Author: Jess McCuan

Better process mining means better outcomes across industries.

Apr 22, 2020 by Jess McCuan

When it comes to business processes, most companies are still consulting flow charts from five years ago. They burn millions of dollars and precious employee time without doing real process mining and without a real sense for what’s happening behind the scenes. 

In a booming economy, such inefficiency might have been permissible. But the world has changed. Now companies and organizations can’t afford to carry extra weight — or work from outdated process maps. No one wants to find themselves in the middle of a crisis. But when they do, it can be a good time to step back and assess basic business operations. For enterprises, a more efficient core can mean they’re better equipped to survive a massive economic shift. For hospitals, stepped-up efficiency means nothing short of saving more lives. 

More efficiency—and fairness—in insurance

Think of the standard operating procedure for most insurance claims, which agents can likely repeat in their sleep: 

assess damage →  calculate loss → note loss on policy →  approve or deny claim

Insurers have been evaluating claims with such steps, plus a handful of worn-out risk formulas, for decades. 

But imagine an insurer could map this process using years of its own past data. Which claims are most susceptible to fraud? Which demographic groups are more likely to be approved for certain claims? Transparency into every aspect of claims management could not only help identify steps that are time-consuming or error-prone, but also those that are potentially discriminatory. 

Helping healthcare workers make on-the-spot decisions

Now picture a nurse in a bustling clinic. She’s juggling forms, answering calls, and taking someone’s temperature, all while trying to assess a new patient. The patient: an overweight 45-year-old male with high stress and a checkered medical history. Should she administer a diabetes test? 

The factors that influence the decision are many. Beyond her training and best instincts, what if she had a ready answer from a system informed by real-time information? An AI model might pull in a number of factors, like anonymized patient health data, which would save the busy nurse time. It could also reduce errors, making sure tests were doled out only to those patients who need them. 

A new world of transparency 

Process mining in companies goes something like this: data analysts (or outside consultants) gather up log files from corporate information systems and use that gathered data for analysis. This can tell a company how the steps in its main processes are carried out, and how those steps relate.

But process mining has also historically been limited to visualizing processes from single data sources. Or, just getting to the analysis stage can require long, expensive data prep. And analysts are often stumped when they find that work travels around the company in a circuitous path generating data from a multitude of sources in a pile that’s large, hard to parse, and never clean.

Process mining + actionable AI 

That’s why we’re excited to announce Insights. You can read more about it here, but the gist is that you can now take process maps and turn them into an actionable AI — essentially letting you collect the wisdom of your company experts into one powerful AI model. 

Out in the real world, Insights can solve all sorts of problems: Our busy nurse could not only draw on anonymized patient data for diagnostic testing, but also on any broader national trends that might influence health. She could add all of these in as factors in her model — the more data, the better.  

Hero_Sonar lets you visually discover and map business processes.

While Insights is only available to customers for now, please feel free to sign up for a demo. 

Automation Hero is committed to making this technology accessible in the fight against Covid-19 and is offering its platform free of charge to the healthcare community. For more information, click here.

Learn more about Insights here.

The famous VC explains how “digital efficiency” will speed up. And that work and life will get forcefully re-balanced.

Apr 21, 2020 by Jess McCuan

In normal times, the tech community might look for Mary Meeker’s internet predictions in early summer. But Meeker, the venture capitalist and long-running trendspotter nicknamed Queen of the Internet, published a note early this year. And it’s not her usual prognosticating. It’s a deep dive into an urgent topic, how coronavirus affects the economy and tech. 

Comparing coronavirus to the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, she reviews the ripple effects of the world’s most recent 100 days, since coronavirus was first detected outside China.  

Early winners: enablers of remote work

First, she gives an overview of Covid-19’s initial winners and losers. An early leader: Zoom and its video conferencing technology; Zoom saw daily meeting participants rise from 10 million to 200 million in just three months. More frontrunners: messaging and collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, which have made themselves indispensable to the real winner of the coronavirus pandemic so far: remote work.

Digital transformation picks up speed

Then, her main thesis: Covid-19 accelerates digital transformation. Trends that were already underway take a giant leap forward, as the world shifts from offline to online life. Companies that will fare the best during and after the crisis? Those selling products that make other companies more “digitally efficient.” Also those that step up efficiency of sales and distribution with limited human contact. 

The virus has exposed some unfortunate aspects of American healthcare, namely that it hasn’t changed much since the Spanish flu of 1918. But now is the time for tech companies to help fix that — and fast — as automation and AI can improve just about every step in the patient journey. “Automation will continue to make inroads in health care to reduce workload and improve the quality of data capture,” she writes. “Applied / vertical intelligence is just beginning to be paired with abundant EHR data to drive the right insights to providers at the right time.”

Play every day — online

As work shifts entirely online, so does our entertainment, and Meeker singles out more winners of the crisis so far: Video game streaming service Twitch hit record usage levels in March, with 4.3 million daily active users. Other streaming services have seen the same. Beyond video games, more creative uses of the platforms have also been catching on. “Humans will find ways to compete in any world (offline or online),” she writes, “and the more playful it is the better.”

Coronavirus does not mean that all is lost, even if the world stands at the brink of a long downturn. She ends the report on a hopeful note, explaining that, after her new firm, Bond, conducted an informal survey of tech CEOs, many of them reported high productivity among their remote teams, and the flexibility to skip the commute and eat more meals with family was welcomed. Long-term effects of the Covid crisis? The months at home could “bolster family connectedness / seriousness of purpose / community / faith?” Perhaps we will emerge, she speculates, a “more united people and world.”

+ Images here from BOND report, first published by Axios, April 17, 2020.

We’re using intelligent OCR to help hospitals and healthcare workers — for free*.

Apr 20, 2020 by Jess McCuan

The world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a slew of vulnerabilities, chief among them our inability to cut through red tape. In the U.S., the FDA was painfully slow in waiving restrictions around mask production. Health and Human Services held up a huge shipment of ventilators. Banks and government agencies around the world are now drowning in loan applications, and insurers are overwhelmed with claims.  

A significant bit of bureaucracy is the paperwork around coronavirus itself, specifically intake forms for patients who may be suffering from it. Automation Hero is working to leverage our AI-powered intelligent OCR to speed up the steps involved. 

Dangerously long waits

Currently, patients in many medical systems around the globe go through an intake process that’s manual. And like other institutions, hospitals and urgent care clinics have been overwhelmed by a crowd of new people needing care, many of whom sit in waiting rooms or on clogged phone lines for hours before they interact with a nurse or doctor.  

One early hurdle in the admission process: healthcare workers must transfer a patient’s handwritten information from paper forms into a centralized digital database. But using intelligent OCR (optical character recognition), we can digitize handwritten and typed text on a standard Covid-19 health form to completely automate this transfer. 

Beyond traditional OCR

Intelligent OCR goes beyond traditional handwriting OCR by using domain-specific training data, meaning the platform focuses on more specific and relevant information to your business. In the end, our solution is much better equipped to accurately interpret problem cases and unusually messy handwriting. 

Free help for hospitals

Hospitals are scrambling on every front. Rural clinics lack specialized equipment and staff for treating Covid-19 patients. Urban hospitals lack space. Nurses being forced to wear garbage bags for gowns at a Manhattan hospital is a sign that these critical, life-saving institutions aren’t getting support they need, from state and local entities or anywhere else.

Automation Hero is committed to making this technology accessible in the fight against Covid-19 and is offering its platform free of charge to the healthcare community.

(*Updated: Offer available through October 2020).

Words to live by: It’s never too late to automate.

Apr 06, 2020 by Jess McCuan

Automation may have spent months or years on your list of rainy-day projects. “Someday when I have time,” you said, “I’ll map out how my team can do X, Y or Z more efficiently.” But the weeks passed, work got done at a reasonable pace, your team grew, and there was no need to streamline.

Suddenly, the need to work more efficiently is urgent. The world faces a long coronavirus-related recession, meaning businesses are slashing budgets and staff in order to survive. With many areas just now tentatively emerging from lockdown, teams that could once talk through problems while sitting next to each other no longer have that luxury. Long after the threat of coronavirus has passed, a remote workforce is likely to become the new normal, as corporations cut down on expensive real estate costs for whole categories of white-collar workers. 

What’s left: two types of companies

The companies that figured out automation long ago are now seeing the benefits of those efforts. They’ve already assessed, streamlined and sped up their core business processes. If they chose an end-to-end automation platform, they’ve moved beyond simple RPA and now use technology that can adapt and scale as their workload changes. They’ve cut out manual, repetitive tasks for knowledge workers. While their newly-remote employees may have all sorts of other hurdles to overcome, spending long hours on tedious tasks will not be one of them. 

Businesses that chose not to automate are likely now feeling some pain. A crisis like the current one can expose long-standing inefficiencies in an organization, as customer service teams get swamped with emails from anxious customers, loan officers get buried in applications, and lines jam with frantic requests. Manual processes are simply harder to manage from a distance. Think of printing out documents for a manager to sign. Picture this happening hundreds of times in a company each week, and the ensuing logistical nightmare when employees are forced to recreate the process from home.

Businesses that chose not to automate are likely now feeling some pain. Manual processes are simply harder to manage from a distance.

Not too late to automate

Never fear: No matter which camp your company falls in, it is not too late to explore or improve automations. Whether the task you’re looking to automate is large or small, the potential upsides are many. 

Let’s say your shipping company has shut down its call center and is now seeing soaring volumes of customer service requests via email. Whatever the nature of those requests — price quotes, address changes, package status checks — automation can save your team hours of time responding. 

Intelligent automation means combining artificial intelligence with RPA to address the task at hand. In this case, it might mean creating an AI model to scan and understand the intent of all those incoming messages. Based on that intent, automation software can either send a response to the email or route it to the proper department. 

For a global logistics company, Automation Hero used a two-step AI model to automate responses to 60% of their incoming inquiries. This led to an 80% workload reduction, mere seconds in response time, and overall higher customer satisfaction. 

Tasks can be simple or intricate

Perhaps the task you want to automate is more complex and multi-step. Let’s say employees at your company log into several different systems each day to extract data, close contracts, and send those contracts out to customers. In a normal economic climate, it might have been fine for such work to occupy hundreds of full-time employees around the clock. But now the size of your team has essentially shrunk by half, and you’re left scrambling to close contracts more efficiently.

You can design a simple automation that helps each employee zip through logins automatically and pull in data from each outside system. Without stepping away from their current task — let’s say they’re looking at a screen in Salesforce — they can speed through login, data extraction and input, meaning their Salesforce screen can be fully populated with closed contracts in seconds, instead of hours or days. 

Working with employees at a large German health insurance company, Automation Hero streamlined several data extraction and data compilation steps, pulling relevant information into PDFs for e-signature. It saved the employees the equivalent of 18 years’ worth of work. 

Getting started

If your normal work routine has been upended recently and you’re home on the couch for a few weeks, it’s as good a time as any to step back and look at the big picture. Where do you and your team spend most of your time? Which tasks are the most repetitive? These are likely areas that could be easily automated. As you move through the brainstorming, keep in mind how the small parts of the puzzle might also integrate with other teams or departments. No matter where this takes you, the first two concrete steps in end-to-end automation projects are almost always these: (1) identify use cases, listing your organization’s biggest process pain points; and (2) create a strategy and consult key stakeholders inside your company.

Now is a good time to take a step back — especially if you’re home on the couch for a few weeks.

Buckle up for an automated future

In a blog last month, Matt Mullenweg, a founding developer of WordPress, said a remote workforce is like managing a staff that’s all in different time zones. Overcommunication is critical, as is a general embrace of asynchronous communication. He couldn’t be more right. In our view, what’s equally important is a streamlined digital workflow. It should both eliminate tedious tasks and give managers a window to peek in on long-running, complex business processes that require multiple checkpoints. Which tasks are in progress? Which have been completed? An end-to-end automation platform at the core is the only way to achieve this. 

You knew, back in the pre-coronavirus good old days, that automation was important. It’s long been shown to save time, money and boost productivity. More and more young people are now looking for meaningful work, so good managers should have already been thinking about ways to cut down repetitive tasks. Now, in the current crisis, automation could not be more critical. It can solve small problems that give your company a quick boost in efficiency and ROI. Down the road it can help you slim down and improve core business processes as the pace of digital transformation picks up speed. 

Why a crisis might be the right time to correct long-standing inefficiencies.

Mar 23, 2020 by Jess McCuan

Crisis mode isn’t where any business wants to find itself (unless, of course, you happen to be in the crisis management industry). Depending on its severity, a crisis might deal a serious blow to your incoming leads and sales pipeline, or it could put more strain on your staff or internal systems, as customers rush to place orders, cancel orders, or fundamentally shift what they need from your business. 

Fixing what was wrong all along

A crisis can also expose long-standing inefficiencies in your organization. Let’s say your financial reporting works something like this: a team of five finance managers regularly download Excel spreadsheets, re-format those sheets to upload into SQL, reformat them again once they’ve run through financial management software, and then finally reformat that information for presentation as a PDF. It’s a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that’s potentially error-prone. With a simple automation, four steps could be turned into one. 

A crisis can expose long-standing inefficiencies in your organization. It’s also a good time to correct them.

The same is true for many types of internal data prep and movement between internal systems. Perhaps your company deals in real estate and property insurance. Before a natural disaster, most customers may have typed claim information into straightforward online forms, with only a few attaching images that needed manual review by agents. During a disaster, however, nearly all your customers may panic and attach photos to their claim forms, meaning your agents get swamped with tricky and time-consuming reviews. A simple automation can help you turn those images into machine-readable data in just a few seconds, meaning it can then be uploaded, classified and used right away in internal databases.

Customer needs shift under pressure

In any crisis, including the current coronavirus pandemic, what people need from businesses gets upended — for many reasons. Right now, banks, hospitals, insurance companies, government agencies, and online retailers are seeing an influx of claims and customer requests. Just think of the endless forms mortgage companies are processing now, for refinancing requests alone. Travel insurance, once a relatively rare option for air passengers, has suddenly seen a surge in demand.

In a crisis, what people need from a business gets turned on its head. The volume of requests might skyrocket, or drop off entirely.

Companies are getting crushed under the volume, with the need for raw document processing outpacing their computing power and systems capabilities, not to mention the onslaught of customer messages, inquiring about products or status.

Sort and classify incoming messages, fast

To help reduce this pressure, you need multi-channel support. If you’re a business owner who’s never seen much activity on Facebook or Twitter, for example, but now you are, you can create a simple automation that views those channels as data sources and uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and an AI model to sort and route incoming messages. For the flood of incoming emails, you can opt for several solutions, including (but not limited to):

• gathering and sorting incoming requests based on their intent
• sending automatic emails acknowledging acceptance
• generating automated responses
• responding with pertinent details (expected wait times, etc.)
• triggering automatic actions based on emails of various kinds 
• routing an email to the appropriate department or person for processing

Call center employees and customer support staff are always looking for new ways to reduce the number of steps they take as they field customer inquiries and swivel between systems with different logins. For example, you might treat a customer service platform as a data source, customizing automated responses to incoming messages, thereby eliminating significant phone time altogether.

Simplify work from home for all

Find that your work-from-home employees are struggling with repetitive tasks, activities that were easier when they were all sitting in the same room together? You can use Optical Character Recognition technology to decipher, for example, handwritten and half-handwritten documents. Simple screen automations, NLP and other techniques can help you quickly classify documents, extract information from them and write that info directly into a company database. Whatever the tasks, the automations can be set up to run as unattended or attended, depending on whether an employee wants to step in and review them.

No company wants to shift gears during a disaster.

To be sure, no company wants to shift gears during a disaster. But a crisis can be an excellent opportunity to reassess your core business processes. Could they use slimming down, simplifying or automating? If so, this likely means your current staff can be reassigned to higher-value tasks. Automating repetitive functions can help give temporary relief to overburdened workers, gives you a quick boost in ROI, perhaps a quick morale boost as well. It will also help ensure that you’re better prepared for a future downturn.

How Automation Hero’s AI-powered OCR handwriting solution is different — and better.

Mar 09, 2020 by Jess McCuan

Imagine you have a rather (ahem) fluffy job: you’re a claims processor at a pet insurance company that handles policies for dogs, cats, exotic birds and other creatures. Your department can see between 400-500 claim documents per day, detailing procedures like doggie X-rays, immunizations, and all manner of exams and prescriptions.

While the patients may be cuddly, some aspects of the work get more than a little hairy. If you thought the average doctor’s handwriting was messy, try interpreting veterinarians’ notes, which cover many species and can either be fully handwritten or half computer-printed and half written, on a wide range of clinical forms. Sometimes veterinarians sign their names, while others have staff members stamp their signatures using old-fashioned paper and ink. Even to a trained eye, a phrase like “apparent lesions on paws” might be confused with “aberrant lesions on paws,” which have very different medical meanings. Pet insurers assign dozens of employees, including specialized veterinary nurses, the task of interpreting such notes. In the end, those staffers spend hundreds of hours on tedious work. 

The opportunity in handwriting OCR 

To help combat the problem, all sorts of companies have sprung up around handwriting OCR, optical character recognition, which converts images of handwritten text into machine-coded text to make interpretation and data entry go more smoothly. Older firms like ABBYY and IRIS started tackling OCR in the ‘80s, and now everyone from IBM to Adobe, along with smaller startups, are piling on for what will be a $13 billion market by 2025. 

The trouble is, even after decades of research, most off-the-shelf handwriting recognition software lacks sophistication and can result in low accuracy rates. Especially when it comes to interpreting complex mashups of information like the pet forms above — where structured data sits side-by-side with semi-structured and unstructured data, and uncommon, colorful words get crammed into printed forms with too-small boxes.

OCR, the old-fashioned way

That’s because, while OCR software has improved, it has essentially worked on the same principles for decades. The software scans a document, weeding out artifacts and noise, like dust or stray marks. It zooms in on letters, numbers and other characters that need translating. Most software then literally “straightens up” the characters and readies them for interpretation. It evaluates each one — is this a “p”, or a “q”? — comparing it to other p’s and q’s in a stored catalog. Then it analyzes whole words. Is this “flower” or “flewer”? The program chooses “flower,” since that word exists in a stored dictionary. 

Automation Hero’s OCR solution works altogether differently. The biggest difference is this: Instead of using a system that’s like a giant dictionary, looking up and comparing words against all known words in the world, Automation Hero’s OCR uses only your set of words.

Instead of using a system that’s like a giant dictionary — looking up and comparing words against all known words in the world — our OCR uses only your set of words.

Domain-specific, with AI in the lead 

Our AI-powered OCR starts out using a dataset for training that’s domain-specific, i.e. unique to one particular industry or company. We can also use a practice dataset of your company’s own past documents. That means the practice dataset is highly specialized, leading to much more accurate interpretations of industry-specific words and their context. Because it saves its compute power for this narrower sphere, our OCR solution is much better equipped to accurately interpret problem cases and unusually messy handwriting. 

Here’s how it works: Let’s say you’re a property insurance company. You routinely process documents dealing with the concept of “square footage.” But these words get scrawled hastily by architects and building inspectors, and your traditional OCR software is stumbling to recognize them, meaning square footage data entry is still a tedious manual process. 

Our handwriting OCR solution uses a practice dataset that’s domain-specific, meaning it’s only about real estate and property. Compared to traditional handwriting recognition software, then, our OCR is more adept at recognizing variations on “square footage” and the ways architects and building inspectors might note it. It would know that “Sq footage,” “Sq feet” and “sq ftage” all mean “square footage,” for example. Or the AI might learn over time that certain letters are frequently transposed or condensed in similar ways when handwritten. 

Compared to traditional OCR, our platform is more adept at recognizing variations on ‘square footage’ and the ways architects and building inspectors might note it. It would know, for example, that ‘Sq footage,’ ‘Sq feet’ and ‘sq ftage’ all mean ‘square footage.’

In any document, we also focus our attention on identifying the key area for analysis first. That means one field, box, or physical part of the page that could be trickiest. Then we apply our custom OCR approach to that specific field, again reducing the scope for false positives. In the long run, it means more information is input correctly into your company database without manual review. 

Less gets lost in translation

The approach applies to material in foreign languages too. Let’s say your company regularly receives contracts in English, with a smattering of Dutch. Rather than using software that makes comparisons to all languages in the world, our OCR tool trains against a dataset that includes only English and Dutch. It would immediately be better than traditional handwriting recognition software at identifying problem cases, odd notations, or idioms in the two tongues.

If you’re already using traditional OCR software and want to keep it, no problem. Automation Hero’s platform can integrate existing OCR software, either using the translated information as a data source or zooming in on tricky cases. Because our algorithms learn fast how to handle uncommon words and edge cases, it can make quick work of documents that were previously generating errors. 

Handwriting: still hanging on

For a world that’s gone digital, there’s still plenty of handwritten material around. In the United States, a country with a gaping digital divide, handwriting still rules in certain geographies. Mobile technology use is up in rural areas, but laptop and desktop usage isn’t. That means companies requiring customers to fill in longer forms — like insurers and banks — must input tall stacks of handwritten documents. Some industries, no matter where they’re located, have also simply been slow to digitize. Take construction, for example, which is awash in handwritten equipment reports. Or veterinary offices, which may be filled with messy handwritten puppy prescriptions for years to come.