Repetitive tasks that are performed many times during the day can crowd out other functions. Data capture and manual data entry, managing payments and suppliers, purchase orders … they’re important, but could be more efficient. What if technology could make this easier? First, it’s necessary to transform and optimize processes before considering their automation. That’s what we are doing through a process of “Discovery” to identify opportunities for process optimization and then find the best solution to automate them.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can provide support in the final step by emulating business processes in a series of sequential tasks or activities. The systems ‘learn’ processes in order to replicate them, so that the more mechanical functions are delegated to a robot that uses specific software to perform them automatically within a workflow executed by humans. This transformation not only significantly increases productivity and, consequently, competitiveness, but also improves the quality of the work, enhances workers’ living standards and eliminates the scope for human error. It also greatly increases accuracy and reliability. This opens the door to new ways of working — ways that are more productive, creative and efficient, optimize resources and achieve significant savings.
In this same vein, the company is making a strong commitment to digital platforms. These are tools that are increasingly forming part of our daily lives; they can be compared to a Lego set, where pieces (platform components) can be combined and reused in a variety of ways to create applications. The more modular and interconnectable these components are, the more they can be reused, bringing more benefits when creating new digital products, speeding up development times and ensuring greater efficiency.
The catalog of public cloud services is huge and is growing constantly to cover all kinds of technological needs: basic infrastructure services, communications, storage, data processing, integrations, security, etc. This provides a great deal of flexibility for development teams to create other reusable digital services, but it also complicates the choice of the most appropriate service in each case and of how to combine them to create an architecture that meets the company’s security and scalability standards.
Ferrovial is creating a multidisciplinary Cloud Architecture Center of Excellence that will combine the necessary know-how in infrastructure, security and architecture to facilitate decisions of this type in projects and generate technology components that can be reused. The main goal is to accelerate digital product development times while ensuring best practices and an evolution towards increasingly competitive solutions.
In this digital transformation, we cannot ignore the change experienced by suppliers, who have gone from being “suppliers” of a good or service to true partners that, in addition to delivering a service, are involved with the company and consider it as an extension of their own business. Forging alliances and complementing internal and external capabilities, under the premise of working together and growing together, is a major source of mutual benefit.
The recent global alliance between Ferrovial and Microsoft is a good example. It enables both companies to develop digital solutions for the construction, infrastructure and mobility industries, in line with both companies’ commitment to innovation, digital transformation and the decarbonization of the economy.
This partnership also seeks to develop innovative digital solutions that help the industry accelerate towards a sustainable economy, driving the use of Artificial Intelligence and sensors to improve infrastructure management, making it possible to accelerate ongoing initiatives such as AIVIA (Ferrovial’s smart roads project) and the use of digital twins based on the Internet of Things.
Ferrovial’s strategy is to promote this type of strategic agreements with suppliers as a vehicle for meeting the company’s medium and long-term strategic objectives. Working together provides mutual benefits.
