Built business resilience while realizing an ROI of 110% for a global healthcare technology leader, Royal Philips

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By AssistEdge RPA

Executive Summary

EdgeVerve commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the EdgeVerve AssistEdge RPA platform. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the AssistEdge RPA platform on their organizations. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed an organization with experience using the AssistEdge RPA platform. Forrester used this experience to project a three-year financial analysis. The EdgeVerve customer’s finance BPM operations, managed by Infosys. Given the level of manual operations required in their finance tasks, the customer developed a mandate to eliminate, simplify, standardize, and automate processes, and looked to Robotic Process Automation as one of the key enablers of their automation journey. After investing in the EdgeVerve AssistEdge platform, the customer saw significant impact on the efficiency of their finance operations, and realized cost savings through the elimination of FTE hours across 220 use cases. After investing in the EdgeVerve AssistEdge platform, the customer has been able to automate almost 31% of their Infosys BPM finance workforce.

KEY FINDINGS

Quantified benefits.

Risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits include:

• Average handling time of payroll posting reduced by 72%. RPA implementation saw BPM staff eliminate a total of 49,348 hours across three years in payroll posting processes. Cumulatively, this productivity gain saw a net present value of $993,137 over a three-year period.
• Faster and more effective cash collections saw 30% average reduction in time spend. Automated running process with RPA especially from the second year of the RPA program, saw a total of 21,320 hours eliminated in the cash collections processes.

• An average of 11 FTEs automated across three years from account reconciliation activities. Standardizing and automating reconciliation processes saw an average of 65% of time saved on this task for the customer’s accounting teams, incurring a net present value of $1,386,959 over a three-year period.
• Over a three-year period, the customer saw a 31% automation rate with its BPM operations. The organization was able to enable automation across a total of 220 use cases, including the four called out separately in this report. Across its remaining 216 use cases, this customer saw a net present value of $9,639,525 from FTE hours automated.

Unquantified benefits.

Benefits that are not quantified for this study include:

• Standardization of processes. The customer leveraged RPA implementation to standardize processes across finance operations. Due to RPA, running compliance or changes over process requires a less amount of time and effort, and builds better structure. Through the RPA implementation, 59% of use cases involved complete standardization, while a further 25% saw partial standardization.
• Change management processes to optimize RPA solutions. The customer also established a broader ESRA (Eliminate, standardize, right-source and automate) strategy in its organization to identify the processes that RPA would most be suited for. This included identifying processes that can be eliminated, simplifying the existing processes, standardize across regions and then looking at what can be automated. Within the automation phase RPA was one of the enablers that the customer used.
• Boost in employee morale. Due to elimination of FTEs involved in repeatable tasks, BPM staff were able to move towards more value-added tasks, boosting morale and skills.
• Integration and collaboration across Infosys ecosystem. The involvement of the Infosys BPM operations and implementation teams, working along side the client and EdgeVerve AssistEdge was able to provide the broader effort and collaborations needed to deliver the success of this program.

Costs.

Risk-adjusted PV costs include:

• Infrastructure, licensing and maintenance support. Infrastructure and maintenance, as well as licensing across a majority of attended bots and remaining unattended bot implementation, saw a net present value cost of $4,295,849.
• Ongoing operations and maintenance support. Dedicated staff across Infosys BPM and EdgeVerve teams were needed for operations, product support. This also required consistent effort from a core group of the customer’s IT managers for project management, bringing in an additional cost of $3,627,352.

The customer interview and financial analysis derive a three-year present value of total benefits of $16,639,491 over three years versus costs of $7,923,201 providing net benefits of $8,716,290 and a ROI of 110%.

KEY FINDINGS

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in the AssistEdge RPA platform. The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that the AssistEdge RPA platform can have on an organization.

DISCLOSURES

• Readers should be aware of the following:
• This study is commissioned by EdgeVerve and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
• Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the report to determine the appropriateness of an investment in the AssistEdge RPA platform
• EdgeVerve and Infosys BPM reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.
• EdgeVerve provided the customer name for the interview but did not participate in the interview.

Due Diligence
Interviewed EdgeVerve stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to the AssistEdge RPA platform.
Customer Interview
Interviewed decision-makers at an organization using the AssistEdge RPA platform to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.
Financial Model Framework
Constructed a financial model representative of the interview using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organization.
Case Study
Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

The EdgeVerve AssistEdge RPA Customer Journey

Drivers leading to the AssistEdge RPA platform investment

DISCLOSURES

Forrester interviewed Royal Philips, an EdgeVerve AssistEdge customer with the following characteristics:

• Royal Philips is a global leader of healthcare technology headquartered in Europe.
• Manages finance operations through Infosys BPM, employing 1,200 Infosys employees across finance processes.
• Philips collaborated with Infosys BPM to deploy 550 EdgeVerve AssistEdge bots across a three-year implementation timeframe.

DISCLOSURES

Philips adopted a Hoshin strategy to eliminate, simplify, standardize, and automate finance operations processes.
As part of this strategy, Philips identified robotic process automation (RPA) as one of the approaches to automation. Through RPA, Philips was looking to enable the following:

• Automation of 1 million work hours in finance operations over three years of deployment
• Efficient, improved, and consistent performance across finance operations
• Centralized BPM operations and enable end-to-end automation across finance operations domain

DISCLOSURES

Philips had an established partnership with Infosys BPM in handling its finance operations. As Philips looked to expand its automation capabilities, it worked with EdgeVerve and Infosys BPM to define strategic use cases for RPA implementation, within the existing Infosys BPM functions. Based on design principles, and change management, standard processes for RPA were defined and implemented from 2018 for the customer.
For this use case, Forrester has modeled benefits and costs over three years.

• 1,200 Infosys BPM staff in finance operations
• 200 BPM staff in collections department; 60 in accounting operations
• Blended average hourly cost of Infosys BPM staff is $2 5
• Main use case of RPA implementation was in BPM functions of Philips’ finance operations

Analysis Of Benefits

Quantified benefit data

COST SAVINGS FROM PRODUCTIVITY IN PAYROLL POSTING

From the customer interview, we understood that one of the use cases that RPA was implemented for was in automating the payroll posting process. After standardizing the operating procedure and enabling attended bots, the automation of payroll posting saw the following benefits.

• The organization saw average handling time for this process reduce by 72% by the third year of the RPA program, allowing the employees in payroll processing function move on to more value-added activities.
• With automation of this process, Philips was able to eliminate 16,449 hours of its Infosys BPM staff hours on average across the three years.

Modeling and assumptions.
The calculation of this benefit saw considered the following assumptions

• The Infosys BPM staff operated across Poland, China, Manila and India for Philips finance operations. With most of the RPA benefits incurred among the BPM staff in India, a blended average hourly cost of $25 was considered for Infosys BPM staff, with an assumed inflation rate of 3% every year.
• The elimination of hours will imply a gradual decrease in Infosys FTEs required for the accounting team across the use cases. However, accounting for not complete productivity conversion of eliminated hours, means that the rate of reduction will not be exact to the hours eliminated per year.

Risks.
In this calculation, Forrester also assumes the following risks:

• Estimations in average handline time considerations by the customer.
• Estimations of benefits realization across the three year program.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $993,137.

COST SAVING FROM PRODUCTIVITY GAINS IN RECONCILIATION PROCESS

• Another key RPA use case for the accounting team was in enabling quicker account reconciliation, which typically took about one-third of the accounting operations team’s time. With RPA implementation on the reconciliation process, transactions could be completed within 20 minutes, allowing the accounting operations team to realize an average of 65% reduction in time spend across the three years.
• This allowed Philips to realize a total of 69,155 hours saved from the reconciliation process across the three years.

Modeling and assumptions.
This quantified benefit considered the following assumptions:

• Blended average hourly rate of staff impacted to be $25, with compounded inflation incorporated.
• Given FTE hours automated across use cases for this team, we would assume a gradual reduction in total staff across year 2 and 3.
• The benefit from this use case is gradually realized, with most benefit coming through in year 2 and 3.
• Considering these assumptions and possible discrepancies in the estimated calculations from the customer, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $1,386,959.

To account for risks and assumptions made on hourly rates and accuracy of customer calculations on hours eliminated, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $416,976.
Risks.
In this calculation, Forrester also assumes the following risks:
Estimations in average handline time considerations by the customer. Estimations of benefits realization across the three year program.

• Estimations in average handline time considerations by the customer.
• Estimations of benefits realization across the three year program.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $993,137.

COST SAVING IN PRODUCTIVITY IN QUALITY CHECKS

One of the key tasks that needed to be performed by the project accounting team, was in conducting data checks and cleansing of the finance data received and processed.

• With EdgeVerve RPA, the customer enabled 21 AssistEdge RPA bots to review data postings on a continuous basis and replace manual work for data cleansing and sanity checks.
• Automating a time-intensive task, AssistEdge enabled 85% of time savings on this process by year 3 of the RPA implementation.

Modeling and assumptions.
This quantified benefit considered the following assumptions:

• The saving in FTE hours is also leading to a reduced base of accounting operations staff over the years.
• The accounting staff considered in this base are also dividing their time across the other use cases across finance and accounting operations.
• The benefit from this use case is gradually realized, with most benefit coming through in year 2 and 3.
• Considering these assumptions and possible discrepancies in the estimated calculations from the customer, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $4,202,894.

COST SAVING FROM AUTOMATED FTES

For Philips, the major use case for RPA implementation was in the automation of FTE hours across their finance operations. This was measured holistically across the remaining 216 use cases that implemented RPA, simplification, and standardization of processes. The automation across these remaining use cases incurred the following benefits for the Philips:

• Across the automation of the remaining 216 use cases, there was a total of 220 Infosys FTEs saved from finance operations. This incurred a cumulative cost saving of more than $10.1 million across the three years of implementation
• Beyond the four key use cases highlighted in the report above, Philips was able to see a remaining 212 Infosys BPM FTEs automated.
• Considering all 220 use cases, Philips incurred a 31% rate of automation from their Infosys BPM staff in their finance operations. This considers the 374 total FTEs saved from Infosys BPM from the original base of 1,200 employees.

Modeling and assumptions.
This specific quantified benefit considered the following assumptions:

• Base of staff considers the balance of finance operations; sans use cases in the above benefit categories.
• Benefits realized gradually with 25% of the automation benefits realized in year 1, 70% in year 2 and 100% realization factor in year 3.
• Blended average hourly rate across Infosys BPM and the customer’s internal staff managing finance operations of $25.
• Considering these assumptions and possible discrepancies in the estimated calculations from the interviews, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $9,639,525.

COST SAVING FROM AUTOMATED FTES

Additional benefits that the customer experienced but was not able to quantify include:

• Standardization of operating procedures was a significant benefit the customer experienced because of the RPA implementation. Change management and compliance activities now only required review of one process, as opposed to the four to five processes for each function that needed to occur before.
• Automation enabled business resilience, especially for critical finance functions of the customer’s organization, amid remote working restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Employees were able to move on to more value-added work instead of routine tasks, providing a more efficient finance organization as well as a better employee morale.
• The RPA implementation also benefitted from the collaboration across the EdgeVerve and existing Infosys BPM teams. Given the BPM team’s longstanding relationship and understanding of the customer’s finance operations could be leveraged for smooth implementation process and tracking.

FLEXIBILTY

Additional benefits that the customer experienced but was not able to quantify include:

• While the main use case for RPA implementation has been in the finance operations functions, the customer has also started using RPA across customer service and order management. This has the potential to further expand as procedures become more standardized.
• RPA has currently been implemented across extensive, routine tasks and processes. The process standardization that needs to occur for implementation will also bring clarity on needed process innovation across use cases in the future.
• The customer is also looking to augment RPA capabilities to include intelligent automation, using AI/ML to enable provisional accruals and automated maintenance.

Analysis Of Benefits

Drivers leading to the AssistEdge RPA platform investment

INFRASTRUCTRE, LICENSING AND MAINTENANCE COST

The EdgeVerve RPA implementation for this customer involved infrastructure and maintenance costs across the attended bots and unattended bots’ landscape.

• As RPA became more established across the finance operations, the bots grew to a total of 550 bots in year 3, with a majority in unattended mode.
• Infrastructure costs mainly involved a hosting on Azure cloud cost of $25,000 per month, incurring a $300,000 infrastructure cost for the bots gradually by year 2 and 3.
• Infrastructure maintenance would account to 20% of the licensing cost, amounting to $233,333 each year.

Modeling and assumptions.
These cost calculations make the following assumptions:

• Some initial costs for set up only involved hosting, gradually builds with remaining effort costs for set-up absorbed by EdgeVerve.
• Initial costs incurred by the customer mainly denote to time and effort and some infrastructure set-up.

Risks.
Considering the assumptions and the risks incurred in stability and consistency in bot management, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $4,295,849.

FLEXIBILTY

To assist with implementation and overall RPA implementation, the Infosys BPM team dedicated close to 50 staff members outside of the existing BPM staff to help with the implementation.

• The dedicated Infosys and EdgeVerve staff involved in implementation, product and operations support cost an average of $1.3 million every year across the three years.

Modeling and assumptions.
The costing for this includes the following assumptions:

• This cost model is only considering the time and effort of the Infosys and EdgeVerve staff involved in the implementation and support
• A productivity conversion ratio of 50% was considered for the Infosys and EdgeVerve staff leading the implementation.
• Industry averages of hourly rate of $25 was used for the Infosys and EdgeVerve’ s implementation staff.

Risks.
To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $3,627,352.

Analysis Of Benefits

CONSOLIDATED THREE-YEAR RISK-ADJUSTED METRICS

The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the ROI, NPV, and payback period for the composite organization’s investment. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis.

Appendix A

Total Economic Impact

Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT APPROACH

• Benefits represent the value delivered to the business by the product. The TEI methodology places equal weight on the measure of benefits and the measure of costs, allowing for a full examination of the effect of the technology on the entire organization.
• Costs consider all expenses necessary to deliver the proposed value, or benefits, of the product. The cost category within TEI captures incremental costs over the existing environment for ongoing costs associated with the solution.
• Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. Having the ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.
• Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.

• PRESENT VALUE (PV)
  The present or current value of (discounted) cost and benefit estimates given at an interest rate (the discount rate). The PV of costs and benefits feed into the total NPV of cash flows.
• NET PRESENT VALUE (NPV)
  The present or current value of (discounted) future net cash flows given an interest rate (the discount rate). A positive project NPV normally indicates that the investment should be made, unless other projects have higher NPVs.
• RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)
  A project’s expected return in percentage terms. ROI is calculated by dividing net benefits (benefits less costs) by costs.
• DISCOUNT RATE
  The interest rate used in cash flow analysis to take into account the time value of money. Organizations typically use discount rates between 8% and 16%.
• PAYBACK PERIOD
  The breakeven point for an investment. This is the point in time at which net benefits (benefits minus costs) equal initial investment or cost.

Automated & digitized 650,000+ contracts to deliver $20M in savings and a 60% improvement in productivity for world’s leading telecom company

XtractEdge. The Ultimate Document AI Platform.

Overview

Our client is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.

Opportunity

Large telecom companies deal with a plethora of mobile tower lease contracts daily. They need to manually identify the conditions & clauses, sort and analyze vast information volumes in the contracts. This is tedious, inefficient, and often introduces errors in data processing needed for critical decision making.
Our client’s sales and mobile tower negotiation and contract enforcement teams were overwhelmed with over 650,000+ tower rental contracts. The contract enforcement team would manually review the tower rent contracts and identify & capture relevant information such as favorable clauses eligible for capital refunds from tower and real estate companies. The sales and mobile tower negotiations team lacked utter visibility of their existing contracts, such as relevance as per particular location, the presence of multi-party leasing clauses, and any cost savings opportunities.
The manual review of these contracts affects both team efficiency and information accuracy. The existing process was very sluggish, involving a human perusing each contract, extracting terms and clauses, and manually inputting the data into down stream systems.

Other Challenges

Managing the contract template variance posed a considerable challenge, as there was no standardization. Each contract had several nuances consisting of multiple pages, clauses, and attached risks.
Legacy contract documents missed multiple crucial fields during the scanning process, impacting both accuracy plus efficiency in reading and interpreting the contracts.
Hence, the client sought a solution that would automate the contract review process and enable teams to work on higher-value tasks to save millions with better negotiations by having correct and instantly accessible information.

Solution

XtractEdge leverages Text Analytics and Computer Vision-based techniques to extract contract clauses faster and more accurately. The surgical abstraction of various contractual provisions and terms also facilitates down stream compliance checks and spend analytics.

• The client commissioned XtractEdge, which helped automate the contract review process — identify, extract and manage data from over 650,000+ historic commercial tower lease contracts with many amendments, addendums, and related documents
• A data pipeline was established to process contracts from upstream repositories, categorizing them, auto-abstracting, and validating signature status. The contractual data was then fed into a downstream system The XtractEdge team structured the workflow for a complete end-to-end extraction process. This involved:

• The elastic search interface helped connect contract metadata and automatically built a structured contract summary. This enabled the client’s teams to navigate through 650K+ contracts instantly and filter them using query-based and logical operators for identification as per specific keyword and phrase combinations
• XtractEdge helped assess the contract risk based on defined rules and flagged high-risk contracts

Outcome

XtractEdge is helping the client with better negotiations and an accurate view oftheir contracts and hidden risks.

60% improvement in partner network and brand visibility for a global sports brand

TradeEdge. The ultimate supply chain platform.

The client is a multi-billion-dollar global corporation in the business of design, development and distribution of footwear, apparel, and sports equipment. In the US alone, our client’sproducts are sold through thousands of retail accounts, in addition to their reach in virtually all countries worldwide. Their sales is conducted through a network of multiple intermediaries such as wholesalers, distributors, single-brand and multi-brand retail outlets.

Challenges

Process Challenges

• Difficulty of data collection
  As an organization of global scale, our client had to bring together various multi-national teams, local territory teams and multiple vendors to collect data from the ground. Despite their best efforts, they weren’t succeeding in this endeavor.
• Non-standardized data capture
  Each retailer / distributor / partner followed their own point-of-sale (POS) system. This made data flow to the parent organization—our client—inefficient. Even in cases where the data existed, it was asynchronous and rendered useless.
• Delays in data flow
  Onboarding a partner to their data acquisition system often took 12-18months. Even from onboarded partners, data wasn’t available to our client’s demand planners for weeks.

Business Challenges

• Inefficiencies in inventory management
  Without accurate and timely data flowing into the headquarters, sales and supply chain leaders were unable to optimally manage existing inventory of finished goods across markets.
• Inability to perform demand planning
  Without clear real-time visibility into sales performance across regions,products and other dimensions, demand planners were working onsell-in data (no. of products sold to retailer) instead of the more precise sell-through data (no. of products sold to customers).
• Low trust on data
  Without streamlined and consolidated data from across retailers, the data being received was deemed untrustworthy or unreliable.
• Sub-optimal response to market dynamics
  Slow onboarding of partners (which took 12-18 months), delays in data availability (as much as weeks) and poor data quality meant that our client couldn’t respond to market indications appropriately or on time.

In response to these business challenges, our client launched one of their business- level initiatives of the year: Redesign of POS business intelligence systems. They had been working closely with their retail partners to increase market partner collaboration and effectiveness to find mutually beneficial agreements for all parties involved.

• Onboard partners globally while maintaining healthy relationships—they set a goal of onboarding 100 partners in 2-3 years
• Process data within 2 hours
• Be secure and configurable
• Be scalable and future-proof
• Leverage automation for convenience of use—with minimum manual intervention
• Offer ease of operations—enable seamless and automated relationships with retailers for continuous data flow

Solution: TradeEdge Demand Sensing Enabled Global Data Acquisition And Harmonization For Better Demand Planning

The team at TradeEdge adopted a consulting plus product implementation approach to help our client meet their business goals. Leveraging our experience working on similar projects in the retail/CPG industry on a global scale, we brought with us a systematic, process-oriented approach to this initiative.
We began by working closely with the leadership teams at our client organization, understanding and adapting to the client ecosystem; studying their data acquisition processes; interacting with multiple stakeholders likeclient vendors, client partners, business team, technical teams and market leads; and being involved in various stages of the product lifecycle.

Enhancing Data Processing Through Customized Implementation

After setting up a robust process across the client’s global organization, we moved to the platform implementation phase. Our client chose theTradeEdge platform for specific reasons: TradeEdge Market Connect is are liable platform that not only facilitates better data acquisition,but also better harmonization. Infosys’ long-term engagement with this client on other projects, and TradeEdge’s success with other global conglomerates stood testimony to its capabilities.
After defining processes and enabling systems to standardize data acquisition, we brought EdgeVerve’s TradeEdge to connect all of our customer’s key partners across the globe, effortlessly accepting data in myriad formats and complexities—integration format, granularity, frequency,calendars, follow up mechanism etc. TradeEdge Market Connect retains these complexities, harmonizes all this data and enables them to be accurate and trustworthy in record time.

Pilot Onboarding And Acceleration

The first retailer onboarding took approximately 6 months. But the lessons from that experience and subsequent improvements, along with multiple onboarding running in parallel from India, Mexico and China locations of TradeEdge, we onboarded 325 client partners in 5 years. By using customized onboarding models, we were able to achieve this accelerated success, far exceeding the target of onboarding 100 partners in 3 years.

Business Outcomes

Just like we had anticipated, TradeEdge Demand Sensing is presenting far-reaching impact on our client organization across the globe.
60% Increase In Partner Network And Brand Visibility
With TradeEdge’s help, our client has onboarded 325+ retailers, covering 32,000+ stores across 30+ countries. This gives them accurate, reliable, trustworthy and timely data empowering thousands of business users across the globe perform demand planning and forecasting more efficiently.
Omni-Channel Visibility
TradeEdge Demand Sensing gave our client clear visibility across all channels — digital, brick and mortar, direct etc. — eliminating the data analysis in silos. With the harmonized data from TradeEdge, our client now performs cross-channel analysis to glean more meaningful insights.Towards Sell-Through Way Of Demand Planning
Towards Sell-Through Way Of Demand Planning
With inventory turn increased by up to 30%, TradeEdge enabled the client to move from being a sell-in demand planning organization to take the more competitive sell-through approach. In this process, we have transformed how 2500+ business users are working today— be it strategic leaders, financial analysts, category managers, business planners, account managers, data scientists, and retailers’ operations teams. With insights from TradeEdge’sdata initiatives, our client is able to further their growth strategy—of doubling the impact of innovation, increasing speed to market and growing direct connections with consumers— assigning resources to target growing cities and 10 countries over the next 5 years.

Way Forward

Having effectively solved a key business problem, our client approached us to replicate the success for another of their flagship brands with TradeEdge Demand Sensing. We’ve developed a roadmap focusing on data quality and implementing new features. TradeEdge would be powering the client’s data-driven strategies for growth over the next five years.

60% improvement in partner network and brand visibility for a global sports brand

TradeEdge. The ultimate supply chain platform.

The client is a multi-billion-dollar global corporation in the business of design, developmentand distribution of footwear, apparel, and sports equipment. In the US alone, our client’sproducts are sold through thousands of retail accounts, in addition to their reach in virtually allcountries worldwide. Their sales is conducted through a network of multiple intermediaries such as wholesalers, distributors, single-brand and multi-brand retail outlets.

Challenges

Process Challenges

• Difficulty of data collection
  As an organization of global scale, our client had to bring together various multi-national teams, local territory teams and multiple vendors to collect data from the ground. Despite their best efforts, they weren’t succeeding in this endeavor.
• Non-standardized data capture
  Each retailer / distributor / partner followed their own point-of-sale (POS)system. This made data flow to the parent organization—our client—inefficient. Even in cases where the data existed, it was asynchronous and rendered useless.
• Delays in data flow
  Onboarding a partner to their data acquisition system often took 12-18months. Even from onboarded partners, data wasn’t available to our client’s demand planners for weeks.

Business Challenges

• Inefficiencies in inventory management
  Without accurate and timely data flowing into the headquarters, sales and supply chain leaders were unable to optimally manage existing inventory of finished goods across markets.
• Inability to perform demand planning
  Without clear real-time visibility into sales performance across regions,products and other dimensions, demand planners were working onsell-in data (no. of products sold to retailer) instead of the more precisesell-through data (no. of products sold to customers).
• Low trust on data
  Without streamlined and consolidated data from across retailers, the data being received was deemed untrustworthy or unreliable.
• Sub-optimal response to market dynamics
  Slow onboarding of partners (which took 12-18 months), delays in data availability (as much as weeks) and poor data quality meant that our client couldn’t respond to market indications appropriately or on time.

In response to these business challenges, our client launched one of their business- level initiatives of the year: Redesign of POS business intelligence systems. They had been working closely with their retail partners to increase market partner collaboration and effectiveness to find mutually beneficial agreements for all parties involved.

• Onboard partners globally while maintaining healthy relationships—they set a goal of onboarding 100 partners in 2-3 years
• Process data within 2 hours
• Be secure and configurable
• Be scalable and future-proof
• Leverage automation for convenience of use—with minimum manual intervention
• Offer ease of operations—enable seamless and automated relationships with retailers for continuous data flow

Solution: TradeEdge Demand Sensing Enabled Global Data Acquisition And Harmonization For Better Demand Planning

The team at TradeEdge adopted a consulting plus product implementation approach to help our client meet their business goals. Leveraging our experience working on similar projects in the retail/CPG industry on a global scale, we brought with us a systematic, process-oriented approach to thisinitiative.
We began by working closely with the leadership teams at our client organization, understanding and adapting to the client ecosystem; studying their data acquisition processes; interacting with multiple stakeholders likeclient vendors, client partners, business team, technical teams and marketleads; and being involved in various stages of the product lifecycle.

Enhancing Data Processing Through Customized Implementation

After setting up a robust process across the client’s global organization, we moved to the platform implementation phase. Our client chose theTradeEdge platform for specific reasons: TradeEdge Market Connect is areliable platform that not only facilitates better data acquisition,but also better harmonization. Infosys’ long-term engagement with thisclient on other projects, and TradeEdge’s success with other global conglomerates stood testimony to its capabilities.
After defining processes and enabling systems to standardize data acquisition, we brought EdgeVerve’s TradeEdge to connect all of our customer’s key partners across the globe, effortlessly accepting data inmyriad formats and complexities—integration format, granularity, frequency,calendars, follow up mechanism etc. TradeEdge Market Connect retains these complexities, harmonizes all this data and enables them to be accurate and trustworthy in record time.

Pilot Onboarding And Acceleration

The first retailer onboarding took approximately 6 months. But the lessons from that experience and subsequent improvements, along with multiple onboarding running in parallel from India, Mexico and China locations of TradeEdge, we onboarded 325 client partners in 5 years. By using customized onboarding models, we were able to achieve this accelerated success, far exceeding the target of onboarding 100 partners in 3 years.

Business Outcomes

Just like we had anticipated, TradeEdge Demand Sensing is presenting far-reaching impact on our client organization across the globe.
60% Increase In Partner Network And Brand Visibility
With TradeEdge’s help, our client has onboarded 325+ retailers, covering 32,000+ stores across 30+ countries. This gives them accurate, reliable, trustworthy and timely data empowering thousands of business users across the globe perform demand planning and forecasting more efficiently.
Omni-Channel Visibility
TradeEdge Demand Sensing gave our client clear visibility across all channels — digital, brick and mortar, direct etc. — eliminating the data analysis in silos. With the harmonized data from TradeEdge, our client now performs cross-channel analysis to glean more meaningful insights.Towards Sell-Through Way Of Demand Planning
Towards Sell-Through Way Of Demand Planning
With inventory turn increased by up to 30%, TradeEdge enabled the client to move from being a sell-in demand planning organization to take the more competitive sell-through approach. In this process, we have transformed how 2500+ business users are working today— be it strategic leaders, financial analysts, category managers, business planners, account managers, data scientists, and retailers’ operations teams. With insights from TradeEdge’sdata initiatives, our client is able to further their growth strategy—of doubling the impact of innovation, increasing speed to market and growing direct connections with consumers— assigning resources to target growing cities and 10 countries over the next 5 years.

Way Forward

Having effectively solved a key business problem, our client approached us to replicate the success for another of their flagship brands with TradeEdge Demand Sensing. We’ve developed a roadmap focusing on data quality and implementing new features. TradeEdge would be powering the client’s data-driven strategies for growth over the next five years.

Digitized 170K+ loan applications with 90% accuracy for a large US-based bank

XtractEdge.The Ultimate Document AI Platform.

Overview

Our client, one of the oldest and largest US-based financial institutions, offers a broad range of retail and commercial banking products and servicesto individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, large corporations and institutions.

Opportunity

Our client had to review and approve 25K+ loan applications in a week, in the midst of COVID-19 and an unprecedented surge in Pay check Protection Program (PPP) Small Business Administration (SBA) related loan applications. They also had to authenticate the small business enterprises applying for the loan, by extracting critical employee payroll data needed for approving the loan application.

Solution

The bank leveraged XtractEdge Platform and its computer vision capability to accelerate loan processing for PPP SBA loans with high accuracy. The XtractEdge Platform

• Crawled through loan application database (25K+ loan application folders, with over 170K documents) to find and extract only the documents that are necessary for loan processing
• Processed a variety of documents, submitted by borrowers in a variety of formats, to extract payroll information
• Assembled wage data with related information for traceability and audit
• Delivered both a simple system for validation, and an automated loan approval process and system
• Enabled the solution design without any need for data or system integration

Outcome

The implementation of XtractEdge Platform helped the bank:

• Serve a large number of impacted customers by getting them access to PPP SBA loans
• Accelerate loan processing, while adhering to stringent risk and audit requirements
• Achieve data accuracy of around 90%
• Scale the operation to extract information at the speed of 15,000 digital forms per hour. This allowed for quick automated disposition of loans
• Provide traceability for risk and audit now, and in the future

XtractEdge Platform Successfully

• Crawled through 25K+ loan application folders with over 170K documents
• Extracted data at the speed of 15,000 digital forms per hour for faster execution by loan officer Achieved data accuracy of around 90%

60% reduction in average claim settlement time for a US-based Fortune 500 healthcare company

AssistEdge. The ultimate automation platform.

Our client, a US based Fortune 500 healthcare company, is focused on government sponsored health care programs for families and individuals. With over 20,000 employees, they focus on contracts with state governments and serve health plans providing a wide range of quality healthcare services to consumers in over 13 US states.

Opportunity

While having achieved cost benefits with off shoring, the client was still facing
backlogs and high cost per claim. This was due to the requirement of a
multi-product offering and a need to validate and compute the actual payouts
based on the benefits of the individual plans and rules for specific states. A
large workforce was involved in performing these manual interventions that
required validation of pending claims. Two main areas had a backlog of claims
and needed immediate attention- Anesthesia and COBA (Coordination of
Benefits Agreement). The volume was further building up for these and
required working through several applications and databases. The high
volume and stress to turn around claims manually on time led to errors,
further reducing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

To improve customer experience, productivity and accuracy, the client wanted
to automate manual tasks. Before adopting an automation tool, the company
also underwent an extreme makeover of their business strategy by
implementing multiple cost optimization strategies.

Solution

EdgeVerve’s automation platform AssistEdge RPA helped the company
maintain operational SLAs, making RPA a key part of their cost optimization
strategy. Starting with just 10 bots and two areas, the client has now
embarked on an enterprise wide license to scale the program. At present,
EdgeVerve has implemented over 12 use cases and has a pipeline to
potentially implement over 90 bots with other use cases in the next 12
months.

AssistEdge RPA helped in achieving 100% automation of Anesthesia and
COBA claims processing and validation, of which Anesthesia claims process
automation has been implemented for 2 states and COBA claims processing
automation for 4 states. The bots also generate “Success/Failure exception
mail records” and “Tracing in Log file” reports. And in case of discrepancies,
automatic routing of the claim gets lined up to the ‘PEND’ Queue.

Built business resilience while realizing an ROI of 110% for a global healthcare technology leader, Royal Philips

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By AssistEdge RPA

Executive Summary

EdgeVerve commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the EdgeVerve AssistEdge RPA platform. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the AssistEdge RPA platform on their organizations. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed an organization with experience using the AssistEdge RPA platform. Forrester used this experience to project a three-year financial analysis. The EdgeVerve customer’s finance BPM operations, managed by Infosys. Given the level of manual operations required in their finance tasks, the customer developed a mandate to eliminate, simplify, standardize, and automate processes, and looked to Robotic Process Automation as one of the key enablers of their automation journey. After investing in the EdgeVerve AssistEdge platform, the customer saw significant impact on the efficiency of their finance operations, and realized cost savings through the elimination of FTE hours across 220 use cases. After investing in the EdgeVerve AssistEdge platform, the customer has been able to automate almost 31% of their Infosys BPM finance workforce.

KEY FINDINGS

Quantified benefits.

Risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits include:

• Average handling time of payroll posting reduced by 72%. RPA implementation saw BPM staff eliminate a total of 49,348 hours across three years in payroll posting processes. Cumulatively, this productivity gain saw a net present value of $993,137 over a three-year period.
• Faster and more effective cash collections saw 30% average reduction in time spend. Automated running process with RPA especially from the second year of the RPA program, saw a total of 21,320 hours eliminated in the cash collections processes.

• An average of 11 FTEs automated across three years from account reconciliation activities. Standardizing and automating reconciliation processes saw an average of 65% of time saved on this task for the customer’s accounting teams, incurring a net present value of $1,386,959 over a three-year period.
• Over a three-year period, the customer saw a 31% automation rate with its BPM operations. The organization was able to enable automation across a total of 220 use cases, including the four called out separately in this report. Across its remaining 216 use cases, this customer saw a net present value of $9,639,525 from FTE hours automated.

Unquantified benefits.

Benefits that are not quantified for this study include:

• Standardization of processes. The customer leveraged RPA implementation to standardize processes across finance operations. Due to RPA, running compliance or changes over process requires a less amount of time and effort, and builds better structure. Through the RPA implementation, 59% of use cases involved complete standardization, while a further 25% saw partial standardization.
• Change management processes to optimize RPA solutions. The customer also established a broader ESRA (Eliminate, standardize, right-source and automate) strategy in its organization to identify the processes that RPA would most be suited for. This included identifying processes that can be eliminated, simplifying the existing processes, standardize across regions and then looking at what can be automated. Within the automation phase RPA was one of the enablers that the customer used.
• Boost in employee morale. Due to elimination of FTEs involved in repeatable tasks, BPM staff were able to move towards more value-added tasks, boosting morale and skills.
• Integration and collaboration across Infosys ecosystem. The involvement of the Infosys BPM operations and implementation teams, working along side the client and EdgeVerve AssistEdge was able to provide the broader effort and collaborations needed to deliver the success of this program.

Costs.

Risk-adjusted PV costs include:

• Infrastructure, licensing and maintenance support. Infrastructure and maintenance, as well as licensing across a majority of attended bots and remaining unattended bot implementation, saw a net present value cost of $4,295,849.
• Ongoing operations and maintenance support. Dedicated staff across Infosys BPM and EdgeVerve teams were needed for operations, product support. This also required consistent effort from a core group of the customer’s IT managers for project management, bringing in an additional cost of $3,627,352.

The customer interview and financial analysis derive a three-year present value of total benefits of $16,639,491 over three years versus costs of $7,923,201 providing net benefits of $8,716,290 and a ROI of 110%.

KEY FINDINGS

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in the AssistEdge RPA platform. The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that the AssistEdge RPA platform can have on an organization.

DISCLOSURES

• Readers should be aware of the following:
• This study is commissioned by EdgeVerve and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
• Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the report to determine the appropriateness of an investment in the AssistEdge RPA platform
• EdgeVerve and Infosys BPM reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.
• EdgeVerve provided the customer name for the interview but did not participate in the interview.

Due Diligence
Interviewed EdgeVerve stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to the AssistEdge RPA platform.
Customer Interview
Interviewed decision-makers at an organization using the AssistEdge RPA platform to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.
Financial Model Framework
Constructed a financial model representative of the interview using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organization.
Case Study
Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

The EdgeVerve AssistEdge RPA Customer Journey

Drivers leading to the AssistEdge RPA platform investment

DISCLOSURES

Forrester interviewed Royal Philips, an EdgeVerve AssistEdge customer with the following characteristics:

• Royal Philips is a global leader of healthcare technology headquartered in Europe.
• Manages finance operations through Infosys BPM, employing 1,200 Infosys employees across finance processes.
• Philips collaborated with Infosys BPM to deploy 550 EdgeVerve AssistEdge bots across a three-year implementation timeframe.

DISCLOSURES

Philips adopted a Hoshin strategy to eliminate, simplify, standardize, and automate finance operations processes.
As part of this strategy, Philips identified robotic process automation (RPA) as one of the approaches to automation. Through RPA, Philips was looking to enable the following:

• Automation of 1 million work hours in finance operations over three years of deployment
• Efficient, improved, and consistent performance across finance operations
• Centralized BPM operations and enable end-to-end automation across finance operations domain

DISCLOSURES

Philips had an established partnership with Infosys BPM in handling its finance operations. As Philips looked to expand its automation capabilities, it worked with EdgeVerve and Infosys BPM to define strategic use cases for RPA implementation, within the existing Infosys BPM functions. Based on design principles, and change management, standard processes for RPA were defined and implemented from 2018 for the customer.
For this use case, Forrester has modeled benefits and costs over three years.

• 1,200 Infosys BPM staff in finance operations
• 200 BPM staff in collections department; 60 in accounting operations
• Blended average hourly cost of Infosys BPM staff is $2 5
• Main use case of RPA implementation was in BPM functions of Philips’ finance operations

Analysis Of Benefits

Quantified benefit data

COST SAVINGS FROM PRODUCTIVITY IN PAYROLL POSTING

From the customer interview, we understood that one of the use cases that RPA was implemented for was in automating the payroll posting process. After standardizing the operating procedure and enabling attended bots, the automation of payroll posting saw the following benefits.

• The organization saw average handling time for this process reduce by 72% by the third year of the RPA program, allowing the employees in payroll processing function move on to more value-added activities.
• With automation of this process, Philips was able to eliminate 16,449 hours of its Infosys BPM staff hours on average across the three years.

Modeling and assumptions.
The calculation of this benefit saw considered the following assumptions

• The Infosys BPM staff operated across Poland, China, Manila and India for Philips finance operations. With most of the RPA benefits incurred among the BPM staff in India, a blended average hourly cost of $25 was considered for Infosys BPM staff, with an assumed inflation rate of 3% every year.
• The elimination of hours will imply a gradual decrease in Infosys FTEs required for the accounting team across the use cases. However, accounting for not complete productivity conversion of eliminated hours, means that the rate of reduction will not be exact to the hours eliminated per year.

Risks.
In this calculation, Forrester also assumes the following risks:

• Estimations in average handline time considerations by the customer.
• Estimations of benefits realization across the three year program.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $993,137.

COST SAVING FROM PRODUCTIVITY GAINS IN RECONCILIATION PROCESS

• Another key RPA use case for the accounting team was in enabling quicker account reconciliation, which typically took about one-third of the accounting operations team’s time. With RPA implementation on the reconciliation process, transactions could be completed within 20 minutes, allowing the accounting operations team to realize an average of 65% reduction in time spend across the three years.
• This allowed Philips to realize a total of 69,155 hours saved from the reconciliation process across the three years.

Modeling and assumptions.
This quantified benefit considered the following assumptions:

• Blended average hourly rate of staff impacted to be $25, with compounded inflation incorporated.
• Given FTE hours automated across use cases for this team, we would assume a gradual reduction in total staff across year 2 and 3.
• The benefit from this use case is gradually realized, with most benefit coming through in year 2 and 3.
• Considering these assumptions and possible discrepancies in the estimated calculations from the customer, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $1,386,959.

To account for risks and assumptions made on hourly rates and accuracy of customer calculations on hours eliminated, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $416,976.
Risks.
In this calculation, Forrester also assumes the following risks:
Estimations in average handline time considerations by the customer. Estimations of benefits realization across the three year program.

• Estimations in average handline time considerations by the customer.
• Estimations of benefits realization across the three year program.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $993,137.

COST SAVING IN PRODUCTIVITY IN QUALITY CHECKS

One of the key tasks that needed to be performed by the project accounting team, was in conducting data checks and cleansing of the finance data received and processed.

• With EdgeVerve RPA, the customer enabled 21 AssistEdge RPA bots to review data postings on a continuous basis and replace manual work for data cleansing and sanity checks.
• Automating a time-intensive task, AssistEdge enabled 85% of time savings on this process by year 3 of the RPA implementation.

Modeling and assumptions.
This quantified benefit considered the following assumptions:

• The saving in FTE hours is also leading to a reduced base of accounting operations staff over the years.
• The accounting staff considered in this base are also dividing their time across the other use cases across finance and accounting operations.
• The benefit from this use case is gradually realized, with most benefit coming through in year 2 and 3.
• Considering these assumptions and possible discrepancies in the estimated calculations from the customer, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $4,202,894.

COST SAVING FROM AUTOMATED FTES

For Philips, the major use case for RPA implementation was in the automation of FTE hours across their finance operations. This was measured holistically across the remaining 216 use cases that implemented RPA, simplification, and standardization of processes. The automation across these remaining use cases incurred the following benefits for the Philips:

• Across the automation of the remaining 216 use cases, there was a total of 220 Infosys FTEs saved from finance operations. This incurred a cumulative cost saving of more than $10.1 million across the three years of implementation
• Beyond the four key use cases highlighted in the report above, Philips was able to see a remaining 212 Infosys BPM FTEs automated.
• Considering all 220 use cases, Philips incurred a 31% rate of automation from their Infosys BPM staff in their finance operations. This considers the 374 total FTEs saved from Infosys BPM from the original base of 1,200 employees.

Modeling and assumptions.
This specific quantified benefit considered the following assumptions:

• Base of staff considers the balance of finance operations; sans use cases in the above benefit categories.
• Benefits realized gradually with 25% of the automation benefits realized in year 1, 70% in year 2 and 100% realization factor in year 3.
• Blended average hourly rate across Infosys BPM and the customer’s internal staff managing finance operations of $25.
• Considering these assumptions and possible discrepancies in the estimated calculations from the interviews, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $9,639,525.

COST SAVING FROM AUTOMATED FTES

Additional benefits that the customer experienced but was not able to quantify include:

• Standardization of operating procedures was a significant benefit the customer experienced because of the RPA implementation. Change management and compliance activities now only required review of one process, as opposed to the four to five processes for each function that needed to occur before.
• Automation enabled business resilience, especially for critical finance functions of the customer’s organization, amid remote working restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Employees were able to move on to more value-added work instead of routine tasks, providing a more efficient finance organization as well as a better employee morale.
• The RPA implementation also benefitted from the collaboration across the EdgeVerve and existing Infosys BPM teams. Given the BPM team’s longstanding relationship and understanding of the customer’s finance operations could be leveraged for smooth implementation process and tracking.

FLEXIBILTY

Additional benefits that the customer experienced but was not able to quantify include:

• While the main use case for RPA implementation has been in the finance operations functions, the customer has also started using RPA across customer service and order management. This has the potential to further expand as procedures become more standardized.
• RPA has currently been implemented across extensive, routine tasks and processes. The process standardization that needs to occur for implementation will also bring clarity on needed process innovation across use cases in the future.
• The customer is also looking to augment RPA capabilities to include intelligent automation, using AI/ML to enable provisional accruals and automated maintenance.

Analysis Of Benefits

Drivers leading to the AssistEdge RPA platform investment

INFRASTRUCTRE, LICENSING AND MAINTENANCE COST

The EdgeVerve RPA implementation for this customer involved infrastructure and maintenance costs across the attended bots and unattended bots’ landscape.

• As RPA became more established across the finance operations, the bots grew to a total of 550 bots in year 3, with a majority in unattended mode.
• Infrastructure costs mainly involved a hosting on Azure cloud cost of $25,000 per month, incurring a $300,000 infrastructure cost for the bots gradually by year 2 and 3.
• Infrastructure maintenance would account to 20% of the licensing cost, amounting to $233,333 each year.

Modeling and assumptions.
These cost calculations make the following assumptions:

• Some initial costs for set up only involved hosting, gradually builds with remaining effort costs for set-up absorbed by EdgeVerve.
• Initial costs incurred by the customer mainly denote to time and effort and some infrastructure set-up.

Risks.
Considering the assumptions and the risks incurred in stability and consistency in bot management, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $4,295,849.

FLEXIBILTY

To assist with implementation and overall RPA implementation, the Infosys BPM team dedicated close to 50 staff members outside of the existing BPM staff to help with the implementation.

• The dedicated Infosys and EdgeVerve staff involved in implementation, product and operations support cost an average of $1.3 million every year across the three years.

Modeling and assumptions.
The costing for this includes the following assumptions:

• This cost model is only considering the time and effort of the Infosys and EdgeVerve staff involved in the implementation and support
• A productivity conversion ratio of 50% was considered for the Infosys and EdgeVerve staff leading the implementation.
• Industry averages of hourly rate of $25 was used for the Infosys and EdgeVerve’ s implementation staff.

Risks.
To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $3,627,352.

Analysis Of Benefits

CONSOLIDATED THREE-YEAR RISK-ADJUSTED METRICS

The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the ROI, NPV, and payback period for the composite organization’s investment. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis.

Appendix A

Total Economic Impact

Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT APPROACH

• Benefits represent the value delivered to the business by the product. The TEI methodology places equal weight on the measure of benefits and the measure of costs, allowing for a full examination of the effect of the technology on the entire organization.
• Costs consider all expenses necessary to deliver the proposed value, or benefits, of the product. The cost category within TEI captures incremental costs over the existing environment for ongoing costs associated with the solution.
• Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. Having the ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.
• Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.

• PRESENT VALUE (PV)
  The present or current value of (discounted) cost and benefit estimates given at an interest rate (the discount rate). The PV of costs and benefits feed into the total NPV of cash flows.
• NET PRESENT VALUE (NPV)
  The present or current value of (discounted) future net cash flows given an interest rate (the discount rate). A positive project NPV normally indicates that the investment should be made, unless other projects have higher NPVs.
• RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)
  A project’s expected return in percentage terms. ROI is calculated by dividing net benefits (benefits less costs) by costs.
• DISCOUNT RATE
  The interest rate used in cash flow analysis to take into account the time value of money. Organizations typically use discount rates between 8% and 16%.
• PAYBACK PERIOD
  The breakeven point for an investment. This is the point in time at which net benefits (benefits minus costs) equal initial investment or cost.

A Japan-based Fortune 500 conglomerate achieved 90% cost savings

XtractEdge.The Ultimate Document AI Platform.

Overview

Our client, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a 100-year old group competing in various industries such as construction, machinery, railway systems, electronics, financial services, and more recently digital technologies. Their $86B revenue footprint is diversified across their 879 subsidiaries, in over 46 countries.
Client’s rest while contracts review management process:Our client’s procurement team was manually creating, reviewing and conducting risk analysis of the contracts

Opportunity

Loss Of Productivity:

25% Of Procurement Staff’s Time Was Spent On Contract Analysis

Our client’s contracts review process was heavily dependent on people and time consuming. Even a senior member of procurement staff needed at least 2-3 hours to review a draft contract, retrieve past examples of clauses such as obligations, warranty, compliance, timeframes and their corresponding terms to build counter proposals.

Non-Standardized Risk Review:

Analysis Was Subjective And Prone To Errors

Much of the knowledge was tacit, and its sharing was limited to the ability of a staff member to coach another. As a result, risk analysis was open to subjective interpretations, or in worst-cases, errors in risk scoring.

Inability To Ramp Up:

New Members Of Procurement Staff Had A Steep Learning Curve

There was no centralized knowledge repository with easy access for everyone. Hence, it was difficult for new staff members to ramp up quickly and perform contract analysis swiftly.
The existing procurement team, was able to process only contracts per year, and this caused delays in contract signing, project kick-offsand so on. The business’s ability to scale was disproportionately affected by the procurement team’s capacity to review contracts; our client needed this bottleneck eliminated immediately.

Solution

Our client commissioned XtractEdge Contract Analysis to automate the analysis of buy-side contracts such as purchase agreements, service agreements, license agreements, rental/lease agreements. XtractEdgeContract Analysis leverages AI to build contract summary quicker, perform risk analysis more efficiently, and offer alternate clauses/legal wordings at scale.

Understanding Existing Process

We began by working closely with the contracts and procurement teams to understand the current processes. We observed the tasks performed by each staff member to identify inefficiencies,opportunities for automation and potential to improve.

Configuring XtractEdge Contract Analysis

We began by understanding the key clauses and terms to be extracted based on the type of the contract. Existing contracts were used to build training datasets. XtractEdge Contract Analysis was used to tag the clauses and terms for machine learning; the data created was the input to our advanced neural network models.
We also set up a framework for SMEs to review machine-tagged sentences to provide feedback that would help improve accuracy withtime. An Infosys AI engineer was constantly tuning the AI model and triggering model creations based on feedback from the client’s legal and procurement teams.

Solution Scope

The XtractEdge team was tasked with the automation of three distinct areas-risk scoring, contract summary and review dashboard.

Risk Scoring

XtractEdge Contract Analysis accepts any contract draft as an input, performs automated analysis and gives two distinct outputs: A risk analysis report which will tag specific clauses/terms in the contract ashigh, medium or low risk and recommendations for alternative wording.

Contract Summary

XtractEdge Contract Analysis extracts the meta data of the contract and automatically builds a contract summary in structured format. This summary will include items from the contract, for instance, title of the contract, term, object, license grant, warranty, indemnification, limitation of liability, assignment, etc. Procurement teams can use this information to review any particular contract or use it as a source for future contract analysis.

Review Dashboard

XtractEdge Contract Analysis will automatically build a consolidated dashboard with individual clauses enabling team members to collect review comments from all stakeholders.

Solution Scope

Outcomes with XtractEdge Contract Analysis:

9x Improvement In Employee Productivity

Before XtractEdge Contract Analysis, each employee was spending about 150 minutes in reviewing one contract. After XtractEdge Contract Analysis, this reduced drastically to less than 15 minutes, in total, empowering them to spend the 2+ hours saved, in building meaningful relationships with vendors and suppliers.

90% Cost Savings Per Contract Review

With XtractEdge Contract Analysis, our client had the potential to achieve about 90% savings in labor cost per contract review at under $25 from $220 per review earlier.

Standardized Risk Scoring

With XtractEdge Contract Analysis, risk analysis and scoring for contracts were standardized, using predictive and cognitive modules.The system performed a thorough risk analysis, making it more accurate and objective.
This also established an organization-wide cognitive knowledge base for the entire procurement team to refer to, at any time. Moreover, XtractEdge Contract Analysis’s real-time review dashboard enabled both business and procurement teams to collaborate on contract review, empowering new comers to learn in the process. Potential To Dramatically Increase In Scale Before XtractEdge, assuming the client had a bottleneck at 260,000 contracts per year, the projected number of contracts they will be able to process in future is 2,340,000 for the same period. The efficiency of this is bound to increase with further use.

Making Better Contracts

With clear visibility into past contracts, our client’s procurement teams were able to create better contracts across the board. With automated risk scoring and suggestions for alternate clauses, XtractEdge directly reduces our client’s risk profile, make contracts stronger, and their negotiation posture better.

Way Forward

After successfully proving the business and financial value of XtractEdge Contract Analysis for the procurement contracts of our client, we are preparing to implement the solution for risk assessment of all contracts, saving the legal team’s band width and cost.