"The best RPA developers are the best references on their own," said Choi Jae-sup, executive vice president of Samsung SDS.
Samsung SDS is changing. Technological innovation is a task that cannot be done alone. We'll have more than 100 partners, a number of external developers, and a 'one-team system' with the best global universities and the 'one-team system' to lead the technology change." This is what Samsung SDS CEO Hong Won-pyo said at the "Technic 2019" held at his headquarters in Songpa-gu late last year. It is not only a shift in the idea of working with the global development ecosystem, but also a wider development spectrum such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud, data analysis, smart factory, logistics, and security, as well as innovative development cases that are noteworthy to the industry.

At the center of this innovation case is the AI business team led by Samsung SDS executive Choi Jae-sup. In particular, the AI business team developed an intelligent business automation solution called "Britty Works" last year, which resulted in an amazing saving of 550,000 hours from the nine-month use of 15,000 Samsung SDS employees. They succeeded in creating antibodies on their own by making vaccines and administering them to their bodies first.

Therefore, it not only reduced working hours across all areas of the company's business, such as logistics, IT operations and purchasing, but also secured improved quality of inspection due to reduced human error. The solution developer has become the first customer to implement and incorporate the solution on its own, allowing other customers to share the know-how of failure and success in the future.

In addition, 550,000 hours saved by Samsung SDS executives and employees means that time has been re-entered into more core and more creative work. Is that why? Samsung SDS once again generated record sales figures. [Ryu Ji-young met Choi Jae-sup, who heads the Samsung SDS AI business te
○ What is Samsung SDS' 'Brity Works'?

Samsung SDS' British Works (RPA) is an intelligent business automation solution that can automate complex, multi-person collaboration by installing AI technologies such as chatbot, Optimal Charcter Recognition, and Machine Learning.

In addition, Samsung SDS plays a key role in digital transformation of companies as an AI-based business automation solution that combines AI technology capabilities and expertise in process innovation by industry.

British Works, a combination of "Brity" and "Works," aims to implement a digital workplace that will make the working environment intelligent and will help people do their jobs, help people, and enhance their work productivity in the future artificial intelligence era.

○ How did Samsung SDS develop its own RPA solution and how did it compare with the global RPA solution? And what is Samsung SDS' RPA business strategy?

The goal of Samsung SDS is to become a digital transformation enabler for customers and become an innovative partner for customers. Samsung SDS has already secured the source technologies needed to develop RPA solutions, such as automated scenario designers, object recognition in Windows, and image recognition, and developed its own RPA solution, not introducing external solutions, in order to realize AI-based digital transformation for existing customers.

Since then, we have secured level of perfection and quality of functions as well as global competitors by applying RPA to all Samsung SDS employees and making technological advances through the use of many internal and external customers. Unlike other small and medium-sized solutions, it has different characteristics of enterprise-oriented functions such as multi-tenancy for tens of thousands of large multinational companies.

British Works is also designed as an open platform structure that can easily link various AI technologies, such as image recognition and voice recognition, and has the advantage of being able to meet customers' diverse needs. For RPA, competing proof of concept (PoC) is often carried out to select solutions, and British Works is recognized in the market for features such as Easy-to-use, Operational Capability, and A-DRIVEN Scalability.

Based on such RPA, Samsung SDS is creating a number of achievements and good cases in various industries, including finance, distribution and manufacturing, along with some 20 domestic and foreign partner companies. This year, RPA adoption by public institutions is expected to be in full swing, with Samsung SDS' public work experience and know-how likely to help public institutions introduce RPA. It also agreed with Creditax, a global payment platform operator that is also recognized overseas for excellence in solutions, and recently to apply British Works to payment platforms, accounting systems, and business processes that serve 30 countries including Europe, the U.S., China, and Japan.

○ When introducing an RPA, what size process can be applied to the RPA solution? Can British Works efficiently handle hundreds of thousands of structured, unstructured data and equivalent resources?

From the time of planning for solutions, Samsung SDS' British Works developed a chatbot connection function so that users can step in and support decision-making process. It also provided a web-based OCR portal for easy processing of unstructured data so that users can learn and relearn document forms based on UI.

In addition, deep-learning-based AICR products and TA (text analysis) technologies obtained from Samsung SDS are also linked, enabling the collection, interpretation, and extraction of key data from images or documents. British Works implemented 'parallel processing' rather than the 'one bot = one task' method, enabling one bot to perform multiple tasks simultaneously and a 'headless' function that allows other tasks to be performed while the bot is being performed, resulting in up to 30 times the speed and performance of manual tasks.

○ Hyper-automation is gaining much attention among the top 10 technologies Gartner has pointed to this year. In the future, there is a need for a digital workforce platform based on 'RPA + AI' - a full web-based and cloud native 'RPA-as-a-Service' platform - what are your plans?

British Works is closely linked to chatbot based on natural language comprehension (NLU) from its initial launch, combined with deep learning-based letter/image recognition technology (AICR) and Samsung SDS' AI-based big data analysis platform, Brightics. This is in line with the directions of Cognitive RPA (Cognitive RPA), Beyond Automation (Beyond Automation), and RPA+AI, which are described in hyper-automation.

It is also developing functions such as automatic recommendation of work processes based on user logs and improving solutions in the direction of hyper-automation 'Integrated with Process Mining' and 'Self-Learning Bot'. Through process mining-based automation and self-learning robots, customers can automate a wider area of work and further enhance the effect of introduction.

Samsung SDS expects the "RPA-as-a-Service" platform market to grow for smaller operators. Therefore, it is preparing to launch a cloud-based "RPA-as-a-Service" in the second half of this year to meet the corresponding needs. In addition, if a customer wants to introduce a virtual assistant using RPA for all employees, it will share not only Samsung SDS' solutions but also its experiences in internalizing the company and expand into business process service (BPS).

○ RPA is already actively introduced and utilized by many companies, and there are growing calls to spread and internalize it throughout the enterprise. How does Samsung SDS respond to this trend and what will the RPA look like in the future?

The enterprise-wide spread and internalization of automation tasks requires a lot of preparation, particularly the 'Lessons Learned' from references that have attempted to internalize them. In rare cases, Samsung SDS has the experience of enterprise-wide internalization, with 80 percent of all employees participating to automate personal and departmental tasks.

In May last year, the company opened an in-house business automation portal to help all employees learn how to use British Works and apply them to repetitive tasks, and 15,000 employees developed their own work into British Works and saved 550,000 hours in nine months. It not only reduced working hours across all areas of the company's business, such as logistics, IT operations and purchasing, but also secured improved quality of inspection due to reduced human error.