Innovating with Bots

NTT DATA has been in business process management for more than two decades. Our strong R&D — coupled with hands-on experience across industries such as healthcare, banking and insurance, and manufacturing — has led us to innovate and implement large scale Robotic Process Automation for our clients. Today, we have close to 2,500 bots in production; these bots perform innumerable tasks and continue to help our clients increase enterprise efficiency and productivity, all the while helping these companies optimize costs.

Creating a bot to oversee the other bots

In more recent times, NTT DATA’s creativity and vision has led us to the next phase of bot creation. We have applied for patents for a series of new bots. For example, recently our clients have been looking for ways to improve operations performance with Business Process Improvement (BPI) programs. This client need inspired us to create LEAN Bot, which takes RPA up the management ladder to “oversee” the productivity and efficiency of other bots. LEAN Bot, based on LEAN and Six Sigma principles, assists the human manager by managing the bots. We believe that the LEAN Bot can lead to higher process quality and service enhancements of automation programs, by ensuring all bots perform optimally.

Keeping security up-to-date

Data security is a hot button issue in many industries today. Many of our clients are seeking ways to use automation to better manage IT security in an increasingly complex environment rife with constantly evolving threats. For example, with the increased adoption of Electronic Medical Records, which contain sensitive personal information, it is becoming critically imperative for the hospitals to ensure data security. Due to these layers of complexity, it’s challenging for organizations to be 100% compliant 100% of the time. While large-scale health organizations train multiple teams on compliance and regulation, each new threat can create the need for new training, all the while ensuring teams adhere to existing rules with new amendments. To help our banking and healthcare clients be vigilant, we created Security Bots, which monitor other bots deployed in industries requiring 100% adherence to compliance. These new bots ensure all bots are up-to-date with regulatory requirements, and decrease the likelihood of costly errors.

Reducing the complexity of medical coding

Healthcare organizations use International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes to record and identify health conditions when diagnosing patients, while insurers use these same codes to classify conditions and determine reimbursement when billing for services. Teams of medical coders extract and validate the assigned codes from the pool of medical records that include various charts, reports and diagnostics. Working closely with our clients, we realized this activity to be very amenable to automation. That’s how we created the Code Finder bot. This bot can review medical records — just like a human would — and by using AI technologies, it can automatically assign a medical code, as per ICD. And unlike humans, it can perform this arduous task at a phenomenal speed with greater accuracy. The Code Finder can also be monitored by LEAN Bots and Security Bots to ensure the entire automated system is up-to-date with compliance or any new changes in ICD codes.

Taking the guesswork out of paperwork

Contract management poses another challenge for our clients. Dealing with multiple insurers and vendors is often complex. On behalf of several clients, we asked ourselves if we could bring in RPA to help manage contracts. Thus the Robotic Context Processor was born. Built with sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI technologies, this bot can review complex documents in a variety of file formats, including legal documents, business contracts and medical reports, at phenomenal speeds. Just as a human would read and analyze a document, the Robotic Context Processor’s cognitive engine helps identify and extract relevant portions from a set of documents and performs the prescribed actions. For banks, hospitals and manufacturers, this cognitive engine can reduce document processing times drastically, and increase process efficiency. The Robotic Context Processor also has self-learning capabilities and gets smarter each time it is put to work. For documents it cannot understand or process, the bot passes them on to the staff for further action. This man/machine collaboration works very effectively.

Helping clients achieve their automation goals

And yet, bots are only one part of the journey. In fact, in our experience, writing bots is the easiest part. Changing the mindset and setting it to a “futuristic mode” is most challenging. To be truly successful in their automation initiatives, organizations need to change their mindset toward automation and visualize how RPA fits into their entire ecosystem. And NTT DATA is helping companies do just that. We help our client look beyond bots-at-work and the immediate gains of automation, (such as improved efficiency and productivity), to harness the true and full potential of automation.

I like to say, more than the bot business, we’re into the business of scaling automation for our clients.

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• Find out more about our Robotic Process Automation capabilities.