In a highly competitive landscape, businesses that leverage data-driven insights to optimize, manage and automate work processes gain a competitive advantage. Making smart choices about where to implement and how to manage process automation is key.
Process intelligence can help by utilizing advanced data analysis to identify processes that are best suited for automation. This eliminates the guesswork and enables your organization to make informed decisions about improving business value.
This article explores ways in which you can use process intelligence tools to become more agile and responsive to changing market conditions. This flexibility allows for faster adaptation to new opportunities and increases speed to value.
Making the Most of Automation
With the increased adoption of automation, companies can collect and analyze vast amounts of data. Figuring out how to best integrate this information to streamline business processes is the challenge. Process intelligence enables you to quickly uncover the best automation opportunities from data scattered across the organization. It helps you improve processes end-to-end, regardless of complexity, through its ability to extract data from almost any system, including legacy ones. This big-picture approach gives the insights and accuracy needed to understand how processes work, where they can be improved and how to optimize them to increase your organization’s return on investment (ROI).
Traditional methods of gathering insight about processes can be time-consuming and eat up in-house resources. And, once in production, it is hard to know whether these process automations are meeting service level agreements (SLAs), delivering results and doing so in a compliant and cost-effective fashion.
Process intelligence automates the process, collecting data from various sources in real-time. You get a 360-degree view of operations, systems and your people. This enhanced visibility allows you to understand how different components interact and where bottlenecks occur. This allows you to focus your automation efforts on end-to-end processes that will have the most impact on efficiency, cost reduction and overall performance.
Navigating Compliance and Cost-Efficiency Outcomes
In the financial world, it is easy to let critical operations grow in complexity due to regulatory demands across multiple regions. As more banking customers switch to digital and real-time apps – offering greater and more flexible ways to access their money – financial service providers are using smarter analytics to stay competitive.
Digital transformation is not only great for the customer, but it also supports risk and regulatory compliance priorities. Understanding processes and tasks at a macro and micro level can reveal unnecessarily complex or sub-optimized processes that add time and cost to routine tasks, obstructing customer service.
By using process intelligence, you can analyze system log file data in near real time. This allows you to detect where things are going wrong and how to significantly improve them. These enhancements boost customer service, increase accuracy in reporting and compliance, improve efficiency and eliminate wasteful reworks.
A financial services firm, for example, with more than $1 trillion under management and five million clients, came to us with a conformity issue. The firm’s goal was 100% compliance of investor onboarding to mitigate regulatory risk, compliance violation, and exposure from fines.
It soon became clear that the team could only monitor 15% of the processes, leaving them open to possible litigation and risk. Using process intelligence, compliance is now 100% checked with a fifth of the resources, which saves the firm $2 million a year.
When regulatory fines for compliance violations are measured in tens or hundreds of millions, or an interest rate change makes products uncompetitive, the faster teams can analyze customer data or products, the faster they can identify issues and solve them. By creating a simple automatic baseline with key criteria, challenges can be analyzed immediately and upgraded, allowing people, processes, and systems to be set in place.
Eliminating Waste and Improving the Customer Experience
The global healthcare sector must balance patient experience with compliance risks. Intelligent process mapping is essential to understanding which areas of treatment are working well and where improvements can be made. In the healthcare industry, one of the biggest issues is the management of patient and health insurance data, requiring huge amounts of budget and personnel.
In the case of an 11-hospital health group re-processing patient insurance claims, for instance, they streamlined processes and compliance for employees and made cost savings. Process intelligence uncovers delays, siloes and duplicates across an organization. This end-to-end visualization enables you to find opportunities to optimize processes for both digital workers and people, helping to seamlessly unify your workforce. For the hospital group, this process intelligence solution was able to identify and eliminate wasteful duplicate insurance processes in a matter of hours, and significantly improve compliance rates from 40% to 87%. With the team now monitoring 100% of all scheduled interactions with patients – up from just five percent – the hospital group has transformed its revenue cycle by identifying $5.5 million in potential cost savings.
Taking Automation to the Next Level
In most cases, unified intelligent automation (IA) is able to streamline decision-making through the use of everything from chatbots to digital workers, monitoring and predicting outcomes that are faster and more focused. In rapidly changing markets where competitive differentiators are critical, advances in process intelligence technology mean greater efficiencies are possible by weaving artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) into any organization – all facilitated through digital workers. But implementing digital workers effectively requires preparation and planning.
Developing an automation implementation strategy will help you realize your best business value. Process intelligence helps you make optimal use of RPA and IA by assessing end-to-end process performance and identifying inefficiencies as well as automation opportunities. These tools can optimize any aspect of daily operations, improving customer experience and reducing costs.
Nowadays, customers are able to better interact with their brands, resulting in more focused data-led operations over time. Organizations looking to digitally transform should look at their existing platforms and make process intelligence a greater part of their infrastructure roadmap. These tools help streamline the discovery and automation journey, leading to faster results.
Michael McLaughlin is V.P. of Alliances and Commercial Operations for SS&C Blue Prism. He has 20 years of experience managing and selling software, Intelligent Automation, Robotic process automation (RPA), workforce automation, security and telecoms solutions. A good communicator at all levels, he focuses on relationships and problem solving. His specialties of expertise include: Intelligent Automation and Robotic Process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), Enterprise software solutions, Cloud & SaaS solutions, big data and data integration, virtualization, encrypted e-mail and data security solutions and telecommunications and IT.