Bala Ethirajalu, Director and Head of Delivery (Poland), Brickendon

With time humans have evolved and developed many skills. However, what we cannot escape is the risk of making errors, especially when tired, and we may not always be the best at learning on the job, or even tidying our desks. In fact, for many tasks humans really aren’t the best candidates at all.

Automating some business functions, particularly repetitive tasks, not only alleviates some of the concerns associated with human working nature, but can also increase efficiency, improve effectiveness – especially with tasks like software testing, and can even elevate customer experience.

We can say this with absolute surety as we successfully saved one client £15.3m a year simply by automating and combining their development and testing processes[i].

Whilst we’re far from predicting the wholesale replacement of humans with computers, for certain tasks it is just more convenient to automate processes. As well as significantly cutting costs and improving performance, it also frees up humans to add value in areas of the business where deploying machines doesn’t make sense.

Eliminating testing time with end-to-end automation

At Brickendon, we have seen the benefits of investing in automation first-hand. A full end-to-end regression testing cycle of a medium-sized application traditionally takes six working weeks. We observed that automating this process reduced it to as little as six hours – a 97 per cent reduction. That is basically saving 29 working days, meaning those employees were freed to carry out other tasks and add value to other business areas.

Similarly, traditionally the manual process of resolving software development issues ranges from between six-seven hours. Automating this process can reduce the action to less than 15 minutes – a clear 96 per cent reduction. However, this does not mean that the role of the employees who originally carried out these tasks will become redundant. It will simply change.

Enhancing the process to provide the best customer experience

The future of automation lies in collaboration. Whether it’s in a support or development capacity, automation will always need to be programmed. It will require highly skilled developers and software engineers to ensure that the technology functions as required. While machine learning has come a long way over the past decade, there is still a long way to go before robots can continually learn from their mistakes and correct their actions based on what has happened before.

With the world continually changing, we constantly seek new ways to enhance business’ delivery and operational processes. We do this internally for our digital product development and externally for our clients as they look to improve the service they offer their customers.

Within one of our own businesses we have reduced operational costs by 80 per cent, significantly reduced operational risk and increased business intelligence by implementing our own chatbot. And that’s not all, it has also enabled us to provide the best end-to-end customer experience.

With our extensive and proven expertise in automation, we are committed to delivering a full end-to-end service that makes us at least 10 times faster than our competitors. More information can be found here – case study, DevOps transformation.