Intelligent Automation (IA) is being adopted across multiple industries worldwide. Logistics, real estate, healthcare, hospitality, shared services, and more are adopting Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) solutions to enhance their operations. This widespread adoption of disruptive technology is largely due to its ability to automate the processing of unstructured content. Unstructured content is a challenge for over 80% of businesses and growing at a rate of 50-60% per year.
IPA solutions harness both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The AI component is capable of processing unstructured content while RPA handles rule-based automation and feeds the processed output further downstream and mimics human actions.
The second factor driving the rising popularity of IPA solutions is that it enables end-to-end process automation also known as hyperautomation. Gartner listed hyperautomation among its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2021. It also predicts that by 2024, hyperautomation will lower operational costs by 30%.
Gartner has stated that by 2022, 65% of organizations will introduce IPA with Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. Hyperautomation is currently paving the way into the future. Companies who are wise enough to make the most out of this disruptive technology often reap a triple-digit ROI fairly quickly.
The ability to automate the processing of unstructured content along with hyperautomation opens tremendous possibilities for modern enterprises to harness intelligent automation. It has been a huge success in boosting efficiency across tasks like invoice processing, customer service, accounting management automation, and many more processes.
Thus it is imperative for modern enterprises to harness IPA solutions as intelligent automation is rapidly becoming the new normal across a wide range of use cases. However, aside from the typical benefits such as greater efficiency, an often overlooked aspect of intelligent automation is its ability to standardize and optimize processes.
Why Process Standardization & Optimization Matter
Despite the numerous benefits of intelligent automation, many company’s pilot projects flounder, This is why it picking your first use case requires careful consideration. The ideal choice would be to list candidate processes that are highly repetitive and data-intensive. Many times, IA’s ability to streamline processes making them much more efficient than they used to be is often overlooked. This means going over each step of the candidate process and removing any redundancies, which optimizes the processes. Automating an inefficient process is poor practice as you’re simply automating inefficiency. Streamlining processes making them leaner is crucial at this stage and it raises a crucial question – to standardize, or not to standardize?
The is yes overall. While in most cases the process steps may be unique to your organization it is important to standardize them as much as possible in order to boost the speed and seamlessness of processes. Remember that an IPA solution must fit your process instead of forcing your process to fit a rigid solution. However, standardization and optimization of your processes will pay off massively in terms of efficiency.
Some use cases are by their very nature highly standardized, while others necessitate the ability to handle variances and exceptions. After mapping your use case and removing redundant steps, the training stage can teach the solution how to handle variances and exceptions that could arise.
Trying to launch an intelligent automation pilot without mapping use case steps and optimizing them and trying to standardize processes later down the line is poor practice. This initial groundwork lays the foundation for robust automation once your pilot is up and running. Although democratized, low-code solutions enable companies to start their intelligent automation journey swiftly, lack of process optimization and standardization will have consequences. Your business will not be able to reap maximum value from your intelligent automation initiative. Furthermore, without process standardization and training to handle a range of exceptions, the solution is likely to struggle at the first instance of a particular variance.
This is not an ideal sequence of events since it can cause negative aftereffects that only compound as they continue down the line. In today’s world of commercialized technology democratized IPA solutions that are low code and come with minimal infrastructure footprint can enable you to get started on your IA journey much sooner than you can anticipate.
Leveraging intelligent automation is crucial because it enables businesses to redirect their human employees to engage in much more creative tasks that actually fare better human effort, while digital workers handle the data-intensive grunt work. In addition to ROI, scalability, and efficiency, IA allows for the mode of intelligent operation that drives better business outcomes like improved customer service and greater sales.
Take a look at How Modern Enterprises can Reap Value from Intelligent Automation. You could also learn more about Obstacles that Hinder Enterprise Adoption of Intelligent Automation.
If you’re interested in exploring intelligent automation to optimize your business processes, the Rapid Acceleration Partners team would be glad to help. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow enables full lifecycle AI orchestration on a single platform. When used in tandem with our RPA tool RAPBot, it provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just weeks. You can even build your own use case and the platform can easily integrate with your existing systems. Book a demo to get a more detailed understanding of how our products can transform your business.
