In many businesses and industries, automation is too often considered a ‘dirty’ word, almost whispered among managers and the C-suite in an attempt to mitigate the inevitable groans and fear among employees.
The first thing to clear up is that we’re not talking about automation in the sense of physical robotics - you’re not suddenly going to be managing an office of robots.
Instead, we’re referring to intelligent automation and software robots. Programs, systems and algorithms that can automate certain day-to-day line of business tasks and processes, so a human doesn’t have to.
It’s all about taking a hybrid approach in order to make processes more efficient, employees happier through removing mundane tasks and ultimately increasing productivity across the business.
With the increase in remote and location free working, organisations are presented with an opportunity to introduce and develop intelligent automation. This is in part due to the fact that many employees are going to continue to work remotely, and office-based physical processes, such as printing, mail distribution, on-premise content management doesn’t fit with how people will work moving forward.
That’s why now really is the time to invest in intelligent automation.
What does intelligent automation involve?
We broadly fit intelligent automation for back-office processes into six areas:
Cognitive Capture:
Cognitive Capture can transform and simplify information-rich customer interactions by capturing, classifying, extracting, understanding & integrating any type of unstructured data from any channel.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Automate repetitive tasks with a digital workforce of unattended software robots - examples include copying and pasting content and data gathering. Essentially, the approach with RPA is to automate repetitive, mundane tasks so employees can work on the value-driven and more important tasks.
Process Orchestration
Drive successful outcomes by orchestrating multiple actions, people, software robots, policies & systems. Customer journeys, such as new customer onboarding, account opening, claims processing and citizen service provisioning are simplified and enhanced.
Advanced Analytics
Provide actionable analytics for any business process with increased visibility and deeper insights. Our Advanced Analytics deliver process intelligence capabilities to monitor, analyse and help you optimise your operational business processes.
Communications
Communicate and transact in efficient, effective, and trusted ways with e-signature, facial recognition and on-demand communications.
Content Management
Access, search, edit and approve documents, securely share & collaborate on files as well as assigning tasks, managing workload and creating workflows without any IT intervention.
How to get started with intelligent automation
The first step to getting started with intelligent automation is to analyse and review your current business processes in order to recognise inefficiencies and potential for enhancements and optimisation. It’s possible that right now, you’re actually starting to notice some of the inefficiencies as people try to do their jobs from different locations, occasionally without access to things they need.
Consider the mailroom as an example - if mail is sent to the office but the employee is working from home, someone needs to make sure the communication is forwarded on, either digitally or physically. This takes time to do and means the mail is delayed in getting to the employee.
By putting processes in place whereby the mail is automatically captured, digitalised and forwarded to the correct person, there is little to no delay.
Identifying the processes most ripe for automation can be tricky though, as it’s not always as obvious as the example above. Sometimes it can only be recognised through deeper analysis and examination.
Once you’ve identified some of the processes that could be right for intelligent automation, you can begin to plan and develop a strategy for putting it in place and developing other processes along the way.