The business impact of intelligent automation

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises are constantly reviewing solutions to streamline their operations and gain a competitive edge. With new challenges continually on the horizon for enterprises, the need to automate operations and processes to allow room for innovation becomes vital.

One of the most transformative technologies revolutionising the business world today is intelligent automation.

With its ability to combine artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), digital process automation (DPA) and more, intelligent automation is empowering organisations to automate repetitive tasks, enhance productivity, drive efficiencies and streamline costs to unlock new opportunities for growth and customer satisfaction.

In a recent transformation simulation study of a composite organisation created by Pega, in partnership with Forrester, the results delivered a 421% return on investment for the organisation.

The need for improvement of traditional systems

Traditionally, enterprises have lacked the insights and tools needed to modernise their workforces and overall organisations.

Business processes were either completely manual or only partially automated using antiquated, unintegrated point solutions and/or legacy mainframe platforms.

Furthermore, employee workflows weren’t optimised, instead relying on a patchwork of email and spreadsheets for management and collaboration.

Departments were also disconnected, as Pega and Forrester’s Total Economic Impact of Intelligent Automation study found, 38% of business decision-makers stated that the business and IT sides of the organisation did not work together prior to intelligent automation implementation.

As a result, common business processes were slow, inefficient and inconsistent, and caused an array of challenges to arise:

• Lack of visibility into workflows: Organisations lacked visibility into their workflows, leading to a lack of insight into performance, and inefficiencies to arise. The absence of monitoring systems made it difficult to pinpoint specific areas of improvement.
• Hindrance to speed of delivery: Siloed and error-prone processes resulted in delays and suboptimal solutions. Pega and Forrester found almost a quarter (23%) of business decision-makers said their organisation’s legacy tools were not designed to work together and one in five (19%) noted that it was difficult to leverage data across the disparate systems in place before adopting intelligent automation.
• Sub-optimal employee experience: End users of the technology would often become frustrated with the time it took to complete common tasks, and the lack of cohesion in systems presented no direction on where to get the right information. Furthermore, most interactions took place via email, which only lengthened response times and in turn project timelines.
• Slowness hurt customer experience: Organisations’ primary goal is to provide a high-quality customer experience, and traditional systems had a considerable gap between how enterprises wanted to engage with customers, and the capabilities that could be handled. Internal back and forth, as well as process quality issues combined with no insight of customer workflow performance, led to many delays, ultimately impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• No room for modernisation: With a range of disparate technologies and solutions, siloed workflows and holes in communications, organisations traditionally struggled when it came to modernising and innovating. The speed of evolution for many businesses took time, as 46% of respondents stated traditional technology was not the best fit for their goals and aims.
   

With a focus of not only providing high-end experiences for customers and employees, but also continuing to innovate and grow, enterprises required systems to be put in place that would optimise processes and reduce time spent on everyday tasks. In turn, the need for automation becomes pivotal if they wish to modernise and keep up with the rapidly evolving business landscape.

The power of intelligent automation

Intelligent automation offers enterprises the opportunity to address all these challenges, allowing organisations to become more efficient and frictionless. When businesses utilise capabilities like digital process automation (DPA), robotic process automation (RPA), end-to-end workflow automation and AI-powered decision-making, they have the opportunity to streamline and automate processes in their back office and IT departments to improve efficiency, agility, collaboration and performance.

Intelligent automation can optimise a range of areas for organisations including:

• Visibility: When adopting intelligent automation, businesses are able to elevate process visibility to enterprise level, rather than restricting it to individual tasks. This allows organisations to use data to further enhance performance and improve decisions.
• Customer experience: As intelligent automation optimises business processes and employee performance, it leads to better customer solutions. With reduced customer frustration, enterprises are more likely see improved customer loyalty.
• Employee experience: With access to more insights from intelligent automation, enterprises can provide employees with personalised training and guides. Furthermore, mundane tasks can be automated leaving more time for employees to complete engaging and satisfying work, creating a better work environment, employee satisfaction and delivery.
• IT collaboration: Organisations can change the composition of their delivery teams — moving towards bringing business and IT together to align more closely with the needs of the business and design process that drive measurable impact.
• Decision-making: As enterprises look to invest in technologies and solutions that help grow the company, intelligent automation provides data and insights to make evidence-backed decisions, providing organisations with data-backed insights and opportunities to innovate.
   

Intelligent automation presents a powerful solution for enterprises to overcome challenges and achieve greater efficiency, seamlessness and opportunity for growth.

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