How Extending RPA Capabilities Enables Digital Transformation

Many companies end up hitting a wall in their attempts at full workflow automation. A lot of solutions fail to provide the combination of intelligence, stability, and flexibility needed to move an organization beyond the automation of basic repetitive tasks. Enterprises need platforms capable of moving back and forth when it comes to handing the mix of simple and complex business decisions required in most organizations.

Understanding RPA

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is not just a next step in task automation. It represents an evolution in how businesses approach and manage core business workflows. RPA helps companies optimize their current staff levels by shifting the burden of processes from people to technology. It addresses many of the issues that companies run into with manual or more limited automation workflow efforts.

• Disruptions or slowdowns in regular operations
• Lack of transparency when it comes to the handling of different business scenarios
• Accumulation of bottlenecks that leads to inefficient processes
• The inability of macros or other basic automation to adapt to more advanced business demands

Moving towards RPA means more than having a better method of screen scraping or handling data sorting. The technology helps businesses map out and control end-to-end workflows using computer software, or “robots.” It is not about trying to eliminate jobs or the people who work hard to help businesses achieve their goals.

RPA is meant to complement the current work done by employees. The falling costs of back-end storage and the growing emphasis on the importance of information means companies are storing more data than ever. RPA helps reduce the number of hours workers must spend handling these demands, allowing them to turn their attention to more customer-focused efforts for an enterprise.

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Workflow Automation With RPA

IBM’s Business Automation Workflow (BAW) helps businesses overcome the following challenges when it comes to workflow automation. It handles the needs of a company to scale depending on current needs. Business users gain the ability to deploy consistent hands-off processes that use AI capabilities to handle standard tasks, and exceptions typically requiring manual intervention.

1. Activities can expand in ways that allow companies to be responsive to customer needs.
2. The solution meets a diverse range of needs, from low-code solutions, structured, or more human-assisted tools for handling exceptional business cases.
3. Businesses can measure the results of automation and find ways of improving the company’s overall performance.

The combination of being able to handle the need to standardize processes while adapting to unique situations gives companies the ability to do the following:

• Consolidate and standardize task sequences for accessibility and repeatability
• Implement non-structured flexible solutions for exceptional cases
• Handle diverse business workflows
• Reuse components when creating parallel processes
• Update workflows when business requirements change without needing a large amount of IT intervention
• Prepare comprehensive documentation around actions, content, and data in preparation for audits
• Take advantage of reporting, governance, and auditing tools for real-time compliance and performance monitoring

IBM Business Automation Workflow becomes a powerful weapon for companies interested in digital transformation as a way of improving business outcomes. The platform also helps create a unified space for building, controlling, and monitoring the information handled by an enterprise.

Automated Decision Making

Changes to business rules and logic in most BPM systems tend to bog down because of the complexity of the software. Most updates must be done internally, take a long time, require a lot of IT help, and can quickly become outdated when business needs evolve during that period.

IBM’s Operational Decision Making (ODM) framework externalizes the business rules and decision-making logic, putting power into the hands of business users. They gain the ability to write rules in their language without always needing to turn to IT.

ODM decouples the management and maintenance of business decisions and business processes. Organizations can gain the agility needed to reduce decision-making around critical business decisions from weeks to days.

IBM ODM Business Rule Capabilities

• Eligibility — Represents the link in the process-decision pathway that decides on next steps, like if a customer is eligible for a service or if a payment is late.
• Validation — Determines if the next step to take is proper given the circumstances. That includes if someone has access to critical information or validating credentials.
• Computation — Does the calculations needed based on various factors.
• Process — Follows specific steps based on pre-set data and conditions that protect against any external or ad-hoc actions.
• Authority — Governs various functions when it comes to who or what process is authorized to take specific actions.

IBM’s ODM helps businesses use analytics and find information patterns that locate risks and opportunities within an organization. It expands the depth of applying business intelligence to different sections of a company. Enterprises can be proactive when it comes to making decisions that can ensure future success.

Intelligent Content Capture

Companies often deal with a great deal of information that cannot immediately be accessed by business applications. IBM’s Datacap solution incorporates AI technology that reduces the time and effort needed to enable optical character recognition (OCR). The AI standardizes the extraction of information from various sources to feed into RPA projects and other technological solutions.

• Increase productivity
• Reduce human error
• Shorten response time
• Make data instantly accessible

Datacap’s AI and machine learning capabilities increases the effectiveness of OCR technology. It can handle everything from reading standardize medical claim forms to interpreting letters from an attorney. Because AI is at the core of the solution and not just a last-minute add-on, it can learn to read the variances in human language. The technology’s ability also extends to making recommendations on handling parsed information.

Unlock the Potential of Your Enterprise

The combination of IBM’s suite of RPA, ODM, BAW, and Datacap platforms gives organizations access to the promise of end-to-end digital transformation. All four components remove the barriers that have hindered businesses from taking steps towards their goal of owning a complete data automation and management solution.

Sumerge helps companies find the right solution that works with the company culture and advances desired business goals.
Reach out today and let us help you figure out how to optimize your business’s technological capabilities.