European Service Providers Bet Big on Automation | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

European service providers are betting big on automation. They are systematically including automation in their offerings, taking advantage of both Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and smarter varieties of automation technologies. Here’s a rundown on the key players’ approaches:

Capita: One of the earliest adopters of automation and the one that is the quietest about its initiatives is Capita, the UK behemoth. Examples of its deployment of RPA include Blue Prism in its front-office contracts and open source tools for software testing.

Atos: At its analyst event in Boston in April 2016, Atos announced a strong shift towards automation in its infrastructure services. Partnerships include IPsoft for Amelia, Arago, and Thoughtonomy. Examples of embedding automation in its services include combining it with analytics & cognitive services to transform end user support and reduce call volumes by more than 50%. It is also leveraging automation in its datacenter and cloud-services. Atos is also increasing its focus on Business Process Services (BPS), going beyond the government sector in the UK and possibly growing in other geographies as well. We expect Atos to take advantage of automation to boost competitiveness and opportunities in BPS, too.

Capgemini: The French major has partnered with automation technology providers such as Blue Prism, NICE, and UiPath for RPA and IBM for smart automation. It has been investing in its own automation management capabilities, too.

Sopra Steria: It has developed a new Lean Process Automation (LPA) offering based on a partnership with Blue Prism. Through LPA, Sopra Steria plans to provide clients with a virtual workforce controlled by business users.

Swiss Post Solutions (SPS): At its analyst event in Vietnam on November 16, SPS demonstrated the use of its own smart tools for identifying and processing key information on documents. It is also taking advantage of RPA from UiPath and smart automation from Celaton to automate many different types of processes including the handling of incoming email and claims processing for insurers. SPS is reaping the benefits of automation, reporting that it has more than doubled its productivity. This has enabled it to build capacity and expand its offerings into more business process services such as transactional F&A. Given these achievements, it is unsurprising that SPS has decided to expand its partnership with Celaton. It is going to be one of the first partners to host Celaton’s inSTREAM outside the UK, in Switzerland, and offer it as well as level 1 support for the software to its clients.

European service providers’ automation initiatives will have an impact on services pricing as well as delivery locations. We will continue to cover these and many other aspects of the Service Delivery Automation (SDA) market in our Service Optimization Technologies (SOT) research program.

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