Concentrix Catalyst has recently been recognized by Forrester for our cutting-edge work in automation. Included in both the Now Tech: Continuous Automation and Testing Services Providers, Q1 2021 and The Forrester Wave™: Midsize RPA Services, Q1 2021 reports, Concentrix Catalyst continues to cement its reputation as an innovator in the space.
We sat down with Ram Sathia, Head of Automation at Concentrix Catalyst, to discuss our being among the select companies chosen by Forrester to participate in these reports. His team’s commitment to craftsmanship and accelerated business outcomes has positioned Concentrix Catalyst as part of a vanguard of automation and RPA service providers.
Q: For you and the rest of the automation team, what does it mean to be recognized by Forrester for both our automation and RPA work?
Ram Sathia: Automation has been part of our DNA at Concentrix Catalyst for years. Our unique approach to automation enables us to provide significant value and ROI for companies seeking rapid digital transformation, especially due to changes that we’re seeing as a result of COVID and the shift to remote work. The inclusion in the Now Tech report validates all the work we’ve done for our clients helping to accelerate time to market and protect the customer experience.
As far as the Forrester Wave is concerned, we’ve spent the past few years focused on how to take the best learnings from engineering automation to business process automation and create a superior RPA service. We invested in IP that’s absolutely required for scaling RPA initiatives. The recognition by Forrester is a thorough validation of that strategy and our work to date.
We’re honored and happy to be included in these prestigious reports. It’s been a journey to get to this point, and we feel the recognition is well deserved.
Q: What is Concentrix Catalyst excelling at as a company that helped us achieve Strong Performer status in the Forrester wave for RPA service firms?
Ram Sathia: I would start with our industry-leading IP. We’ve categorized them into three buckets—before you launch your RPA initiative, during the establishment of an RPA program, and post-automation. Built on top of the latest and greatest RPA platform players, we offer innovative solutions and have made significant investments to ensure these solutions create value for our clients.
One of the interesting aspects of our services that many clients like is the whole onboarding experience. If you look at the biggest challenges that customers face in their RPA initiatives, it’s how do they onboard effectively, what elements of an RPA Center of Excellence are required to get started on the right foot, and how do I build bots that conform to a high standard.
We focus from an implementation standpoint on what is the ideal model for the individual client, whether that’s federated versus an IT-driven model, and what does that journey look like when they start identifying needs. Combined with Concentrix Catalyst’s ProcessPedia, a collection of 700+ business processes that we’ve determined to be the best candidates for automation across various industries, make us a unique player in the RPA as a service and consulting space.
Q: How is Concentrix Catalyst developing human collaboration with bots to accelerate time-to-market and improve quality?
Ram Sathia: Digitization and business user empowerment are key foundational beliefs for us. Our CollaBot helps drive towards a one-stop paperless business process that’s centered around the human-in-the-loop with the ability for human collaboration and training of bots. Another solution we offer called BotScope helps bring visibility into business process execution in the context of RPA, providing key insights to not just the performance of your bots but all of operations.
Q: Sometimes RPA is viewed as just back-office automation, but it can be so much more. How is your RPA work engineering experiences and moments that matter for consumers?
Ram Sathia: As an experience engineering company, we believe in bringing unified and rich experience to end-users, vendors, and employees through Experience Bots. Our point of view on Experience bots unifies both the front office and back-office experiences. This approach helps in bridging the gap that exists in enterprise platforms today and provides rich interactions for those unique moments that matter for users.
We believe that RPA initiatives should be looked at as closed-loop systems in a larger context. We drive this by measuring process coverage across various enterprise user journeys and addressing the gaps through automation.
Q: Concentrix Catalyst likes to say we help clients design, build, and run the future. What are you currently working on that you see as the future of intelligent automation?
Ram Sathia: Resiliency is the new normal. Because of the global pandemic, resiliency has to be foundational for any business moving forward. We believe in designing, building, and running resilient business processes. Our IP and innovation initiatives, like cross-platform bot development using robotic definition language, next best action recommendation using bots, and machine generative automation, are key to the future of business process automation.
Q: If there’s one piece of advice you could give to companies seeking to improve their automation, what would that be?
Ram Sathia: My advice would be not to look at automation just to solve information silos in the enterprise application landscape. Rather, look beyond and look through automation to the edge. Start thinking about process automation in the context of Devices, Things (IoT), Software Bots, Physical Robots, and more importantly the data science required to make intelligent decisions, helping to augment human intelligence with automation. Ultimately, we want to keep humans in the loop.