Re-skilling workforce must to transform in digital age: Alok Bansal, Visionet India

Visionet delivers a complete range of technology services delivered with unified purpose. Its highly skilled and experienced enterprise technology consultants have assisted global organizations in mortgage and financial services, retail, consumer goods, distribution, manufacturing, and other industries.

Here, Alok Bansal, MD and Country Head, Visionet India, talks about the future growth areas. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the key growth areas that are driving factors in BPM and RPA segment?

Alok Bansal: There are multiple factors like digitization, service innovation and market transformation. These are reforming the BPM industry and have been significantly contributing to their growth

Digitization and automation: Most global companies will have digital transformation as their corporate strategy in the next couple of years. It will require wide implementation of disruptive technologies, organizations will look to work with efficient outsourcing partners that have innovative digital capabilityAsdigital transformation is enabled by automation, RPA combines business process management software and cognitive processing to replace human labor. Despite high technology costs, many BPM providers are embracing RPA to lower costs in the long run. Automation in outsourcing is changing the economics and attractivenessof the global outsourcing market.

Service innovation: Service innovation is shaping expectations on how services are delivered within the organization. Client experience has shown that outsourcing and innovation are often incompatible. The reason is that buyers expect a highly reliable service at a low price when they buy from an outsourcer. For long, the BPM industry were seemingly disinclined to the adoption of creative and disruptive innovations due to high initial cost of new technology, training time required. But outsourcing clients today expect high-value innovative services from outsourcing providers. And outsourcing companies will need to adopt incessant improvement processes through new technologies.

Global market changes: Transformation in the global market are changing the outsourcing business.Businesses now engage companies that offer outsourcing services in the cloud or prefer to manage these services in-house. Majority of outsourcing clients are looking for much more in terms of services than contemporary offerings. BPM clients are not reluctant to increasing spend for better service relationship; what they want is high-quality, reliable service.BPM services have moved beyond the traditional model of cost savings toward services that have a profound impact on a company's business. The future growth of the customer care BPM market will be fueled by higher-value services that address business outcomes through consulting, planning, and analysis.

DQ: What are the challenges being faced in the market?

Alok Bansal: One of the challenges for the Indian BPM industry that needs to be addressed are more intricate and high-involvement business problems to keep themselves relevant in the outsourcing business.

Recent years have seen many other emerging economies-such as China, Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia, and Vietnam-becoming preferred destinations for BPO. Hence, there needs to be continuous improvement in service delivery, client responsiveness, staying adaptive to their technology offerings

The industry will have to tackle several challenges to make sure that it keeps up with the growth expectations. Re-skilling the workforce is one of the challenges faced. The workforce must be trained on the latest technologies to help organizations transform in this digital age. Most of the IT-BPM companies have a big layer of middle management, who is playing the role of people management and program management. This layer will need to retrain itself on the latest technology and developments.

DQ: What are the industries that will be impacted through innovation in the segment?

Alok Bansal: These would be retail, manufacturing, BFSI, auto, e-commerce, healthcare, education, etc.

DQ: What are the innovative ways that are being developed?

Alok Bansal: India happens to be the hotbed for innovation. The days of traditional BPM processes and tools are finally past us! The onset of rapidly evolving new technology has led us towards “Intelligent Business Process Management’. It involves weaving cutting-edge technology such as RPA, AI, analytics, etc. into workflows to further enhance the outcomes, automate processes and improve efficiency.

Let’s consider a simple instance of breaking down the data derived from a BPM platform: where a traditional BPM system eats into time and resources, an ‘intelligent’ system will incorporate analytics to convert data automatically into tangible insights in no time.

DQ: What is the future of investments in the IT segment in India?

Alok Bansal: The Indian IT industry will be streaming at a greater pace than ever by adhering to future technologies through digital transformation. Gartner estimates that IT spending in India will total $94 billion in 2020, an increase of 6.6% compared to the current levels. Despite the unprecedent situation caused by Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a lull in the demand, but it, will pick up soon.

Here are some of the top technology areas which will attract higher investment:

Intelligent automation (RPA and AI): The investment of global enterprises in intelligent automation (IA) is on the rise with BFSI, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) being the key driving sectors.

While ML, predictive analytics and autonomics are moving up the maturity curve, AI-enabled chatbots and virtual assistants are already being used extensively. Gartner predicts that 25% of customer service operations will be using virtual customer assistants by 2021.

Hybrid cloud computing: The global cloud computing spending is predicted to almost double by 2022. Hybrid cloud adoption saw a big rise in recent years, with an expected CAGR of 17%. The security features on cloud have become promising and it is becoming a priority to safeguard and protect application data and infrastructure.

High cloud adoption is observed in finance and accounting, supply chain and logistics, and IT management. The emerging areas are customer management, marketing, procurement and manufacturing and operations.

Internet of Things: Investments in IoT technology services is growing rapidly than that in IoT products. Cloud service providers, analytics and infrastructure providers are propelling the IoT solutions market. In the Indian market, 20 billion devices are to be connected to IoT by 2021. IoT is growing at a faster pace and its adoption is spreading into various industries such as telecom, healthcare, retail, automobiles, manufacturing, supply chain, and service operations.

Blockchain: In India, it is looking promising. The government is the most critical stakeholder and enabler of blockchain; while BFSI leads adoption in India.Currently, 40+ blockchain initiatives are being executed by the public sector in India. At nearly 50%, BFSI has the maximum production level implementations in India. Logistics, retail, and manufacturing account for nearly 25% of blockchain implementations.

Industrial robotics: Automotive is one of the foremost verticals for industrial robotics and recently demand has been driven by tier 1/ tier 2 suppliers. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are pushing suppliers to invest in robotics to ensure better quality and faster production. Strong growth of the e-commerce industry in India and of logistics subsequently has pushed automation to keep up with high throughput requirements.

Communication objective: This is an industry story that is specifically talking about the BPM segment, the challenges and its future. With the current situation globally, the BPM sector is witnessing a change in demands and more innovative solutions.