Intelligent Process Automation: The Next Frontier in Digital Transformation

Conversation with Mr. Virender Jeet, Senior Vice President (Sales & Marketing / Products) Newgen Software

With increasing competition and diminishing margins, organizations are trying to improve efficiencies and gain new capabilities beyond just human abilities. This is where intelligent automation comes to the rescue–allowing your organization to process millions of applications and documents each day, resolve issues, suggest improvements, and much more. 

What is Intelligent Process Automation?

Intelligent automation is a combination of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which together enable rapid end-to-end business process automation and accelerate digital transformation. It combines the task execution of RPA with machine learning, a workflow engine, and process analytics, as well as cognitive technologies, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and fuzzy logic.

According to Forrester, intelligent automation suites will provide one-quarter of all RPA solutions.  RPA will become an embedded feature in many platforms by the end of 2021.1

Tools Required to Initiate Intelligent Automation

Organizations can automate incredibly complex business tasks by harnessing and integrating cognitive technologies with RPA. Let’s have a look at these technologies:

• Workflow engine

An intelligent workflow engine leverages a unified platform to enable process orchestration, seamless integration, ad hoc task management, and advanced analytics for smart decision making. The engine triggers an RPA bot to automate tasks within a process. APIs can be used to integrate the RPA scripts with the workflow-enabled orchestration. It also allows organizations to monitor metrics and create dashboards to identify opportunities and improve processes

• Robotic process automation

RPA is a non-invasive integration technology used to automate routine, repetitive, and predictable tasks through orchestrated interactions that emulate human actions. It improves productivity significantly by automating mundane tasks. “Non-invasive” means that RPA can be used to interact with legacy applications where traditional integration is complex, time-consuming, and expensive

• Process Insights

Process insights are designed to discover, monitor, and improve real processes by extracting knowledge available within application systems. Process mining, which includes automated process discovery, conformance checks, and other advanced analytics features, provides data for insights. Process mining can be used to identify process inefficiencies at a granular level. It creates process heatmaps, auto-generates simulation models, and makes process recommendations based on historical data

1 https://go.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2021-automation-becomes-a-business-imperative/

• Business rules management

A rule management system can be used to complement conventional application development and runtime tools, especially when a business application must make decisions based on complex or frequently changing logic. Logic statements and decision matrices can be used for the simplified creation of rules. Modern rules management systems have evolved to provide better support for analytics and decision making, and are often used in tandem with a workflow engine

• Artificial intelligence

To generate value, organizations must deploy AI technologies that deliver specific, measurable business outcomes for targeted use cases. This requires enterprises to collectively develop use cases for AI and machine learning, while identifying the quantifiable business outcomes from each of the use cases. AI also ensures consistent employee performance by eliminating any guesswork associated with decision making and enabling faster, data-driven decisions

The Way Forward - A New Era of Innovation

Intelligent automation systems are changing the way business is done by enabling organizations to achieve unprecedented levels of quality and efficiency. Valuable time and money can be saved by reducing human intervention, thereby increasing process speeds. Intelligent automation also has the potential to improve customer satisfaction by facilitating faster response times and allowing employees to focus on complex, value-add tasks.