In the digital transformation journey, if organisations want to get further down the road, they will need intelligent workflow automation. Industry experts share insights.
Let’s face it, if a business is not running on intelligent workflows, the ability to be flexible will be limited, as will be the ability to generate tangible benefits from real-time opportunities.
Now more than ever, customers have more digital interactions with businesses — and higher expectations for each one.
To thrive in the post-pandemic world, companies need to deliver better customer experiences, be more agile and rapidly automate as many business processes as possible – focusing first on high-value workflows such as customer engagement, finance, and operations.
According to experts, the road to workflow automation is paved with artificial intelligence (AI) so that businesses can automate labour-intensive tasks and drive greater value. The orchestration of automation, AI, analytics, and skills has the potential to fundamentally change how work gets done.
Although many businesses haven’t yet fully utilised the value of workflow automation, combining automation and AI is the next logical step, according to Rahul Bhageeradhan, Global Director – Digital Architecture at Kissflow. “Intelligent process automation can augment decision making, perform work processes, and solve problems.”
By incorporating intelligence, automation tools can learn, analyse, and make decisions for business processes, which can help organisations navigate complicated situations without compromising on efficiency, speed, or decision making.
“The goal is to get to a state where a machine can see thousands of transactions or activities every second and make informed decisions based upon this — everything from identifying bottlenecks, issues with existing processes, potential outages, and more — on the fly, and optimise them,” said Paul Hardy, Evangelist, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow. “All without any human intervention required, allowing those humans to focus on higher-value tasks.”
Optimise workforce and processes
The global pandemic has ended the conflict between “need to automate” and “want to automate” as businesses move forward to become more digital and automated. In the Middle East as well, companies are showing interest in Intelligent workflow automation. There are conversations around automation to optimise the workforce, build resilience and add 24/7 capacity to perform mundane tasks.
Last year, Arab National Bank collaborated with Automation Anywhere to automate back-office processes. The Saudi-listed joint-stock company that ranks among the 15 largest banks in the Middle East has automated 35 manual, repetitive business processes within the bank. More than 100 software bots now perform tasks within the bank’s operations, compliance, HR, and other departments.
“There is a definite momentum in the Middle East market towards increasing the uptake of intelligent workflow automation. And while many organisations are starting to experiment with technology, it will take at least a couple of more years for enterprise adoption and widespread use,” said Bhageeradhan.
The demand to transform people’s work is urgent for every organisation – from commercial enterprises to government agencies. The Middle East Oil and Gas companies are focusing on process automation to increase efficiency, and integrate information, and provide safety solutions to respond to the dynamic global demand.
“We have seen our most successful customers leveraging the Now Platform to deliver digital workflow automation and business process optimisation in a relatively short amount of time,” said Hardy.
Many workflows are time-consuming, inefficient, and manual sequences. A key obstacle to automation is extracting and processing unstructured information such as emails, financial documents, forms, contracts, images, and digital assets. It is challenging to develop collaborative working relationships without intelligent workflow automation or building connections between systems.
Now, a layer of technology can be put over enterprise applications — using automation, AI, analytics and other workflow orchestrators — and connect processes, and data, into an integrated end-to-end workflow that gives visibility.
“Leveraging AI to expand automation will help businesses cut costs and increase customer satisfaction while also improving the overall efficiency and productivity of the organisation,” said Bhageeradhan.
Current business conditions require organisations to adapt to change, drive productivity and innovation, and deliver experiences at scale. To reach agility, Hardy said, organisations need to break down silos and connect digital workflows across the enterprise to optimise business processes and keep work flowing seamlessly across people, data, and systems and data.
“In addition to this, as companies set out their ESG goals for 2030, it’s crucial for them to have a single view of their entire estate to ensure they can address pain points early, avoid unhappy customers and meet their goals,” added Hardy.
Enhance customer satisfaction
In an EY survey, 90 per cent of respondents indicated that they are comfortable with using technology, such as virtual agents and chatbots, with speeding up the processing of their queries. And brands are recognising this trend, rapidly increasing the application of intelligent automation. “Business leaders are super focused on experience, both for the customer and employees alike. With a truly cross-functional, cross-departmental portal for getting work done, powered by intelligent automation, the experience becomes frictionless,” said Hardy.
For instance, Take Disney+ embedded the ServiceNow virtual agent in their help centre to allow for quick and easy access to knowledge, FAQs, and even AI-driven conversations to manage their account.
Intelligent automation of customer service operations can result in efficiency, improved quality, and customer satisfaction, leading to greater customer retention and brand preference.
The benefits and ROI are significant – decreasing operating costs by 40 per cent to 70 per cent within six months according to IBM that helped a US-based telecommunications company reduce labour costs by 50 per cent within one year.
Companies are also achieving huge increases in speed. For example, IBM helped a US government agency implement intelligent workflows that reduced the average claims processing time from over 15 days to five minutes. Importantly, companies are seeing gains of 10-plus points in their net promoter score.
With intelligent automation, companies can become more customer-focused and responsive. As their operating models become digitised and intelligent with digital process automation, it also becomes possible to take more risks with product innovation, according to Bhageeradhan.
“We live in a digital age where the culture of rapid experimentation is crucial for all businesses. Automation that cuts across organisations, people, and processes help enable that approach. For instance, if the company has rapidly launched a new product and digital process automation metrics reveal that it is widely successful with customers, then the product can be quickly scaled to increase the company’s overall revenue. Similarly, if the same product is unsuccessful in gaining customer adoption, then it can be killed quickly without causing too many losses.”
Every organisation’s digital transformation journey is unique, so the automation platform should be built accordingly, which needs to be scalable. After all, an automation journey should be based on your current status and business goals.
“The 20th-century IT architectures are not suitable for today’s ever-changing environments,” said Hardy. “COVID-19 highlighted the existing weaknesses in global value chains. While leaders need to keep their hands on short-term challenges, they also need to keep their eyes on the future. Global pandemics, climate swings, and trade wars are all part of the new normal – and they will continue to test the resiliency of our organisations,” said Hardy.
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