at the same time, very complex aviation world.

The Bromont location makes engine components for Boeing and Airbus aircraft, and is home to the companys Global Robotics, Automation and Instrumentation R&D Center that develops advanced robotic processes and software applications.

Not too long after she joined GE, there was an opening in the Global Research Center, which is known as the GRC, and she jumped on that opportunity.

The job at the GRC allowed her to further explore what could be done with automation and robotics from an engineering perspective.

A nine-month assignment in the Czech Republic helped her hone additional skills. There, Caron was not just an automation or robotic expert, she was a project manager.

I was lucky to be part of the engine development program in Prague, she said. I learned to really be open minded on culture and understand their manufacturing processes. I had a lot of [my own] answers, but they werent fitting necessarily with the way they were seeing things. I learned I needed to understand the constraints, understand the environment and propose the right evolution for each site.

While automation can bring productive gains, Caron learned that potential users might not always accept the help so readily.

The mindset of some is that if they need more capacity, they will just shoot an extra body to it. The core of this concern is jobs.

People were like, its going to take our jobs. No, it wont; it will secure your job. Because you will do more parts, more accurately and we will still use your brain for other jobs, she said.

One of her more challenging assignments looked at a manual project that called for seals to be inserted into small assemblies.

In a two-inch by two-inch (50.850.8-mm) piece, for example, the assembly worker might have to insert 40 seals with tweezers. It was very tedious work for the operators to do and was taking them forever. So how do you automate this?

For a human, it is an easy, albeit laborious, task: Simply pick and place the seals.

Humans can determine if the seal is seated correctly, or at least within spec, and even if the seal is present.

But there are a lot of things that your brain does that are quite difficult to put into a system, said Caron.

To automate this assembly process, machine vision was installed and AI/machine learning integrated into a workcell.

Automation robotics is not only robots, its everything around it, she said. How do you see it [seal insertion], how do you localize it, how do you know where youre at in 3D space, and how do you reliably perform a task every time?

To help accomplish this, five different cameras were installed within the work cell, each of them having a specific application.

By analyzing the images, AI can determine a good from bad seal. If you were to say good or no good without the AI, the system would say, Its different, so its no good. But AI brings you that extra capacity to say, I dont need it to be black and white; it can be gray, Caron said.

From Williams days in college where she used imaging technology to sort wood blocks, to her graduate research that used image data to train a series of neural networks, she has extensively utilized imaging and AI techniques to solve automation challenges.

One project, which would earn Williams and her team a Boeing Silver Phantom award, analyzed drill patterns on aerospace components for commercial aircraft.

The control scheme used Boeings RAC concept and incorporated part-scanning, as well as data regarding tooling and part features, to determine accurate final drilling positions.

In aircraft-building, edge distance is an important datum, she said. If you drill a hole too close to the edge of a rib or spar, you risk premature failure of that part.

While Williams range of projects is diverse, she said that one of the most effective projects that she worked on was also one of the simplest: tracking workers tools.

Previously, to ensure that tools are accounted for at the end of the day, a technician would take a piece of foam and draw the shape of a tool on the material. They would then take a Dremel and hand carve out the tools shape.

The automated solution used a mobile cart in which the workers lay out their tools and a machine vision system would capture an image of the toolbox, translate it into a binary image, then translate it in an Excel file and finally the file would be sent to a laser cutter to cut the foam.

We had to figure out a lot of vision system challenges. Some tools are particularly shiny. Some workers have made custom adjustments to their tools, such as adding taping, she said. Thats why we couldnt use an off-the-shelf system.

It was a pretty simple project, that went together very quickly, but it saved our operators who were able to go from maybe finishing eight or 10 [tool] drawers a day to being able to complete multiple full toolboxes in a day, Williams said. It was a really dramatic throughput increase for the team.

In the long run, the goal is to make better, more cost-effective parts. And the talents that Williams and Caron bring to their positions are making that happen in GE and Boeing facilities around the world.

And, while the women are still somewhat of an anomaly in manufacturing engineering these two women have proven that there are no men only jobs.

Williams and Caron have worked with and for and have led male colleaguesand they have risen to the top of their professions.

Each did so through hard work, and a willingness to learn and try new things.

For the next generation of female engineers and manufacturing company executives, the pair urges those considering these professions to follow the things that interest and inspire them.

Think about what connects you, what drives you, whether it be a particular technology, a particular skill set, or particular group of folks you know, Williams said. And then continue your education. Take one class, take a couple of classes. Just dip your toe in the water and see what interests you, and what really drives you.

Caron agreed: Go with your heart. If you like math, dont worry. That profession is evolving and theres so many branches you can take. Dont be afraid to try it. Trust yourself, be yourself, and do what you love.

You grow from every single step of your work experience and your life experience, Caron added. Make the most out of them, and take the small nuggets and put them together into what you want to become and how you want to be. And really, for me, this automation journey is really an example of that.

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The Divergent Paths 2 Women Took to Lead Automation Efforts - Advanced Manufacturing