Category: Business

Can Robotic Process Automation Rescue Businesses From An Economic Recession

COVID-19 is panning out to be a historic tragedy both for the human race as well as our economy. While most businesses are stalled due to the economic recession induced by COVID-19, there is a ray of hope. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rising up as the savior for many businesses by offering recession-proof operations. RPA might be that one alleviating factor that can keep your business and the economy afloat. 

When implemented successfully, RPA can help many sectors experience an undeniable upsurge. How RPA can help businesses get through these unprecedented times? This post takes a look. We will also examine a few automation cases.

Related Reading: Jaw-dropping Facts about Robotic Process Automation

Businesses Can Stay Afloat in These Unprecedented Times

RPA goes beyond allowing businesses to stay afloat. It also helps them respond instantly to drastic changes in demand during such critical situations as COVID-19. It has proven to be an invaluable technology for businesses by ensuring that employees remain productive even if they have to work remotely and from home. 

Here are some benefits of RPA.

Increased flexibility

RPA allows your business to run smoothly despite ever-changing demands while automating manual processes and increasing efficiency. Furthermore, it is helping organizations combat the spread of COVID-19 and is providing customers with timely support as businesses move on to new operating models. For instance, deploying chatbots or automated answering machines in contact centers or help desks can help handle bulk volumes of customer service calls and emails, especially when organizations are forced to function remotely or operate with a limited number of employees. 

Less dependency on the individual employee

Though we can’t deny the need for human intervention in most processes, certain tasks need to be accomplished with precision and speed. Here is where RPA becomes useful as a fast and flexible way to replicate employee-driven processes. RPA enables businesses to automate certain critical processes with greater precision and efficiency. And soon, RPA will free businesses from being dependent on the limitations caused by employees’ absence.

Related Reading: How to accelerate your business growth with Robotic Process Automation

Keep up with production

RPA enables organizations to keep up productivity by providing assistance to an overwhelmed customer using attended automation or front office bots. This frees up employees to attend to other critical aspects of the business. RPA can cater to an increase or decrease in the supply chain demand while allowing you to rely on automated back-office activities.

Industries leveraging RPA

Here are a few examples of industries who have successfully leveraged automation: (examples cited by UiPath)

Healthcare

Health of the workforce:  Updating all relevant data of sick employees in real-time while keeping track of healthy employees could be painstaking. With RPA, bots can be set up to keep track of hospital employees. This minimizes manual errors and ensures employee safety. 

Increasing demand in virus testing: With the increasing demand for virus testing, the wait time for registration also increases. Cleveland Clinic in the United States reduced their patient verification and registration time considerably by deploying an attended robot that collects and prints patient data, thereby reducing hospital backlogs.

Accelerating clinical testing: Filling test reports itself would take about 3 hours per day in the life of a staff nurse. But since Mater Hospital in Dublin automated its process through robots, medical personnel are able to use their precious time taking care of their patients rather than chasing admin tasks. 

Banking and financial services

Surge in trading volume: Global markets have seen a trading surge by about 300% daily. This is tremendously increasing the operational burden. Leveraging automation has ensured business continuity while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction despite the huge spike of activity in areas such as trade allocations and reconciliations.  

Acknowledging customer complaints:  Acknowledging customer complaints in line with UK regulations has been especially challenging for financial services because of their reduced staff. Automation has allowed the banking and financial services to acknowledge complaints in time in compliance with UK regulatory government requirements.

Retail

Helps HR specialists to remain focused on analysis: COVID-19 has overwhelmed the HR department with a large volume of sick leave requests. Automation of two phases of this process has reduced backlogs in processing leave requests while allowing HR specialists to stay focused on their people.

Supply chains

Optimization of the supply chain: COVID-19 has forced factories to shut down leaving their production line idle. RPA allows companies to optimize their supply chains. This has resulted in accurate delivery estimates, optimized vehicle routes, efficient shipment consolidation as well as accountable sourcing. 

Manufacturing

Reduced manufacturing expenses: Prolonged closures of manufacturing plants have forced manufacturers to cut down their operational costs. RPA automates repetitive and manual tasks thus reducing operational costs.

Related Reading: How Robotic Process Automation Is Revolutionizing Industries?

Weather These Turbulent Times with Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation will enable businesses to efficiently allocate funds to areas that need greater focus. It can automate qualification ad validation processes, update public health data in real-time, and much more. Educational institutes can also leverage automation to schedule and activate their classes using LMS and eLearning platforms.  

Obviously, COVID-19 has brought about changes in the working style of both the consumers and clients. RPA will cater to their needs and help ensure that businesses can stay afloat during these difficult economic times. 

Download our White Paper: Learn how RPA can bring a difference to your business and how to embrace the disruptive technology to maintain a competitive edge.

How Can You Get Started? 

Start small! Start by automating small tasks that will give you the needed confidence and experience in automation solutions. Research and evaluate how far automation is applicable to your IT environment. Talk to experts at Fingent and find out how you can build on the benefits of RPA. 

Employee Experience Management with SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics

The spread of COVID-19 has advanced the need for a single workforce management system (Human Capital Management system) that assists people in managing their jobs, rewards, development, payments, and many such areas. It’s during such a crisis that we realize the need for our HCM system to be well-connected and tightly integrated with other enterprise systems such as IT, security, and financials. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Human Capital Management solutions join hands with Employee Experience Management solutions from Qualtrics. All these solutions come packed in the SAP SuccessFactors sales bag. 

Related Reading: How Can SAP Help Manage Your Payroll Under The COVID-19 Crisis

How SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics transform workforce management

SAP SuccessFactors has transformed from an HCM vendor to an HXM (Human Experience Management) vendor with Qualtrics. Businesses have come to terms with the fact that human experiences matter and the organizations that focus on delivering the best employee experiences realize the most stunning results. While you get your operational data or O-data from HCM systems, Qualtrics brings in the experience data or the X-data that measures an individual’s emotions, notions and goals in specific scenarios. Thus, by analyzing your employee’s perspective both inside and outside work, you build a better relationship with them. 

By combining the X and O data you can connect operational HR data with employee experience data. With these, you are armed with information based on facts as well as perception. Whether it’s for routine work events like performance reviews, role change, or for unexpected events like the outbreak of a pandemic, companies can continuously monitor and act upon the data collected. This, in turn, helps you to predict challenges, correct errors, and deliver meaningful results. Thus SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics allow you to win in today’s experience economy.

Three employee experience management solutions from SAP Qualtrics

SAP Qualtrics has introduced three employee experience management solutions that help HR leaders to gather insights by leveraging the data that is collected throughout the employee lifecycle based on feedback.

1. SAP Qualtrics Employee Engagement

This solution focuses on the factors that drive employee engagement and productivity enabling HR leaders to leverage real-time insights to attract, nourish, and retain the best talent. This solution records information through employee feedback which helps managers to use employee experiences to identify key focus areas and take necessary actions. The Qualtrics Employee Engagement solution uses powerful Text iQ analytics to scrutinize open text responses. It helps you to easily make out trends, scan topics, and track employee attitude. Managers can use the configurable and role-based dashboards to track the effects of any upgrades and drive results.

2. SAP Qualtrics Employee Lifecycle 

This solution continuously gathers data from employees across their entire journey with the organization and manages their experiences to gain insights that drive improvements. These real-time insights help spot gaps and close them w.r.t expectations and reality. Expert onboarding and exit content, data related to workflow and automation– all these can be directly embedded in the existing HCM system. Using this solution, organizations can understand the key drivers causing attrition and take appropriate actions to retain the best talent.

3. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer

As global markets continue to tighten, organizations have to compete to attract and retain the best talent. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer takes the guesswork out of the process of determining what employees want in terms of benefits offered. You can easily recognize the most suitable benefits and compensation packages that are in tune with the unique culture and budget of your organization by leveraging the choice-based conjoint methodology that is a characteristic of this top-notch solution. You also become aware of the trade-offs that your employees are willing to make through ongoing surveys and analysis. HR managers, thus arrive at the most optimal packages even with changing preferences of employees and shifting market dynamics.  

With SAP transforming HCM into HXM, HR systems are shifting towards micro-experiences. HXM systems let you manage all HR, IT, scheduling, and all work-related activities making it an integrated employee platform. With HR leaders struggling to find effective ways to move forward in the wake of the COVID outbreak, SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics enables you to manage your total workforce holistically. 

Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning

We’ve been supporting managers and leaders to expertly run, use, and maintain various SAP solutions. Get in touch with us to understand how you can leverage SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics Employee Engagement to improve your workforce engagement and experience.  

Digital Transformation in 2025: A Strategized Guide

Digital transformation refers to employing digital technologies to manage the business processes, company culture, and customer experience, which will help meet the changing industry requirements. It is applied to create new strategies as well as modify the existing approaches to different business roles, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. The digital transformation strategy directly reflects upon how a business engages with its customers in this digitally-advancing era.

Incorporating a digital transformation strategy in a startup or small business is very simple. They can easily future-proof the business by applying a digitally agile method of operation, which will help them grow productively. For an established business though, it may take some reimagining for integrating the right tools and technologies for the best digital strategy and transformation.

Related Reading: What considerations should be part of a company’s digital transformation strategy?

What are the 4 main areas of digital transformation?

A digital transformation roadmap to success should include four key areas – customer engagement, empowering employees, optimizing operations, and transforming business models. Digital transformation is not just about adopting new technology or investing in digital tools, you need to be prepared for the changes, anticipate them, and drive innovation to remain competitive in the market.

1. Customer Engagement

Cultivating good customer relationships is the backbone of every thriving business. Maintaining a healthy connection with customers can be very easy by using digital tools. From addressing grievances quickly to promoting seasonal sales and offers, digital transformation can help improve the brand image through enhanced customer engagement, which will, in turn, lead to superior business results.

2. Empowering Employees

Building a dynamic company culture with digital technologies can lead to high performance and enhanced productivity. Digital collaboration and networking tools, for instance, can allow employees to work easily with different business departments and teams. This helps accelerate delivery, boost quality and efficiency, and drive greater employee satisfaction.

3. Optimizing Operations

A robust operations digitalization strategy can reform the business from inside out. Adopting digital tools for managing human resources, sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, or any other business operation can give a comprehensive outlook of the current processes. With proper analytics and insights, businesses can easily manage the operations as well as fix the flaws for a better outcome.

4. Transforming Business Models

Digital business transformation strategy cannot be complete without changing how the business functions work. Leveraging technology to find innovative ways to introduce digital products can perfectly complement traditional offerings. In fact, marketing the brand and promoting the products and services digitally is the key to emerge as a flourishing business today.

Related Reading: 4 Questions to Ask When Your Business Goes Digital

How do you develop a digital transformation strategy?

Rapid digital development and evolution can be seen in every industry in the present day. If you want to keep up, you will need to have the right plan to make the best of the digital landscape. A digital transformation strategy framework allows you to understand your current state, identify your goals, and adopt the best measures to achieve those objectives.

Here is a three-step process to create your digital transformation strategy roadmap:

1. Analyze your requirements and align your business objectives

Developing a robust digital transformation strategy roadmap requires you to analyze the market properly. At the same time, you should also focus on your goals and evaluate how it will affect your current business model. Determine your vision for implementing digital transformation and think about how it will improve customer experience and company culture.

2. Plan your budget

You should also secure funding for your digital transformation. It is an ongoing process and usually involves technology-intensive investments. Therefore, you should have an idea of how much resources you can allocate for the initiative. However, the budget should be calculated keeping in mind all the business areas that would benefit from digital transformation. This way, you can structure the best IT transformation strategy by identifying priorities and establishing the scope of the process.

3. Evaluate the present to plan the future

It is also important to recognize your current business state. Simply trying to migrate to digital infrastructure will not work. You need to understand the current organizational structure, culture, business processes, operations, and employee skill sets. This will help you to categorize the pain points or opportunities that should be addressed at the earliest. It will also let you track the achievements in your digital transformation strategy roadmap promptly.

What are some of the best digital transformation examples?

Digital transformation has practical benefits for every business unit or department. Here are a few examples:

In marketing, it can help to find more customers for less capital investment. Digital marketing approaches can generate more leads and connect with potential customers, which results in greater brand awareness.

In sales, digital transformation can allow automation with analytics tracking and data-driven insights. By using the stats, businesses can promote the products/services that a consumer is likely to buy. Besides, the data and analytics can also help understand the effectiveness of current sales techniques and strategies.

As for customer support, digital transformation allows consumers to contact businesses quickly for any grievances related to the product/service. Customer support personnel can share information promptly across digital modes and find the best solution for the customer. When the company addresses their problems in time, it strengthens their relationship with the customer, which in turn leads to better customer retention.

Related Reading: Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Implementing digital tools also facilitates improved collaboration between different teams within the organization. This is a must for streamlined business growth in today’s highly competitive industry. That is why you should employ a reliable digital transformation strategy for your business. It will definitely help you discover new opportunities and make the most of powerful sales channels to increase business revenue. 

Fingent empowers businesses to build a strong foundation for smooth and cost-effective digital transformation that helps them discover new opportunities and revenue streams. Get in touch with our experts to learn more. 

SAP Payroll Compliance: Extending Support During COVID-19

The global spread of COVID-19 has put businesses into disarray. The long period of lockdown enforced by many governments has changed a lot of things. We’re all practicing new ways to work (remote work), use software, and pursue learning. We’ve also come across many compliance changes since governments across the world are trying to help their people through the HR and Payroll Systems. Due to this, many SuccessFactors partners have released add-ons, extensions, and functionalities to help users. Free-of-charge COVID-19 extensions for SAP SuccessFactors are available where customers can directly download the instructions from the website and set up the extension in their system as a self-service application. 

Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning

Getting the most out of SAP SuccessFactors Solutions

It’s the right time for customers to think outside the box in terms of getting the most out of SuccessFactors Solutions. The flexibility of SuccessFactors allows you to use it in new and different ways. SAP customers can also use SAP Jam to put out announcements, publish status updates, messages from leadership, and other questions about how to use the solutions that they have, to the best capacity. 

Since most people are working remotely for the first time, staying connected is more critical than ever. Companies can also leverage SuccessFactors Onboarding for a relaunch and get the business going since many organizations have opted for temporary lay-offs. So to relaunch and get these resources back on-board, this tool can be used effectively.  

Valuable information at your fingertips

Lots of countries are putting out programs for helping workers manage lay-offs, helping companies with cash flow, and giving them financial breaks so that they can retain their workers longer. These approaches are specific and differ from country to country. SAP has created a blog to bring all those updates together in one place. Employers can leverage the schemes that several governments across the globe have announced to prevent mass lay-offs. However, these rules and schemes are subject to constant review and it’s important for employers to review and plan before implementation. Every country HR and payroll need to collaborate to ensure that the changes are correctly put into effect. 

Related Reading:5 Tips to verify the business process expertise of your IT outsourcing partner

Legal changes announced by a few countries w.r.t payroll

Following are some legal changes announced by a few countries w.r.t payroll:

The United States: 

The state and federal wage laws mandate employers to pay minimum wages to their employees and time and half the regular hourly rate exceeding forty hours in a workweek to non-exempt employees. The FFCRA (Families First Coronavirus Response Act) demands employers with a staff less than 500 to provide a paid sick leave of 10 days along with FMLA leave for reasons related to COVID-19. 

Employers can obtain tax credits for Social Security and Medicare for statutory benefits. This Act allows employers to retain the amount of payroll taxes equalling the amount qualified for sick and child care leave rather than deposit it with the IRS. If employers find that the payroll taxes are insufficient to cover the cost of statutory benefits that have been paid, they can file an accelerated payment request with the IRS. The IRS would process these requests within two weeks.

The United Kingdom: 

The UK government has come up with the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme wherein they have pledged to reimburse 80% of wages for furloughed employees up to 2500 pounds per month. All employers in the UK are entitled to this scheme. The main objective is to help those employers retain their staff who cannot afford to pay salaries. They can then get those employees back on board once they start rebuilding their businesses. 

Australia:

The Australian government has implemented a broad range of measures to provide relief to employers through its “JobKeeper Payment Scheme”, where wage subsidies will be granted to employers affected by COVID-19. This will allow employers to pay their employees and such payments will be exempted from payroll taxes. 

The Pay-Roll Tax Relief (COVID-19 Response) Act 2020 that took effect from 1 March 2020 outlines the payroll tax waiver and the exemption for payments made under the JobKeeper Payment scheme. The payroll tax relief approaches in the country differ from state to state and employers need to carefully follow the corresponding province’s website to learn more. 

Canada: 

The Canadian government has announced a 10% wage subsidy for qualified small businesses. To avail of this benefit immediately, businesses should reduce their remittances of income tax that has been withheld from their employees’ remuneration. 

The Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy Act that was announced on April 11, 2020, states that the employers who have lost 30% of their revenue due to COVID-19 are eligible for a subsidy amount equalling 75% of employees’ remuneration paid up to CAD$847 per employee per week for a 12-week period.

Brazil: 

Brazil’s government has announced provisional measures such as a temporary suspension of employment in business sectors that are adversely affected by the pandemic. The authorities have considered permitting employers to reduce the working hours and salaries of their workforce by 50%. Additionally, the employees are to be allowed to take collective vacations with prior notice of 48 hours and individual vacations for 15 days. The employers have to make teleworking arrangements and include flexibility in banked hours. 

Employers should note that such schemes have a wage ceiling, so high earners may encounter greater losses of income. Since the main aim of these measures is to save jobs, employers who utilize these schemes are prohibited from continuing business with a reduced workforce simultaneously.   

The present global crisis has highlighted the essential function of payroll. If payroll fails, everything comes to a standstill. SAP Payroll can help you maintain resilience and ensure smooth operations. Connect with us to find out how your business can leverage payroll compliance with SAP.   

Top 10 Algorithms to Create Functional Machine Learning Projects

From simple day-to-day functions to making computers smarter, Machine Learning algorithms help automate manual tasks for making our lives simpler. The significance of Machine Learning has grown even further, which is why enthusiastic data scientists and engineers look forward to learning different techniques to hone their skills.

Below are the top 10 Machine Learning algorithms that you should know. These will help you to create practical projects, no matter whether you choose Supervised, Unsupervised, or Reinforcement Machine Learning model.

Read our Infographic: What Machine Learning is and why it is important in business

1. Apriori Algorithm

Apriori algorithm is a type of machine learning algorithm, which creates association rules based on a pre-defined dataset. The rules are in the IF_THEN format, which means that if action A happens, then action B will likely occur as well. The algorithm derives such conclusions by analyzing the ratio of action B to action A.

One of the most common examples of the Apriori algorithm can be seen in Google auto-complete. When you type a word, the algorithm automatically suggests associated words that are mostly typed with that.

2. Naive Bayes Classifier Algorithm 

Naive Bayes Classifier algorithm works by presuming that any specific property in a category is not related to the other properties of the group. This helps the algorithm to consider all the features independently as it calculates the outcome. It is very easy to create a Naive Bayes model for huge datasets, and can even do better than many of the complex classification methods.

The best example of the Naive Bayes Classifier algorithm will be email spam filtering. The function automatically classifies different emails as spam or not spam.

3. Linear Regression Algorithm

Linear Regression algorithm determines the correlation between a dependent variable and an independent variable. It helps understand the effect that the independent variable will cause on the dependent variable if the former’s value is changed. The independent variable is also referred to as the explanatory variable, while the dependent variable is termed as the factor of interest.

Generally, the Linear Regression algorithm is used in risk assessment processes, especially in the insurance industry. The model can help to figure out the number of claims as per different age groups and then calculate the risk as per the age of the customer.

Related Reading: Can Machine Learning Predict And Prevent Fraudsters?

4. K-Means Algorithm

K-Means algorithm is commonly used for solving clustering problems. It takes datasets into a specific number of clusters, which is referred to as “K”. The data is categorized in such a way that all the data points in the cluster remain homogenous. At the same time, the data points in one cluster will be different from the data grouped in other clusters.

For instance, when you look for, say, “date”, on the search engine, it could mean a fruit, a particular day, or a romantic night out. The K-Means algorithm groups all the web pages that mention each of the different meanings to give you the best results.

5. Decision Tree Algorithm

Decision Tree algorithm is the most popular Machine Learning algorithms out there today. The model works by classifying problems for both categorical as well as continuous dependent variables. Here, all the possible outcomes are divided into different standardized sets with the most significant independent variables using a tree-branching methodology.

The most common example of the Decision Tree algorithm can be seen in the banking industry. The system helps financial institutions to categorize loan applicants as well as determine the probability of a customer defaulting on his/her loan payments.

Related Reading: How Predictive Algorithms and AI Will Rule Financial Services

6. Support Vector Machine Algorithm

Support Vector Machine algorithm is used to classify data as points in a vast n-dimensional plane. Here, “n” refers to the number of properties in hand, each of which is linked to a specific subset to categorize the data. A common use of the Support Vector Machine algorithm can be seen in the regression of problems. It works by categorizing data into different levels using a particular line or hyper-plane.

For instance, stockbrokers use the Support Vector Machine algorithm to compare the performance of different stocks and listings. This helps them to device the best decisions for investing in the most lucrative stocks and options.

7. Logistic Regression Algorithm

Logistic Regression algorithm helps calculate separate binary values from a cluster of independent variables. It then helps to forecast the likelihood of an outcome by analyzing the data against a logit function. Including interaction terms, eliminating properties, standardizing techniques, and using a non-linear model can also be used to create better logistic regression models.

The probability of the outcome of a specific event in the Logistic Regression algorithm is calculated as per the included variables. It is commonly seen in politics to predict if a candidate will win or lose in the election.

8. K- Nearest Neighbors Algorithm

K Nearest Neighbors or KNN algorithm is used for both the classification as well as regression of different problems. The model saves the data available from several cases, which is referred to as K, and classifies new cases as per the data from the K neighbors based on distance function. The new case is then included in the identified dataset.

K Nearest Neighbors needs a lot of storage space to save all the data from different variables. However, it only functions when needed and can be very reliable in predicting the outcome of an event.

9. Random Forest Algorithm

Random Forest algorithm works by grouping different decision trees based on their attributes. This model can deal with some of the common limitations of the Decision Tree algorithm. It can also be more accurate to predict the outcome when the number of decisions goes higher. The decision trees are mapped here based on the CART or Classification and Regression Trees model.

A common example of the Random Forest algorithm can be seen in the automobile industry. It is seen to be very productive in forecasting the breakdown of a specific automobile part.

10. Gradient Boosting and Adaptive Boosting

Gradient Boosting and Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) algorithms can be used when you need to handle a huge amount of data and predict the outcome with the highest accuracy possible. Boosting algorithms combine the power of different basic learning algorithms to improve the results. It can also merge weak or average predictors to get a strong estimator model.

Gradient boosting is generally used with decision trees, while AdaBoost is typically used to improve binary classification problems. Boosting can also correct the misclassifications found in different base algorithms.

The above-listed Machine Learning algorithms will help you get started with your desired projects right away. These will equip you for understanding the scope of Machine Learning as well as work out complex problems more easily.

Related Reading: How Machine Learning Boosts Customer Experience 

Want to develop machine learning applications that deliver better experiences for your users? Connect with us. 

How we can expedite customers’ move to emerging tech like AR & VR

Many real-world scenarios have shown us the need to keep up with technology. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has proved to be an unanticipated catalyst in accelerating customers’ move to the new and emerging technologies and tools. As millions of consumers go into lockdown, they are forced to work from home that impacts their day to day habits of digital connectivity. 

Though COVID-19 has created a major drag on the world economy, it is playing an active role in accelerating the development and commercialization of several emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). This is especially true for innovations that automate processes, reduce human-to-human contact, and increase productivity during social distancing. This article examines how new technologies such as AR/VR can influence various industries.

Wholehearted Support for Virtual Health Care

In a survey conducted by Perkins Coie LLP, a vast majority of the respondents found healthcare and medical devices as one of the top potential growth areas for AR and VR technologies.

Telemedicine had previously not received enough support from healthcare providers, financers, and patients. But now, the need for virtual healthcare advice is accelerating the adoption of telemedicine. Various countries have authorized their healthcare professionals to expand telehealth consultations to make it easier for patients to speak with their healthcare providers.

This pandemic is also spurring the interest in asynchronous healthcare, a form of telemedicine that eliminates the need for face-to-face appointments in managing and monitoring chronic health conditions. New technologies in AR/VR allows a healthcare provider to remotely assess and diagnose a patient in an ambulance two miles away. 

Related Reading: Is Mixed Reality the Future of the Healthcare Industry?

Promising future for the Real Estate Industry

Though the present scenario has stirred unrest in certain industries, the real estate sector need not come to a standstill at this time. The use of AR/VR technologies can facilitate communication and collaboration within the industry. As a useful tool for design communication, AR/VR has the ability to ensure virtual co-location of the teams making it possible to transfer messages and work cultures.

The new tech line (AR and VR) allows all project stakeholders to take a ‘walk’ inside the project before it is built. Such an understanding of project data can reduce errors, facilitate faster and better decision-making, and achieve greater business and profitability. In this period when physical mock-ups and on-site prototyping are no longer viable, VR-enabled online libraries can add accuracy to design projects without additional cost.

Related Reading: Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality: Transforming The Real Estate Industry

Use Chatbots Instead of Human Punching Bags

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced changes in customer behavior and business models, which might persist well after the crisis abates. Meanwhile, chatbots can be used to reduce the surge in customer frustration. Various websites are using chatbots to answer general FAQs asked by the customers providing them a better customer experience. 

AI-powered chatbots can communicate with humans in real-time. Such personalized chatbots can be developed for your websites, social media profiles, and SMS services to generate automated responses using pre-defined keywords and categories. COVID-19 has complicated the role of the customer service representative. They have to lead the delicate dance of balancing policy and empathy with frustrated customers. 

Read our case study: Using Chatbots to Create an Enhanced and Engaging Learning Experience

Chatbots provide proactive customer service and help protect the emotional well-being of the agents. Onboarding and training new customer service representatives are not viable options when the work volume increases. Chatbots allow you to scale-up teams and multiply output within seconds. Additionally, now chatbots can be used effectively to sell products directly to users via WhatsApp (WhatsApp for Business). 

Powerful Cutting-Edge Technology: Face-Recognition 

In the span of a few weeks, COVID-19 has reshaped how the world works. This new paradigm has opened the door to the deployment of latest technologies such as facial recognition. During this period of social distancing, business and government agencies are increasingly turning to facial recognition technology. Also, face recognition payments are growing in popularity. 

Read our case study: The Future of Communication and Security Using Augmented Reality

Grand View Research, Inc. forecasts that by 2027, the worldwide facial recognition market will increase at a CAGR of 14.5 percent to reach 9.93 billion dollars.

Face recognition is already getting a lot of momentum since it avoids touching surfaces and potential infection. Another benefit to face recognition is that it can enable thermal scanning to check body temperatures, minimizing the risk of the sick infecting other workers.  

The Race To Keep Pace

Today the globalized economy is in fierce competition. Technology helps increase efficiency across industries especially during this pandemic. That is why AR/VR is emerging as a critical solution. From accelerating user collaboration to streamlining processes, the use cases of AR/VR technologies in business will only get stronger. And as IT infrastructure increases in complexity, these new technologies will deliver multiple benefits to businesses as a whole. 

Fingent helps accelerate your move to new and emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality. Get in touch with us to find out how we help our clients deliver a compelling reality experience using these technologies. 

Transforming Healthcare with Predictive Analytics powered by SAP HANA

Predictive analysis has been helping businesses like Uber, Amazon, and Netflix to best serve their customers. They use it to predict what shows viewers would like to watch or what items they’d like to buy. It’s altogether a different story when it comes to healthcare. 

The stakes are higher when you recommend care based on predictive analysis. That’s why many healthcare organizations prefer prescriptive analytics over predictive analytics even now. However, the rewards are potentially much greater if organizations buy into this risk balance and ensure that predictive analytics is incorporated in an appropriate way to deal with the complex operations of a healthcare organization.  

The Healthcare Data Challenge

Healthcare data doubles every three years and the $7 trillion industry is unable to keep up with the staggering rate at which information is produced. The ever-increasing medical data generated/ collected in real-time from numerous medical records, clinical trials, research, personal fitness bands, wearables, implanted devices, sensors, and health apps will be equivalent to 300 million books. That means the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime (source: IBM Research). 

Related Reading: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry

So, we require smart tools to use these massive data efficiently and derive clinically actionable results from them. While treating patients, we need to gain insights faster to provide specifically tailored treatments that are based on biological, genetic, and physical information. 

 SAP HANA Helps Unlock Massive Health Data

SAP HANA is the platform that integrates disparate and fragmented biological, clinical, and lifestyle datasets, helping users to analyze them and gain insights from them. SAP HANA enables users to conduct predictive analysis to examine and identify patterns across healthy as well as patient populations. 

Predictive analytics powered by SAP HANA combines the depth and speed of in-memory analytics with the potential of native predictive algorithms to process huge amounts of healthcare data on a real-time basis. In industries such as healthcare, most of the data is unstructured. Whether you use Enterprise systems, data warehouses, data marts, spreadsheets or Hadoop environments, Predictive Analytics solutions from SAP HANA combines both structured and unstructured datasets from any source. 

Leveraging SAP predictive analysis for visualization, R’s extensive library of statistical and data mining techniques, and SAP HANA predictive analytic library, data scientists get everything they need to predict the future in real-time. For instance, you’ll be able to predict the “patient footfall” in a hospital in a given period of time. Once you have the expected number of patients walking in, you can easily make arrangements to meet their needs like adjusting the bed capacity, maintaining stocks of critical protective devices, medicines, and so on. These proactive decisions can be extremely helpful in the current COVID-19 crisis situation.

Related Reading: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Know The Difference

Implementing SAP HANA Solutions in Healthcare

Does this sound too futuristic and hard to deploy? 

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that using SAP HANA for Predictive Analytics is also easy. You just have to use a drag and drop visual interface for data selection, preparation, and processing. You can create models by using native predictive algorithms as well as algorithms from R. So it’s not only for the experts. With SAP BusinessObjects and business intelligence integration, you can unlock predictive insights. Moreover, the stunning and advanced visualizations help to reveal valuable, hidden insights. The Mitsui Knowledge Industry has successfully used SAP Predictive Analytics to provide a one-stop-shop for genomic data analysis of cancer patients and support personalized therapeutics. 

Today, global healthcare industry experts are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized and preventive medicine is taking the center stage so that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time. This, in turn, paves the way towards improved clinical outcomes and cost savings. Genomic research is gaining importance as it not only helps predict the signs of diseases even before they occur but also helps learn their physiologies. This can enable healthcare providers to determine the treatment plan on an individual basis thus greatly improving the efficiency and standard of healthcare. 

However, the challenge is to store the growing data. Only the genetic sequencing data would amount to approximately 5PB for 6 billion humans on the planet! Analyzing and interpreting this data is another challenge. Using SAP HANA researchers can analyze this data almost instantaneously. What once took 48 hours to analyze now takes only a few minutes with SAP HANA. This ultimately means a faster and precise diagnosis, better care, and fewer visits to the hospital.  

With SAP HANA, medical researchers and clinicians can integrate genomic data with clinical data to find associations with genetic markers and certain types of diseases. Once a doctor accesses this data in real-time, he can provide personalized treatment that is specific to certain genetic markers of the patient. 

Uncover hidden trends, take proactive actions, conduct new research on pharmaceuticals, and plan for future needs with Predictive Analytics from SAP. Fingent’s SAP experts help you take advantage of your SAP investments. Talk to us to know more.      

Understanding the Significance of SAP Support and AMS

Any SAP user can vouch for the fact that the SAP plays a significant role in their company.  Since business operations depend upon the reliability of the SAP system, any flaw can develop into a major problem hampering business operations. The effectiveness of your SAP support functions will determine how quickly your organization can restore operations. Choosing the right SAP Support model is, therefore, critical. So let’s dive right in and understand SAP support functions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

Types of SAP Support Functions

SAP support functions can be divided into 4 types: 

• Business Process Support
• SAP Functional support
• SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support
• SAP Basis or Technology Support

1. Business Process Support: 

The role of this team is to assist in various business processes and streamline them. Since the best role is played by the internal staff who are well versed in the workings of the company, you’ll see external consultants in this capacity.

2. SAP Functional Support: 

This team assists you with how to use the SAP software in the most effective way. Every now and then situations may arise where you require help. Your business may also demand frequent reconfigurations to handle new scenarios. The functional support team handles all these requests. This team needs to have an in-depth knowledge of the SAP system and a working knowledge of business processes. 

3. SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support:

This support team is also called as the technical team. While implementing SAP, the team that configures the system gathers business requirements and tries to meet them. Ideally, the ERP system should cater to all business needs. Of course, the business processes are re-engineered to meet best practices, but in the end, the role of SAP is to support business processes; not the other way around. While doing so, you realize that there are gaps and the ERP is unable to handle everything that your company does. This is where the ABAP and Interfaces Support team comes in. They go under the hood and modify or extend the software to meet the needs that could not be realized before. Similarly, if you want your SAP system to communicate with another ERP system or software, you’ll need help from the technical support team to write programs that enable the smooth flow of data between the two.       

4. SAP Basis or Technology Support: 

This team maintains the health of the infrastructure. They make sure that the SAP software is up and running on various environments such as production, testing, development, and training. Additionally, for each environment, you may have multiple machines. Thus the SAP software is running on multiple machines that host the database, operating system, hardware, and network. Depending on the size of your company, you may require a larger team to manage more number of machines. Of course, if you’re going on the cloud then you won’t need all this. The PaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the software as well as the infrastructure.  

Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA

How SAP Support Works

All four support teams interact with each other based on requirements. Most SAP users have a team called SAP CCOE or Customer Centre of Expertise wherein the IT and (Line of Business) LOB collaborate with each other. The IT department takes care of the infrastructure and supports the technical part (SAP ABAP and interfaces), whereas the SAP configuration and business procedures are owned by the LOB. 

The SAP CCOE aims to promote transparency, efficiency, and innovation to drive continuous improvement. The CCOE program starts with the Primary Customer COE and allows customers to gradually mature into certified Advanced Customer COE(s).  Advanced Customer COE(s) help by providing a clear definition of the IT service portfolio and cost models. Apart from service provision, they leverage their knowledge of business processes, objectives, and technical feasibility to implement innovative ideas using leading technologies. Advanced Customer COE(s) thus provide competitive business advantages by including both IT and business in decision-making processes.     

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP AMS (Application Management Services)

All said and done, internal SAP support teams have to face many challenges like :

• Providing and maintaining competencies for all business areas covered by the system
• Strategic talent management to meet the dynamic demands of ERP support 
• Ensuring that all problems will be solved within the allotted time frame 
• Ensuring efficient work-load planning
• Maintaining cost-effectiveness
• Maintaining effective contingency plans 

While SAP keeps adding new and valuable features and functionalities to their software at regular intervals, even in the current gloomy market, SMBs are forced to upgrade in order to maintain vendor support. All these challenges have led many organizations to look for third party support or SAP AMS providers for support. 

You can considerably reduce the support and maintenance costs of your SAP software by opting for Shared Team Delivery Model offered by Fingent. With shared services, you have a larger pool of resources to support multiple customers. Collaborating with various team members in a shared team enables the team members to learn about industry best practices thus enhancing skillsets. Customers can enjoy the benefits of improved scalability and flexibility. 

With support from an AMS provider, you get continuity of support in accordance with the SLA. However, you have to take care to avoid setting simple SLAs for support. You need to focus on getting more value from the SAP AMS provider. 

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

Choosing an AMS provider that fits seamlessly as an extension to your existing staff can help your organization to deliver desired business outcomes. Of course, every company may have unique processes that call for unique SAP support. With Fingent, you get solutions that are tailored to your needs. Our service delivery structure is designed to manage costs and improve service levels. Thus you are freed from vendor lock-in, empowering you to focus on improving agility and innovation. Contact us to learn more.    

How SAP Solutions Help with Business Continuity Challenges

Every organization needs a business continuity plan to carry out its critical business as usual, especially when the area where it operates is affected by a crisis like COVID-19. That’s where enterprise resource and business planning suites like SAP comes to your rescue. SAP solutions are designed to help you meet your business continuity goals and ensure that your establishment survives and recovers from a disaster efficiently.

“SAP Help Portal describes business continuity as the efforts to ensure that critical business functions will be continuously available for clients, customers, suppliers, and other entities.”

Business continuity planning, however, is not free of challenges. Varying business requirements can shoot up your investment costs. Consider scenarios such as the installation and maintenance of hardware, software, and data center infrastructure. A simple and cost-effective way to address these requirements will be to use efficient cloud computing solutions instead of massive physical servers. This is where SAP solutions can come handy. SAP Cloud Platform, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Analytics, SAP Leonardo, SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things, etc. are only a few of the key services offered by SAP. 

How SAP Solutions Help with Business Continuity Challenges

SAP is an efficient technological framework that can be easily incorporated into your existing business structure to maximize the productivity of your business functions. This helps boost the overall growth of your establishment. 

SAP offers impressive ways to manage your clients, customers, and business interactions. With the right SAP solutions, you can fast-track and automate your routine processes and dedicate your skilled workforce to attend the core functions. Minimal workforce retention and lower equipment maintenance costs are two of the key benefits of deploying SAP into your business. 

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

You will gain a high degree of flexibility by integrating SAP in your business structure. This way, you can adjust to the existing as well as imminent changes in the industry smoothly. That helps your establishment to adapt and evolve as per the varying market trends. By storing massive amounts of data on the cloud, you can also significantly reduce the operational and management costs of your business.

Business continuity plans can be very complicated to employ and execute. Traditional ways of managing the recovery infrastructure and testing the solutions can be very challenging and time-consuming. With reliable SAP solutions, all that can be managed flawlessly. 

Below are some examples of how SAP solutions can help to solve different business continuity challenges.

Identifying Alternative Sources of Supply

Maintaining the supply chain is one of the most critical aspects to ensure efficient business continuity. Using SAP Ariba allows you to create smart connections with your suppliers so that you can communicate and collaborate with them adequately. The spend management solutions of SAP Ariba also ensure that your business is responsive and responsible, no matter what the crisis is.

SAP Ariba solutions help simplify the procurement and supply chain processes. It enables you to find new sources of supply for better management of your resources in the event of a disaster. At the same time, you can find profitable customers too, and scale your client relationships for superior sales cycles and cash control.

Financial Modeling and Managing Cash Flow

Financial modeling is key to make certain that your business continuity plans are authoritative and adequate. With the help of SAP S/4HANA Finance solution, you can easily manage your financial planning and accounting jobs. The ERP system also allows you to use real-time operational data and end-to-end planning for avoiding redundancy and time lags.

SAP S/4HANA Finance solution also supports accounts payable and receivable, so that you can keep an eye on the cash flow as well as create ad hoc simulations to see new business models or organizational changes. The treasury and financial risk management solutions of the ERP system allow you to integrate cash flow analysis and business planning, including the liquidity planning lifecycle. This is highly beneficial for effective accounts management.

Related Reading: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-to-End Solution

Employee Training and Certifications

Staff involvement is another vital element of a successful business continuity plan. However, holding a meeting to train and educate your staff members on the essentials of the business continuity and disaster management plans may not be possible always. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS) emerges as a productive alternative. The online learning solution can simplify the process and adequately instruct your employees about the business continuity plan.

SAP SuccessFactors LMS can make sure that everyone is on the same page through proper training and emphasis on critical business functions. You can create easy-to-understand content for your employees and incorporate personalized and innovative elements to help them get a clear idea of the business continuity plan. You can also manage certifications and documents easily using the LMS software.

Download Our Case Study: Check out how Fingent automated integration between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA.

With a robust business continuity plan laid out using the right SAP solutions, you can have all the critical business data secured and accessible. This helps you recover from the disaster quickly and manage important business functions without affecting your customers or business reputation.

Fingent helps enterprises to frame robust business continuity plans leveraging SAP, S/4, and intelligent enterprise platforms. Our team includes members who are part of SAP’s core engineering team, who can provide consulting, advisory, implementation, integration, support, and monitoring services to ensure business continuity. Get in touch with us to learn more about our services. 

The Key Benefits of Adopting LMS in eLearning

Learning and training by means of various digital resources (eLearning) have been in vogue for some time. When learning is imparted through internet-based platforms like Learning Management System or LMS Technology and made available to users through electronic devices like computers, tablets, or smartphones, it offers learners the convenience to access resources any time they need. That makes eLearning even more beneficial in times of a global pandemic like COVID-19 to ensure uninterrupted learning.

Digital learning (eLearning) offers numerous benefits to both organizations as well as learners. 

• For employers, it offers a time-effective and affordable mode of training employees.
• For employees, it helps in quick learning and improved productivity.
• eLearning systems can also benefit educational establishments that are looking for robust solutions for remote learning activities.

Related Reading: How Corporate Learning Management Systems Help Engage Your Employees

How Digital Learning is Becoming a Trend in the Education Industry

eLearning systems like LMS offer a reliable solution for the diverse requirements of the education industry. It can be helpful for all kinds of learning, be it in a business environment or for an educational institution. Below are some of the key advantages of eLearning that boost its importance in the education industry.

Cost-Effective

The most obvious benefit of eLearning is that it helps to save time and money. As users can learn anytime, from anywhere, and using any device, they do not have to take time out of their current schedules for learning and training. There is no need for printing materials in online education either, which adds to the cost benefits for the company.

Facilitates Better Communication

Some businesses use eLearning to educate their clients and partners as well. This helps in better customer engagement and retention, which ultimately leads to increased revenue. Moreover, as online education fosters the idea of interactive content, it motivates the learners to keep going easily. Interactive digital content also makes it easy to remember the information and apply that at work.

Offers More Convenience

Online learning is also more consistent and reliable when compared to face-to-face training sessions. Although every instructor will have a tried-and-tested method of instruction, there are still chances of errors and mistakes in the traditional approach. These can be easily eliminated with eLearning because it offers standardized training modules for everyone. The courses can also be customized easily to meet the specific needs of the company.

How LMS Boosts Productivity and Efficiency in Online Education 

LMS provides you the right tools to accomplish your eLearning goals. You can easily create and manage a training program using the learning software, which can be beneficial in saving a lot of time when compared to running a training session in the meeting rooms. The LMS software also allows you to organize the eLearning schedules as per the needs of the learners. This makes LMS a cost-efficient solution for businesses. 

Here are a few benefits of implementing LMS:

1. Better Resource Management

By adopting online education, your company does not have to bear the costs of travel and accommodation for employees or instructors. As online classrooms allow you to provide training to a large number of users in a go, there is no need to host multiple sessions either. As you can easily avoid those expenses, it gives you more resources to equip the LMS software with extra features and tools for enhanced functionality.

2. Scalable Education Modules

You can train and educate employees in different geographical locations with an LMS platform. The online courses can be used repeatedly as well, without having to allocate any extra funds for that. This means you can enroll new users easily and have them follow the same schedules for quick learning. The LMS software will also allow you to scale the learning modules so that you can include new lessons in that as needed.

3. Enhanced Collaboration and Administration

The learning management software will give you complete control of administration as well. This makes it easy to collaborate and communicate with trainers and users. You can create as many groups and courses in the software as required and assign different roles to learners, instructors, and supervisors easily. In addition, LMS also makes content management very simple. You can update the learning courses with intuitive and interactive content whenever applicable.

4. Managing and Sharing Information

As all the data is organized properly and stored in a structured manner, accessing the information about the courses, registrations, and user files is also very efficient with LMS. You can even customize the learning platform as per your preferences, such as adding corporate image and brand logos. Some LMS software applications also support multiple languages, which can be an added advantage for training and educating staff members overseas.

How to Choose the Right LMS Software

In order to make the most of the Learning Management System, you need to choose one that suits your needs in the best way. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, which is why you should assess your organization’s requirements properly before choosing one. 

Related Reading: 5 Tips for Choosing a Responsive Learning Management System

An LMS application can be cloud-based, open-source, commercial-grade, or installation-based. So, you need to check out all the features and functionalities in each of the options carefully to make an informed decision. Your goal should be to find an LMS software application that will allow you to create courses easily, manage users and content effectively, and report on the learning process accurately.

We recommend our clients to adopt customized Learning Management System with single-time development cost and zero license fee as the best way to get started. It retains your savings in your pocket.

Customized Learning Management System (LMS) Development

Fingent helps schools, universities, colleges, educational institutions, NGOs, and training centers to develop customized LMS platforms that come with aptitude-based smart learning tools. This makes sure that you can have a more interactive learning atmosphere. Customized LMS allows you to cultivate more transparency and communication between the instructor and the learner, which works to improve performance significantly.

Get in touch with us to find out how Fingent’s LMS software can help augment your learning process.