My name is Frank Schuler
I'm the managing director of global shared service center
of digital global forwarding and Freight
It's about 20 years ago that I wrote my
doctoral thesis about artificial neural networks
and how they could be applied within market research
Today I'm fascinated to see how it actually
becomes reality in business world
we are doing business offshoring, business process offshoring
for that we are going to our business partners we
are looking at the processes, we document the processes
we optimize the processes
we take the processes with us, we train our employees
and then we provide our service from the offshore centre
if you look at it from an RPA perspective it's very similar
you still look at processes, you document them,
you optimize them and then you don't train people
you configure actually bot
and therefore it was just a natural development within our service line
I am absolutely thrilled and fascinated to see how process automation
can free up our human workforce
to actually do the things which really matter
and that's about escalation management
that's about exception management it is about prioritization of work
that's what we should focus on from a human workforce perspective
while our virtual colleagues can take up the repetitive tasks the mundane tasks
RPA is very easy to apply in business processes
to actually structure the tasks which the RPA board would need to take up
it's like drawing a business process and from there it is very easy then
to steer and it's also very similar to how you would manage actually human workforces
Today we are doing actually two POCs on artificial intelligence
one is for email classification and the other one is for smart OCR
meaning OCR offers some cognitive elements like machine learning
I think in the future definitely there will be also predictive analysis
some areas where we are starting to look into but it's still at the horizon
The biggest business outcome for our RPA and AI for me is actually
the complementary element of virtual workforce and human workforce
I am strongly convinced that was our RPA and AI you can complement your human workforce
and was that you can prove that one plus one is more than just two
My most favourite software bot is actually one of our pilots
we call it a post flight bot - it's a process at that time we had off-shored for the Americas
where we had so many people looking at the flights where we put
our shipments on and we were then looking for the airlines whether they
are delayed on the internet, if there was a delay we could then actually
proactively inform our customers
we have looked into process automation opportunities
and we put a bot into the production there
about 50% of productivity improvements were the outcome
but even more important we took the entire service
and we actually globalized it, we took it from America's
out to the world and today we are supporting actually all countries around
the globe with the same service with the same quality supporting our customers
The main lesson for me out of our RPA our RPA journey is take away the myth
there's a lot of hype and myths around robotics and digitalization and whatever
Just get started and do something, get it rolling, get it done
and start your way to work with it and learn with it while you're doing it
find the right governance, the right surrounding, the right frame
Don't think too much about the technology, apply the technology.