Aecus, a company of The Hackett Group (NASDAQ: HCKT) today announced the winners of the 2017 Aecus Automation Awards, which spotlights companies that are on the cutting edge of digital transformation, including smart automation, robotic process automation, cognitive computing, and advanced analytics.

The Aecus Automation Awards winners encompass some of the hottest trends in digital transformation technology, and spotlights the advances being made in this critical area and the strategic business impact that can be generated. In addition, the awards feature companies that demonstrate the ability to deploy more familiar tools -- such as offshoring, outsourcing, or redesign -- in new ways. This year’s winners came from a range of industry sectors, including banking and financial services, telecoms, consumer goods and utilities.

“Each year, it’s always impressive to see how much further companies are taking smart automation,” said Paul Morrison, managing director, Aecus. “This area is maturing at a breakneck pace, and it’s playing a greater role in the quest to make companies leaner, smarter, and more agile. This year’s winners showcase the cutting edge of smart automation -- fast, cost effective and disruptive tools that are being used to drive a broad array of powerful business benefits.”

“While cost reduction and transactional automation are still the primary focuses of many companies’ efforts, we see companies now truly exploring what else they can do with tools like robotic and cognitive automation,” said Morrison. “More and more, companies are using smart automation to achieve more strategic goals, such as boost customer satisfaction, shrink the time it takes to respond to and solve issues that arise, improve quality, reduce risk, and identify and avoid problems entirely.”

“Today’s smart automation projects are very different from the IT projects of the past,” said Morrison. “They are largely business-led, and use open source tools, so development time is often measured in weeks, not months or years. The nature of smart automation is also that it allows companies to be much more innovative. So much of the technology is available off the shelf, that companies can shop around to find the technologies that do what they need and then quickly integrate them to solve a wide array of business problems.”

The winners of this year’s awards, their suppliers, award category and project names, are as follows:

Aggregate Industries UK (Rimilia) – Finance & Accounting RPA - Collect: RPA in Credit Management

Aimia Inc (Infosys) – IT Robotics/RPA - IT Service Monitoring, Request Handling and Fulfillment

AMP Services (Tata Consultancy Services, Limited) – Insurance & Wealth Management RPA/Analytics Through Automation - Insurance and Wealth Management Process RPA

British Gas (EXL) – Utilities RPA - Homecare Services Automation

Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank (CACIB) (Wipro) – Banking - Smart Decisions for Broker Commission Reconciliation

Innogy (Wipro) – Predictive Automation - Wipro Holmes at Innogy

Mondelẽz International (Accenture) – Consumer Goods RPA/Order Management RPA - Order Management Automation: India & Russia

Openreach (Wipro) – Telecomms RPA - Robotic Automation for PSTN Offline Queues

Opus Capital Market Consultants, LLC (Wipro) – Mortgage RPA/Intelligent Data Capture - Mortgage Loans RPA: Auto Stacking, Classification and Re-Ordering

Stanley Black & Decker (SBD) (EXL) – Best of Breed Tool Integration - Scalable Finance Utility Model

This year’s Aecus Automation Awards were presented by Aecus Managing Director Paul Morrison at The Hackett Group’s 2017 European Best Practices Conference in London. The Aecus Automation Awards were established in 2014.

About Aecus & The Hackett Group

Aecus is an award-winning European consulting firm that helps clients optimize business process outsourcing (BPO), IT outsourcing (ITO) and robotic process automation (RPA) through benchmarking and implementation consulting.

Aecus delivers results for our clients by bringing deep domain expertise supported by the best current market data. Our consultants are experienced specialists who can help clients avoid pitfalls, maximize benefits, and develop sourcing and automation arrangements based on the best the market has to offer.

In April 2017, Aecus was awarded the prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise in the international trade category for outstanding short-term growth in overseas sales.

In addition, the firm recently launched Aecus Interims, a new service aimed at meeting companies’ needs for experienced, “known quantity” short-term consultants to take on key line roles in business service domains that the firm is known and respected for – outsourcing, shared services, offshoring and automation.

In May 2017, The Hackett Group announced that it had acquired Aecus, with the anticipation that Aecus would expand and enhance The Hackett Group’s efforts to support clients’ RPA projects.

The Hackett Group (NASDAQ: HCKT) is an intellectual property-based strategic consultancy and leading enterprise benchmarking and best practices implementation firm to global companies, offering digital transformation and enterprise application approaches including robotic process automation and cloud computing. Services include business transformation, enterprise performance management, working capital management and global business services. The Hackett Group also provides dedicated expertise in business strategy, operations, finance, human capital management, strategic sourcing, procurement and information technology, including its award-winning Oracle EPM and SAP practices.

The Hackett Group has completed more than 13,000 benchmarking studies with major corporations and government agencies, including 93% of the Dow Jones Industrials, 87% of the Fortune 100, 87% of the DAX 30 and 58% of the FTSE 100. These studies drive its Best Practice Intelligence Center™ which includes the firm's benchmarking metrics, best practices repository and best practice configuration guides and process flows, which enable The Hackett Group’s clients and partners to achieve world-class performance.

More information on The Hackett Group is available at: www.thehackettgroup.com, info@thehackettgroup.com, or by calling (770) 225-3600.