Four Finalists Also Named:
HCL/Manchester United, HP, IBM, and
Indecomm
The Hackett Group (NASDAQ: HCKT) today announced that Bayer
and IBM are the winners of its 2019 Digital Awards, which spotlight
companies that are on the cutting edge of digital transformation,
including smart automation, robotic process automation (RPA),
cognitive computing and advanced analytics.
Bayer won the award in the advanced analytics category for its
Statistical Demand Forecasting System, while IBM won in the smart
automation category for its Cognitive Support Platform. Four other
companies were also recognized as finalists: HCL/Manchester United
Football Club, HP, IBM and Indecomm.
The Hackett Group’s Digital Awards spotlight and celebrate
companies on the cutting edge of using smart automation and
advanced analytics to solve business problems.
“Disruptive digital technologies continue to take great strides
in terms of impact, affordability, and usability,” said Paul
Morrison, Managing Director, The Hackett Group. “We see companies
from all sectors making major changes to their back, middle and
front offices with tools such as RPA, cognitive automation and
advanced analytics. For many enterprises these changes are initial
pilots. But for others, such as our winners and finalists today,
these are mature and massive changes that can enable breakthroughs
like providing proactive and super-fast and personalized services
to tens of millions of customers, or freeing up talent from
hundreds of thousands of hours of wasted admin work. Efficiency in
the form of cost reduction and transactional automation are still
the primary focus for many organizations in their improvement
plans. However these awards show that more and more companies are
using these rapidly implemented, cost-effective and disruptive
approaches to drive wider business outcomes in the areas of
effectiveness and experience – not least increased revenue, reduced
risk, customer satisfaction and service innovation.”
“This year’s Digital Awards winners and finalists are showing
that the scale and impact of both smart automation and advanced
analytics continues to grow,” said Morrison. “They also point to a
growing overlap, and the accelerating impact of artificial
intelligence on both areas. Increasingly at The Hackett Group we
see the overlapping and reinforcing impact of these 3 trends or
‘3As’ – automation, analytics and AI. While they come from
different directions – automation is underpinned by process
improvement, analytics has grown out of data science and AI is a
computer science driven discipline - we increasingly see these
three digital levers being pulled by company initiatives at the
same time, not in isolation. We think this will be a key coming
together for digital business in the years ahead.”
The winners and finalists for 2019, and some information on
their projects, are as follows:
Bayer – Analytics Finalist - Statistical
Demand Forecasting System – Faster and simpler ways of working
are key elements of the digitalization journey at Bayer. An
automated prediction platform was developed to leverage statistics
and provide independent cross functional usage with a
low-total-cost of ownership. The platform further broadens Bayer’s
business analytics capabilities from descriptive to
predictive/augmented analytics. The solution has been
industrialized into the enterprise business data warehouse
infrastructure and has significantly improved speed and accuracy of
forecasting and scenario-based planning. The new platform has
enabled Bayer to fully achieve state-of-the-art, automated
predictive analytics, all inhouse! For example, the operational
sales forecasts in Supply Chain & Logistics can now be
generated automatically with adaptions and enrichments made to
specific business processes as needed. Overall, divisional supply
chain planners in the countries and regions can run the forecasting
process in a more efficient and focused way. Combined with external
cost reductions the solution enables significant efficiencies and
improvements in forecast accuracy which in turn will help improve
inventory positions and product availability.
IBM – Smart Automation Winner – Cognitive
Support Platform – IBM’s Cognitive Support Platform powered by
IBM Watson technology is transforming its ability to support
clients. IBM currently supports over 7,000 products across 170
countries investing millions of person hours each year. The system
is designed to help IBM understand problems, generate insights, and
take action to resolve client issues. A key part of the platform is
a “Continuous Learning Loop” where cognitive components listen to
client interactions, collect feedback and learn how to better
provide advice and act to resolve issues. The platform uses
weighting factors to facilitate case management prioritization,
enabling support engineers to quickly see and understand their
workload and know how the client cases should be prioritized as
they begin their workday. Cognitive routing and assignment
capabilities predict the expertise required to resolve a case, then
matches that with the skills, capacity, and availability of a
support engineer. In addition a chatbot has enabled clients in some
areas to address many of their issues via self-service.
HCL Technologies – Analytics
Finalist–Reimagines Business through Digital – Manchester
United, a 140-year old football club with a global fan base of
659 million, embarked on a digital transformation journey with HCL
that recorded exponential fan engagement within 6 months – the
Manchester United Official app reached number one in the App
Store’s sports category download charts in 68 markets around the
world. The app was also in the top ten within sports category in
123 markets. The Digital Experience Platform developed by HCL, web
site and app offer a rich, engaging, real-time multi-channel
experience as close as possible to what fans receive at the
stadium. A key element of the platform’s value lies in millions of
data points created by the club’s global fanbase as they engage
with the platform. Advanced analytics enabled the platform to
recognize patterns and trends along with predictions in fan
behavior by geography/demography, enabling both club and sponsors
to fine tune their campaigns and value offerings. HCL’s digital
platform integrates multiple industry standard products, services
and applications into a cloud native, auto-scalable architecture
that has been configured to support the club’s global fan base,
Technology and partner: HCL.
HP – Finalist – Deal Pricing – This
project addresses the need to provide timely quotes to our channel
network with specific pricing needs and requirements on a daily
basis. The project leverages intelligent robotic process automation
and machine learning/natural language processing to automate
special pricing. It improves the time to quote, accuracy of the
quote and significantly improves the likelihood of the quote being
converted to an order. To date, the solution has been successfully
deployed across three countries and is seeing strong success rates
for the end-to-end robotics solution and the natural language
processing output, covering a large volume of deals processed
through the robots. The other key benefit this automation provides
relates to the impact on revenue and as the solution is leveraged
across other countries, HP is anticipating improved accuracy and
faster turn-around times in the deal pricing quotation process.
IBM – Finalist – Enterprise
Operations & Service Automation Center of Excellence – The
automation effort enables 8,000 order-to-cash practitioners within
IBM to improve speed, quality, and client experience as they
develop pricing and financing scenarios, propose contracts, create
contracts and orders, register and manage contracts, create billing
and collect cash. With more than 300 largely disparate legacy
systems, databases and applications, processes remained fragmented
resulting in a lot of manual, repetitive tasks which limit the
practitioner’s opportunity to spend their time on higher value
activities and tasks. To address this issue, an Automation Center
of Excellence was created to enable the creation of a digital
workforce to perform manual, repetitive tasks so that we can
increase speed and quality and focus on being truly client-centric.
BotCamps sessions were used to train staff, aligning capability
with demand, to use BluePrism robotic process automation tools, and
a total of 469 people were trained in 18 locations across the globe
over 2017 and 2018. The effort has already delivered 360,000 hours
in productivity improvements in order-to-cash across three
geographies – Americas, Asia, and EMEA. Seller satisfaction has
increased, turnaround time has been cut in half, process quality
has improved, and additional data is providing better insight for
intelligent workflows that leverage multiple automation
technologies to achieve business outcomes. Technology and partners
used include: BluePrism RPA and Cloud infrastructure.
Indecomm – Smart Automation Finalist –
Redefining Mortgage Processing with AntWorks – As a leading
SaaS-based technology and services provider to the mortgage
industry, Indecomm Global Services sought an Integrated Automation
Platform (IAP) to enable easy flow through, organizing, extracting,
validating, standardizing data and documents. In collaboration with
AntWorks, Indecomm developed an industry point-solution by
deploying a full-stack IAP with Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR),
Intelligent Automation and AI/ ML tools to classify and read
contracts, extract unstructured data fields automatically, and send
the output file to the client. Turnaround time has cut to less than
half, and quality levels and customer satisfaction improved
significantly. Cost savings were 25% in 1st year, progressively
nearing 50% as the solution goes up the maturity curve. Indecomm is
repurposing its existing staffing model of 1000 to support twice
the current levels of business in the next 2-3 years. Technology
and partners used include: AntWorks.
The Hackett Group’s Digital Awards were established by Aecus in
2014 as the Aecus Automation Awards. Aecus was acquired by The
Hackett Group in May 2017.
About The Hackett Group
The Hackett Group (NASDAQ: HCKT) is an intellectual
property-based strategic consultancy and leading enterprise
benchmarking and best practices digital transformation firm to
global companies, offering digital transformation including robotic
process automation, smart automation and enterprise cloud
application implementation. Services include business
transformation, enterprise analytics, working capital
management and global business services. The Hackett
Group also provides dedicated expertise in business strategy,
operations, finance, human capital management, strategic sourcing,
procurement and information technology, including its award-winning
Oracle and SAP practices.
The Hackett Group has completed more than 16,500 benchmarking
studies with major corporations and government agencies, including
93% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 89% of the Fortune 100, 83% of
the DAX 30 and 57% of the FTSE 100. These studies drive its Best
Practice Intelligence Center™ which includes the firm's
benchmarking metrics, best practices repository and best practice
configuration guides and process flows, which enable The Hackett
Group’s clients and partners to achieve world-class
performance.
More information on The Hackett Group is available at:
www.thehackettgroup.com, info@thehackettgroup.com, or by
calling (770) 225-3600.
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Statements including without limitation, words such as “expects”,
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of Hackett to effectively market its digital transformation,
process automation and other consulting services, competition from
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this release or any forward looking statements contained
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Gary Baker,Global Communications Director(917)
796-2391gbaker@thehackettgroup.com
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