Finger on the Pulse is a series where we explore the major trends shaping business technology. In each post, you’ll learn from one of our key partners and their perspective on an industry trend through the lens of their unique business. Our last post explored how to use data to develop strategic insights that elevate your business. This interview is focused on the power of automation to drive agility and growth.
Process automation
The worldwide disruption of a global pandemic has taught a lot of hard lessons about what it takes to thrive in the midst of uncertainty. For global enterprises, one of the lessons that stands out is the necessity of agility. Without being able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, modern enterprises face a number of risks like loss of competitive advantage, reduced customer loyalty, and employee turnover.
But when you’re talking about a company with thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of employees, agility is hard to come by. Many enterprises are still dependent on legacy systems and dated IT architectures that require long, manual processes to launch new offerings, navigate mergers and acquisitions, or curate the data necessary to validate business strategies.
In this interview, you’ll discover how MuleSoft and Capgemini help enterprises solve these challenges by infusing automation into cumbersome processes that stimy business growth. We spoke with Rahul Murudkar, Capgemini’s Head of Integration Practice in Europe and Al Liubinskas, Capgemini’s Head of Integration Practice in Americas, to learn how they’re helping clients across industries turn automation from a hypothetical idea into a competitive advantage.
What makes the partnership between MuleSoft and Capgemini so successful, and what role does automation play in that partnership?
Capgemini and MuleSoft have partnered to help clients in their digital transformation and legacy modernisation programs for over a decade now. We’ve become one of the largest MuleSoft implementation partners. One of the things that makes the partnership work so well is the trust between our organizations. This trust is reflected in our common understanding of helping our clients deliver tangible business outcomes and drive continuous innovation to improve our solutions.
A great example of that innovation is MuleSoft’s robotic process automation (RPA), which has generated a lot of excitement in the industry. For those who aren’t familiar, RPA is a tool for building software robots that emulate how humans interact with digital systems and software. It records human users accomplishing tasks and generates a script that the software bot learns to follow so it can perform that same task. This can save a lot of time and create significant process efficiency, which allows employees to spend more energy on higher priority tasks.
What are some process-related challenges your clients are facing, and how does Capgemini leverage MuleSoft to help them overcome them?
One of the central challenges for the clients we work with is how to increase business agility. Especially for large, enterprise companies, processes and operations can be frustratingly cumbersome and slow. From low-level tasks to large-scale initiatives, getting things out the door can be complex and requires significant lead time to rollout new features and solutions
Many of our clients are using dated legacy solutions to manage mission-critical operations — and those legacy tools tend to be very siloed. That limits a company’s access to the data they need to make informed decisions quickly, which makes it difficult to remain competitive in rapidly-changing markets.
For example, imagine a global telecom enterprise whose competitor in a specific region has recently launched a new product or campaign. To hold on to market share, they need to make a quick product launch. But there are dozens of disconnected back-end systems and software platforms to deal with to make that happen. By the time the enterprise has managed to make the market rollout, their competitor has often already increased their lead with some new advantage.
With MuleSoft, we help our clients create a unified digital ecosystem and application network that sets you up for speed, agility, and innovation.
Can you give us some examples of business outcomes your clients realize when they implement MuleSoft?
Some business outcomes that clients have experienced are lower total cost of ownership (TCO), faster time to market solution, improved productivity, and business risk mitigations.
MuleSoft’s managed platform for integration with ready-to-use connectors and its catalyst program help in lowering TCO. In addition, faster time to market is a huge benefit on its own, but it also can have a measurable impact on a company’s bottom line by reducing operating costs and improving employee productivity. And that impact isn’t just in the short term. The APIs and capabilities built in MuleSoft are highly reusable for developers to use in future integrations.
Another good example is mergers and acquisitions, which play a huge role in the telecom industry, but also other verticals like life sciences. Global enterprises face enough integration challenges on their own, but having to incorporate a whole new business into an already disconnected ecosystem takes a lot of time and resources that can both delay and reduce the return on investment in that acquisition.
In contrast, our clients who invest in a modern, composable architecture with the process automation and integration capabilities of MuleSoft are dramatically improving the time-to-value of their mergers and acquisitions.
How would you describe the benefits of automation for companies that are trying to become more customer-centric?
A large percentage of our clients who are looking for help with integration tell us that customer 360 is one of their highest priorities. Companies understand better than ever that customer expectations are rising, and personalization is no longer nice to have — it’s a necessity to remain competitive in the vast majority of industries. That’s easier said than done, though, and we’ve seen the automation made possible by MuleSoft make customer centricity a lot more accessible.
The reason is that smart and efficient integration of back-end systems improves an enterprise’s customer data visibility. MuleSoft empowers automations that aggregate everything you know about your customer’s end-to-end journey. With a clearer picture of that journey, real-time decision makers across your organization can incorporate customer history and preferences into every touchpoint. That makes the customer feel seen and valued, which drives loyalty and long-term relationships.
Automated processes also improve the accuracy and reliability of many customer experiences by reducing the need for error-prone, manual interventions. In an industry like life sciences where small errors can have huge impacts, that accuracy builds the confidence of customers and the credibility of the enterprise.
Finally, our MuleSoft clients have seen a lot of benefits to customer experiences by making self-service solutions easier to deploy. For example, manufacturing companies who give their B2B customers a self-service portal to make changes to their orders are saving a lot of time and effort for both parties.
How does Capgemini leverage MuleSoft and automation to improve data security?
There are a lot of factors that are moving security higher on the priority list of our clients, but two stand out. First, the rise in cyber attacks from malicious actors in the last decade is becoming harder to ignore. Second, many countries are, justifiably, increasing the number of security and privacy regulations that companies need to adhere to.
Our partnership with MuleSoft is driving significant improvements for our clients’ cyber security by modernizing the fundamental IT architecture of their businesses. A connected and cohesive architecture and highly-automated ecosystem saves tremendous time and energy for IT departments’ everyday operations. Whether they’re releasing hotfixes to shore up vulnerabilities or managing governance in the wake of a merger or acquisition, the repeatable and streamlined MuleSoft platform makes security-related initiatives much faster and easier to achieve than with manual legacy systems.
If you’d like to learn more about Capgemini, explore the Capgemini + MuleSoft home page or catch up with them at Dreamforce.
