Realize value faster and accelerate automation with Process Intelligence

Automation can revolutionize organizations by saving costs, improving customer service and empowering people to focus on more strategic tasks. But it takes significant time and resources to find the right processes to automate, and organizations could be missing automation opportunities and investing more than necessary in the long run.

That happens for two main reasons: organizations fail to prioritize the right processes for automation and automate processes without considering how they could be improved, reinvented or eliminated altogether.

Process Intelligence (PI) allows organizations to realize the value of automation more quickly by managing and optimizing processes. By helping them discover which processes should be automated first, PI enables them to achieve a faster return on investment (ROI).

How does process automation benefit and accelerate automation 

Traditionally, most organizations draw process models that reflect how processes are performed and store these models in process definition documents (PDDs) as a best practice.

However, documenting business processes is a time consuming and costly initiative, requiring teams of consultants to interview multiple stakeholders. The outcome is often an incomplete understanding of end-to-end process execution, resulting in automation investments that fail to realize their intended business value or unlock the full potential of intelligent automation (IA).

That’s why Blue Prism has introduced Process Intelligence. It creates an unfiltered and unedited history of every process iteration from beginning to end. These timelines are analyzed so they can be compared, filtered, searched and aggregated.

PI visualizes the workflow through each process stage and reveals the delays, bottlenecks and outliers. It then provides an “as-is” insight into end-to-end process execution.

This method offers users complete visibility into processes from start to finish, even if some steps are performed using multiple systems.

The numerical process analysis approach of PI works equally well on all types of processes, whether they’re simple or extremely complex, using extensive filtering capabilities to drill into identified issues and evaluate in-depth process optimization opportunities.

At the same time, PI enables quantifiable, data-driven ROI calculations based on the number of transactions and process steps, process duration and cost per transaction.

It achieves all this while eliminating arduous, costly and often subjective manual process evaluation. It delivers end-to-end process visibility, so organizations can find high-risk or costly patterns that might have otherwise been missed.

Avoiding automation of broken or poorly executed processes is crucial, and PI helps achieve just that. That’s because it reviews processes exactly as they’re executed, allowing teams to identify, analyze and correct issues before they’re automated. That way, they can avoid or fix broken processes that amplify automation development costs and extend time-to-value (TTV).

Monitoring and alerts to keep automation on track

PI continues to add value once new processes have been introduced and are up and running. The solution monitors processes in near real time, observing every iteration and alerting process owners of deviations that could cause delays or other problems.

By enabling continuous improvement, PI continues to deliver ROI as businesses capitalize on opportunities to make processes work faster and smarter.

For example, automated process monitoring in mixed-mode scenarios (where software robots incorporate human assistance) helps to safeguard ROI commitments. Organizations can specify detailed scenarios or conditions that trigger real-time alerts to the right people at the right time. These features are backed up by clear, quantifiable cost-impact data that’s automatically updated and monitored daily, providing a rock-solid justification for future automation initiatives.

A second area where PI continues to add value is within compliance. It enables users to define process rules that align with the organization’s compliance requirements and to instruct the system to watch for violations.

When one or more of those rules is broken, the system alerts users right away, enabling them to take immediate action to rectify the deviation and ensure it will not happen again.

Users can set their PI alerting rules to automatically manage the problem when an alert is triggered. This capability can mean the difference between discovering an issue before it affects a business’ compliance status and finding it when it’s already caused problems elsewhere in the workflow or, worse still, learning about it after a violation has been reported.

How does process intelligence continue to accelerate automation

The majority of current RPA and IA initiatives focus on automating high-volume and relatively simple processes involving structured data without human intervention.

But forward-thinking users are increasingly considering automating processes that use unstructured data, as well as those in which humans are part of the process or where some cognitive reasoning may need to be employed. This increase in complexity and sophistication drives up deployment costs and, in turn, reduces automation ROI.

Scaling an automation program at speed is a difficult task. It requires significant command, control and orchestration to ensure automation remains synchronized across every process and business system it touches.

With PI, organizations can monitor enterprise-wide processes in near real time. And if anything goes wrong, the organization’s alerting functionality will automatically detect and start correcting the problem, providing the control and visibility they need to scale with confidence.

Scale automation faster with process intelligence

There’s no doubt that organizations will increasingly rely on IA to build more efficient models required to meet customer expectations, remain competitive against new digital-first market entrants and deal with ever-stricter regulatory regimes.

Intelligent automation can help organizations manage a range of business challenges, including:

• Automating compliance checks in financial services
• Providing better outcomes in the healthcare and public sectors
• Improving visibility in the manufacturing supply chain
• Optimizing multiple connected steps in the insurance claims cycle
  
  

The scale of potential transformation is enormous, but the amount of work involved in delivering widespread change can seem daunting. PI delivers more certainty to IA than ever before and eliminates the need for lengthy investigations into how processes work and which should be prioritized.

Above all, with Process Intelligence, organizations can secure ROI in intelligent automation faster, bolster the confidence for future initiatives and build an organization fit for future growth.