The Basics of Business Automation

Learn how a leading South Korean pharmaceutical company automates a core process for drug safety monitoring. Proactive incident management solutions estimate proactive and adaptive incident resolution and discover how to achieve IT operations using AI. Hybrid cloud cost optimization solutions allow you to eliminate guesswork with continuous automation that saves time and optimizes cost. Process mapping solutions can improve operations by identifying bottlenecks and enabling cross-organizational collaboration. Document management solutions capture, track and store information from digital documents. This article explores the changing landscape of business automation, why it matters now and what to consider when using automation within your own organization.

BPA helps organizations streamline processes such as employee onboarding, accounts payable, contract management and more. Once an employee accepts the offer letter from the organization, it triggers multiple workflow tasks that span multiple applications and systems. It also helps organizations to design the automation of process workflows, enables data transformations and synchronizes information across systems, all in real time.

Which Industries Automate Their Business Processes?

Digital process automation injects AI into all of your systems to minimize manual data handling. By using more efficient, lightning-quick software to perform these tasks instead, you can significantly increase the speed of decision-making and information processing within your organization. In this blog post, we will define business process automation and its core functions. This is the first step in a multi-part blog series where we’ll provide a more elaborate view of automation and its benefits in today’s digital economy. Digital transformation is central to achieving innovation and meeting ever-changing customer expectations. At the heart of it all, to keep pace, organizations are turning to business process automation.

• A classic example of a process that benefits from BPA is onboarding new employees.
• Whatever method you prefer, automation can assist in the creation of these tasks and even the closure of tasks in some cases.
• Sales reps traditionally spend a significant portion of their workday on administrative tasks—from compiling reports to creating lists to generating contracts.
• In today’s fast-paced landscape, businesses are facing the challenge of striking a balance between automation and maintaining a personalized customer experience.

Let’s look at one common scenario, contract generation for sales teams, to see how BPA can free up valuable time. BPA occurs whenever an organization automates a process, but workflow solutions aren’t created equally. The benefits of automation are endless — including quick responsiveness to customer and market demands, faster workload deployment, and risk mitigation. And by reimagining the employee, customer, and product experience, automation produces improved transparency, customer satisfaction, and increased revenue.

The Basics of Business Automation

Before beginning a BPA project, it is critical to understand how the existing process works, why it is a good candidate for automation and how it should be changed. As you explore and discuss BPA’s role and potential benefits for your organization, you will need to articulate what it is and is not to a variety of people. These capabilities will not only give time back to your team but can also help your organization compete in the market and assist with future growth strategies. For example, you might use Gantt charts or Kanban boards to provide a visual overview of project timelines, task progress, and work allocation. Discover how the Italian fashion group is redesigning its order-to-cash processes for a better buying experience. 3 min read – IBM is going to train two million learners in AI in three years, with a focus on underrepresented communities.

Such monitoring allows you to identify anomalies and potential security incidents and mitigate the impact of a security breach. Your VirtualSpace for business development should be able to integrate with various applications, allowing you to automate processes across your entire technology stack. VirtualSpace — a free project management tool that can help you automate business development, where it joins forces with features to change the way companies grow. Whether you’re running a small business or a large enterprise, automation is an excellent way to streamline operations and drive business growth.

Ignite static procedures and flowcharts into real-time workflows between people

By implementing automation solutions, your team can eliminate busywork and increase productivity. It combines automation with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. This means that machines that automations can continuously “learn” and make enable better decision making and actions based on data from past situations they have encountered and analyzed. For example, in customer service, virtual assistants powered by AI/ML can reduce costs while empowering both customers and human agents, creating an optimal customer service experience. Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with where human input is minimized. With IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, you can eliminate repetitive tasks and reallocate your resources toward higher-value work.

IBM provides a single platform for both business and IT automation, helping organizations worldwide to automate both effectively. For example, a global reinsurer in Switzerland used IBM software to automate its quarterly closing tasks and saved $40,000 USD per quarter. Over the decades, automation has touched almost every industry — from ATMs to assembly lines to healthcare systems. But artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are taking automation to a whole new level. This so-called “intelligent automation” is changing the way humans and machines interact, so businesses can increase efficiency, drive revenue and thrive in challenging markets.

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Read how using digital workers to automate data gathering, IBM HR empowers human workers to devote more time to high-value tasks. Workflow automation solutions use rules-based logic and algorithms to perform tasks with limited to no human interaction. Document processing solutions combine artificial intelligence and deep learning to streamline the processing of business documents. The use of a repeated set of processes can IT increase IT productivity and efficiency and reduce human errors. Increasingly, businesses are turning to process automation as a powerful tool in their fight to drive their competitiveness and profitability. In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey of global industry leaders, 80% of respondents cited automation as one of their core business priorities and tactics for success.

But one area you can control is how you manage the experiences you create for your customers. Automation, especially automation combined with AI, can help you fix or refine these experiences, resulting in higher sales, better use of resources and greater customer satisfaction. Within a day, your support inbox will be packed with hundreds or thousands of texts complaining about the issue – and there’s no way your support team can take care of all that.

Living in a data sovereign world

With BPA, organizations can reduce their reliance on human intervention by automating a range of repetitive tasks. Process mining analyzes enterprise system logs to map out business processes and variations in how they execute. Process capture (sometimes called task mining) uses machine vision to watch over an employee’s screen to generate a map of processes that span multiple applications. Process intelligence is a newer term to describe the use of both technologies combined with BI and analytics capabilities for greater automation and insight.

You can effortlessly assign task followers, ensuring that the relevant team members stay informed about project progress and upcoming deadlines. By setting up automatic reminders as the task’s deadline approaches, without needing anyone to intervene, you could have prevented this campaign automate business processes disruption. Meet with experts–at no cost–and discover new ways to improve your business using intelligent automation. Speed development, minimize unplanned outages and reduce time to manage and monitor, while still maintaining enhanced security, governance and availability.

Business process automation examples

In today’s all-digital world, organizations are focused on accelerating efficiency while remaining agile; across industries, leaders and consumers alike echo similar prospects. With its automation, the city tracks all invoices from the moment they are received through the final payment. The city significantly reduced processing errors while boosting customer satisfaction as a result of a faster and more efficient process. Automating HR onboarding with Laserfiche enabled the College of Engineering to hire more than 3,400 employees in a little over one year. Other departments have also begun reengineering their own processes and sharing successes campus-wide. The new system has created a new culture of collaboration and innovation for the most efficient processes possible.