Leaders In Tech: NewDay Head of Operational Excellence, Paul Evans
Ask Paul Evans about automation, and his eyes light up. Our Head of Operational Excellence will tell you that there’s a huge prize to be won. Not just in cost reduction terms, but in freeing up people from repetitive work to do more interesting things, whilst also enabling better Compliance, Operational Agility and consistent delivery to our Customers.
Automation also helps the organisation to grow, scaling up at speed. And that’s essential here at NewDay, where we’re adding significant numbers of new customers each month.
Paul and his team are systematically working their way through our various business processes. Whatever can be automated, soon will be.
It begins with Robotic Process Automation, or RPA. RPA can and will emulate many of the activities in the back office and group functions e.g. Finance. It takes structured/digital inputs/data, processes them and provides an output to the customer e.g. Customers can now pose a question or make a request online, such as “I need a PIN Reminder” via a structured web form. RPA takes this request, processes it and sends the PIN out in the post.
But by itself, RPA isn’t enough. Paul knows that if RPA acts as the “arms and legs” of a process, were as future automation opportunities will be required to emulate further human attribute’s such as sight, communication and thought. We’ll need to develop eyes, two-way conversation and a brain. That means adding and developing other smart intelligent solutions, which can extract and digitise data (Optical Charter Recognition / Computer Vision), converse with the customer (Natural Language Processing, Chat Bot and Voice Bot) and make complex decisions (Cognitive Reasoning).
Combining these solutions to create a seamless automated new process is referred to as Intelligent Automation (IA). IA is an emerging and growing field and is one of our six Digital Imperatives that make our Digital Strategy. The drive is to create integrated processes that require less human intervention, can be quickly scaled in line with our rapid growth and provide great customer experiences. This will take expert development, but we’re well on the way to realising our vision of building a world-class Automation Centre of Excellence, which is a key enabler to us becoming a leading engineering firm.
Doing it in-house
Our vision is to become the leading digitally-enabled consumer finance provider in the UK and to achieve this we have set ourselves the goal of innovating and leading as opposed to being “Fast Followers”. To enable this we don’t only consider off-the-shelf solutions when solving problems with IA. First we consider how we can design a better solution ourselves.
The first example of this within IA is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). When we decided to implement OCR, we looked beyond the market leaders to consider eight open-source technologies. Once we’d selected one, we developed the OCR solution ourselves from scratch.
Now that it’s done, we have something which replicates what the market leader does and is specifically tailored to our requirements — only much cheaper, because we’re avoiding licensing and hosting fees.
It’s a similar story for the deployment of Chat Bot, where we have partnered with Microsoft and are using their customisable Bot Framework. We believe that through the use of this framework and leveraging the strategic partnership we have with Microsoft, that we’ll build Chat Bot’s, which will outperform all the others on the market.
Another future example will be Anti Money-Laundering. We will always be required to verify that customers are who they say they are, using copies of passports, driving licences and utility bills. Today, these have to be authenticated by humans; in the future, we’ll utilise Computer Vision and Machine Learning to spot fraudulent or incorrect documents.
In all these cases, we’re not just replicating existing manual process; we’re re-engineering and improving them and then applying IA to free up humans to focus on more interesting added-value work.
The key to making transformation work
Paul learned a great deal from his previous experiences with other organisations where transformation projects were often derailed — brought down by delays, cost overruns or changes in management priorities.
We operate very differently. Anyone joining NewDay becomes aware very quickly that we’re not like a lot of the well establish corporates.
The first difference is the sheer visibility of the work that gets done. The management team are fully involved. Anyone can speak to anyone, face-to-face, to share challenges and explore solutions.
The second difference is pace. Things move very swiftly. Typically change happens in weeks and months rather than months and years. Strong active sponsorship and the adoption of Agile concepts and principles are key differentiators here.
The final difference is in the scope of the work done by individuals. One moment you’re down in the detail, trying to solve a particular problem; the next you’re panning back to look at the whole process from 10,000 feet, and discussing re-engineering options with the heads of other teams.
It’s an approach that is working for us, producing a much higher success rate and a truly motivating environment.
Finding the right people for the job
The specific style of NewDay appeals to people who want to see the result of their work, and who want others to see it too. It’s for people who don’t enjoy watching their work disappear into the void of huge projects at large organisations and consultancies. It’s for people who love keeping up with fast-developing topics like Intelligent Automation, and who enjoy taking projects all the way from ideation to implementation.
A few months ago, an employee said to Paul: “If I ever have to update my CV, no-one’s going to believe it — how much I’ve been involved in and delivered in such a short space of time.”
So if you’re fascinated by Intelligent Automation and you have the determination to see projects through from start to finish, we’d love to hear from you. Find out more about Working at NewDay or Browse Current Vacancies now.
