Shivani Agarwal, VP, AI and Intelligent Automation at Xerox, recently sat down with Bharath Yadla, SVP, Strategic Initiatives at Workato, and Saurabh Gupta, the President, Research and Advisory Services at HFS Research, to discuss her team’s automation journey.
You can read on to learn about her team’s experience with RPA, why they decided to adopt Workato, and how our platform helps managed service providers thrive.
The shortcomings of RPA—and what they’ve done to address them
Shivani shared that her team’s automation journey started with robotic process automation (RPA) software.
“(using RPA) we automated basic, high-volume transactional activities that were time consuming and just required swiveling data between applications.”
And while her team saw value in streamlining these mundane tasks, they quickly realized that most of the processes they wanted to automate were more complex. For example, they required exception management, automated decisioning, and steps for bringing people into the loop.
To help implement more comprehensive automations, they began to look beyond RPA and found a solution that met their requirements in Workato.
Shivani’s team decided to embrace the approach of stitching together various automation technologies. She provided an example within the context of document processing. “You’ll have document AI, OCR, RPA, and you can have Workato; where Workato is coming into the picture is in performing the ‘last mile’ activity of pushing the extracted, validated data into business applications.”
How Workato allows Xerox to deliver powerful automations at scale
Shivani and her team have also decided to use Workato in their commercial offering, enabling them to automate clients’ processes end-to-end.
Throughout this experience, they’ve benefited from a number of Workato’s platform features and capabilities. For example, Workato provides pre-built connectors for many of the ERP systems that Xerox’s clients use, allowing Xerox to avoid the time and resource-intensive work of building and maintaining connectors in-house.
Moreover, she highlighted the ease of which her team can use Workato to build out their recipes (i.e. automations). “Workato offers an easy way of building recipes, where we can transform the data we have extracted from a document or received from an external source, like a customer portal or an incident ticket. The transformations can meet the requirements of another business application, and we can automate the transaction using Workato’s back-end connectors.”
