Jana KrugerManagement

The holiday season is upon us, and with all the checklists, new year budgets, family gatherings, and good cheer, it’s necessary to bring some order to all the chaos. Businesses today embracing Digital platforms are challenged with growing complexity and need Executives to put systems and processes in place. This is where Business Process Automation (BPA) comes in. Executives looking to achieve optimal results from their Digital platforms can significantly benefit from the numerous advantages of process automation.

As you head into the holiday season and start to plan your digital strategy for 2019, consider how your business can better utilize advanced technologies to achieve operational excellence from BPA. Start small focusing on only one or two business processes that can improve from automation. Good candidates include:

  • Complex and time-consuming tasks such as creating a contract
  • Processes where there are large volumes of data or a high-frequency of transactions
  • Processes that have excessive manual user errors (i.e., repetitive keying to multiple applications)

After choosing which business processes to automate, Executives should standardize any repetitive and redundant work. It is essential that standardizing business processes happen before implementing automation, especially across different areas of an organization where inconsistencies in approaches and organizational silos may exist.

Consider automating the ‘happy path’ to start your implementation and then try adding complexity for exceptions where it makes sense. Three examples of first implementations include:

Documents

  • Smart document processing to alleviate hours of manual labor
  • OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract data from documents and forms
  • Rules Engine integration to classify documents and route exceptions to humans

Analytics

  • Worker performance analytics for valuable insight into areas that need improvement
  • Mine process history to gain business intelligence
  • Reliable and up to date analytics are crucial for decision makers

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Process, handle and analyze massive amounts of data and provide more accurate insights
  • Exception management of situations that deviate from normal circumstances
  • Machine learning to improve algorithms and quickly evolve

It’s important to note, AI or machine learning should be the final step of your business process automation. If the process is inefficient or incorrect, AI implementation will achieve less than optimal results and will only cause more problems down the road.

Once the areas of focus are determined, processes are standardized, and the first implementations are complete, Executives should select a framework that offers the ability to tie all technologies together. Intellective’s Unity 7 is a leading Digital transformation platform that allows seamless integration of disparate data, content, and processes all into a modern productivity-focused User Interface (UI). From a single actionable screen, Unity 7 allows users quick access to information stored across diverse applications, databases, and repositories which helps reduce confusion and streamlines workflows – something we all could benefit from now and throughout the year.

The 2019 calendar is filling up fast! If your business is ready to start benefitting from advanced technology, contact Intellective Experts today to schedule a consultation.

We hope you have a chaos free holiday season and a productive and prosperous new year!