63,000-plus robots at Accenture’s operations

BENGALURU: Accenture’s operations division has the largest robot workforce in the industry, topping 63,000, the incoming head of the unit told ET. The company, however, does not forecast robots replacing humans.Manish Sharma takes charge of the $6 billion unit with over 141,000 employees on March 1, as part of Accenture’s recent reorganization. “I don’t want my people anywhere in the world to do boring jobs. We call it MRPT — measurable, repeatable, predictable and transaction work — that our people will not do,” Sharma told ET in an interview. “That will be done by robots and our people will be the supervisors of robots.”Sharma said automation should be a goal in itself as companies look to make processes more efficient.“If you have wasteful processes, and you automate them, that does not help. We don’t automate processes if it doesn’t meet certain criteria. You have to design the process and get to the core of the issue,” Sharma said.Accenture’s Synops platform allows it to map a process, closely follow how a single agent performs a task, and then create a potential framework to automate parts of it. This then allows the agent to focus on problems that the automated system had been unable to resolve.Sharma said he wants to ensure that Accenture continues to be a market leader in the industry. “The big shift that we are looking at is trying to drive massive innovation at a huge scale for our clients.” he said.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2wVTogn