What are the best business process optimization strategies with automation? Making a case for business process automation goes well beyond the initial buzzword appeal since the global process automation size is expected to reach $19.4 billion by 2026.
Time is money, and nobody knows that better than enterprise companies, which is why streamlining their business process optimization and leveraging technology to perform/speed up repetitive, low-level tasks, eliminate human error, and save a lot of time has become indispensable.
But, humble beginnings of this approach, whose main selling points were simple bots and virtual assistants that picked up the slack and handled back-office tasks, have evolved into powerful, fully-fledged automation platforms.
Now, by automating processes, enterprise users can make informed decisions, optimize operations, and tremendously improve their customer experience.
Here’s how.
Proven business process optimization strategies
1. Intelligent Automation Solutions
Upon hearing the word “automation,” the first thing that comes to mind is a robot, or more precisely, a robotic process automation tool that’s a part of the conveyor belt system and performs tasks mechanically and with great precision.
Although this technology allows enterprise users to work smarter and not harder by putting a number of boring, repetitive tasks on autopilot, it’s far from perfect.
Namely, these tools are programmed ahead of time, and in case that an unexpected change or issue occurs, they aren’t able to adjust to new circumstances overcome them on their own.
Intelligent, AI-powered business process automation takes advantage of big data learns from it, thus getting more intelligent in time. As a result, such BPA tools come with decision-making capabilities, meaning that they not only put repetitive tasks on autopilot and speed up the entire process but also adapt to changes and overcome potential issues should they occur.
Stats corroborate the importance of this shift as 54% of business executives say that after their organizations adopted intelligent solutions, they experienced a significant boost in workplace productivity.
2. Enterprise Security Automation
Enterprise security is of crucial importance, especially now that cyber and traditional attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, hard to prevent and detect, and even more difficult to mitigate.
Bearing in mind that human error is a major contributing factor in 95% of breaches, it’s obvious that automation is a must when it comes to safeguarding enterprise businesses and reducing the risk of such incidents.
Besides that, security operations centers struggle with staff shortages, and all this is a recipe for disaster.
Implementing different ML and AI-powered technologies to automate fraud prevention can help enterprises keep their own and their customers’ sensitive information secure. For example, email archiving solutions ensure that all enterprise data is securely captured, stored, handled, and archived in compliance with necessary regulations and with the highest data integrity standards.
Another notable use case refers to cognitive insight tools. These are technology stacks significantly more advanced than robotic process automation as they can solve problems that require human intelligence.
Cognitive insights feature big data analytics and machine learning in order to leverage tremendous amounts of data, easily identify patterns in them, and interpret their meaning, thus making data-driven predictions regarding the risk of fraud or cyber-attack.
In other words, these reliable cybersecurity solutions notice unusual behavior, immediately alert the system, and take the right measures automatically. All this is done without any need for human intervention.
3. Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure as a service, infrastructure as a code, all kinds of microservices, and hybrid IT solutions have become essential for every enterprise company.
However, all this requires coordinating, syncing, and managing on-premise and cloud infrastructures and environments. Since the IT infrastructure has been and will be growing in size and complexity, companies face scaling problems. Namely, if they’re not on top of things, delayed updates, security patches, and delivery occur, and subsequently result in poor user experience and security issues.
Automating IT infrastructure helps with configuration and database management, automated testing, the efficiency of IT operations, provisioning, deployment, and decommissioning. It practically streamlines all these tasks and facilitates them, thus allowing enterprise companies to take control of various IT elements such as servers, storage, and operating systems, to name just a few, and gain a competitive advantage in their industry.
4. Making Sense of Unstructured Data
Enterprise companies create, collect, and store massive amounts of data, both structured and unstructured. The success of every organization heavily relies on making data-driven business decisions, but it’s challenging to analyze unstructured data sets.
This means that great volumes of data would go to waste if they’re not quickly processed, analyzed, and interpreted. And that’s not something that can be done manually.
That’s why advanced automation solutions powered by AI, ML, natural language processing, and other state-of-the-art technologies can unearth a wealth of insights coming from unstructured data.
For example, some RPA tools are enhanced with computer vision, which enables them to “see” the screen and perform image and facial recognition.
Others have the ability to read, understand, and interpret text and unstructured data using natural language processing and optical character recognition technologies. Such tools can be leveraged for extracting relevant information from contracts and similar legal documents automatically.
We can only imagine how long it would take an employee trying to extract the data from hundreds or thousands of invoices and copy it into a database. Not to mention that this is a monotonous task whose repetitive nature brings about making a number of errors.
Instead of that, enterprise companies can use intelligent RPA that can scan a 500-page document and generate the error-free output within seconds.
Enterprise companies can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their processes, boost workplace productivity, and scale their growth using these above discussed business process optimizations with automation. At the same time, this approach will cut costs, prevent and mitigate risks, and provide an exceptional customer experience.
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