Intelligent Automation (IA) changes how we work. For many, this means eliminating the tedious, monotonous activities that create little value other than producing a final deliverable for a stakeholder to review and make decisions. We – as intelligent, sentient beings – were made for more.
Compliance – like other parts of the everyday organization – is filled with these tedious and monotonous activities. Compliance departments are tasked with ensuring that the organization’s activities – operational and back-office – remain within defined tolerances. Federal, state, and local agencies require organizations to endure significant hours to ensure compliance with regulations.
Compliance activities typically include:
- Running reports to determine if activities may be in or out of tolerance
- Scanning parts of multiple reports to determine and identify tolerance imbalances
- Analyzing charts to identify the cause of the imbalance visually
- Creating spreadsheets or combining PDF files to communicate/demonstrate the imbalance
- Uploading these reports internally or externally to data stores to share the results and act on report results
IA introduces the opportunity to fundamentally change how the compliance department works. IA eliminates reports and introduces a whole new compliance capability to organizations – intelligent compliance services.
As humans, we are visual and used to view data in a structured format we call a report. Even regulatory bodies define the specific reporting structures through which organizations must communicate their compliance. IA gets at the heart of identifying compliance issues – the data.
For IA, reports are unnecessary as automations need only to review the data. IA can interrogate the underlying data, identify in- and-out-of-tolerance transactions, create reports as needed (for pre-defined human consumption), perform the analysis, execute other workflows, make recommendations to the compliance team, and when empowered by the organization, make compliance decisions and act on those decisions. This eliminates the tedious and monotonous activity of “report creation” from compliance’s role and enables the compliance team to focus on key areas to reduce risk and ensure safety.
IA also has the capability, and bandwidth, to review thousands more control points than a typical compliance team has time to investigate. The typical robot has over 8,000 hours of utilization throughout a year – as compared to the standard (human) work year of 2,000 hours. Depending on the size and complexity of the compliance automations, a compliance department may be able to generate four (4) times the level of quality control, if not more. This increase in the number of control points enables the compliance department to increase quality control, minimize rogue points going unchecked, and reduce risk to the organization. All of which translates into real value for the organization.
Ashling Partners encountered such a scenario with a customer in their compliance services center. Through our Ideation and Roadmap services, we collaborated with our customers on various compliance processes. In a single process, this customer created, reviewed, and uploaded 5,700 reports over ~950 hours per year. The resulting automation is expected to deliver significant savings to the compliance service center and its customers.
Compliance – and other parts of the organization – are filled with these tedious and monotonous activities. The opportunity is now to transform how we work in compliance and translate IA capabilities into real value back to the organization through increased quality and less risk. It’s time to break away and introduce Intelligent Automation.
