DM1907

Dm MANAGEMENT: INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
Beyond Robotic Process Automation
Intelligent Automation offers the next step to 'working like tomorrow, today', argues
Chris Huff, Chief Strategy Officer, Kofax
Businesses of all sizes rely on an
assortment of processes to get things
done and achieve organisational
goals. New customer onboarding, financial
reporting, batch processing, and shipment
scheduling and tracking are just a few
examples. If handled quickly and efficiently,
they deliver meaningful benefits that
impact revenue and growth, including
enhanced service levels, lower operational
costs, and higher customer satisfaction. It's
also true that these processes - often paperbased
and manual - are excellent
candidates for automation.
To be sure, many companies have
implemented robotic process automation
(RPA) within pockets of their organisation.
But even in the digital era, a large share
have yet to implement RPA even for
optimised processes, and even fewer to
automate end-to-end using intelligent
automation. A global Forbes Insights survey
found a quarter of processes are still
completely or mostly manual, and another
37% are a mix of manual and automated.
That there is still significant room for
automation through the enterprise is hardly
in dispute. In fact, nine out of 10 executives
say they recognise its importance to their
future success. And those that have started
their transformation by implementing RPA
technology, which uses software robots to
automate routine, manual tasks, are seeing
efficiency and productivity gains.
The real opportunity, though, is to move
beyond RPA to intelligent automation. This
next generation technology - bringing
together capabilities such as process
orchestration, cognitive capture, and
advanced analytics - is the only way to drive
maximum business value.
Thus, the true "next step" for the enterprise
of the future isn't automating in small
pockets with point solutions. Instead, it's
implementing intelligent automation across
the enterprise. This approach checks the
box on every C-suite goal: time and cost
savings, improved collaboration, higher
employee satisfaction and a better
customer experience.
WHERE THE OPPORTUNITIES ARE
But where do businesses start? How do
they identify the most promising places
within their organisation to extend
automation capabilities? The Forbes
Insights survey uncovered opportunities in
three key areas.
1. Document and data processing:
Accounts payable, legal and sales teams are
often unnecessarily burdened with
document-heavy processes. But when
invoices, contracts and sales and purchase
orders are handled manually, errors and
delays occur, leading to higher costs and
missed payments. According to the Forbes
Insight survey, just 13% of companies say
they've fully automated the interpretation
of unstructured content, while one-quarter
simply turn text over to humans. Other
organisations say their firms fall somewhere
in between, with automation ranging from
keyword extraction to sentiment analysis.
Of course, manual processing of large
volumes of documents isn't sustainable or
desirable in a world where consumers value
speed and experience most. Businesses
need employees to focus on higher-value,
customer-oriented tasks, and no one has
time for bottlenecks. One way to transform
this situation is to implement RPA with
integrated intelligent optical character
recognition (OCR). This technology creates
a complete workflow that automates
document-heavy processes, making them
faster and more reliable while also giving
employees more time to attend to
customer needs.
2. Automating tasks into an end-to-end
sequence: Businesses so far have
automated processes in discrete corners
6 @DMMagAndAwards July/August 2019 www.document-manager.com