What is Intelligent Process Automation and Why Should You Use It?

Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s, businesses have found innovative ways to automate their processes to help them reduce costs, increase capacity, and improve the quality of their outputs. Today, an increasing number of businesses are using intelligent software to automate not only the actions within a process, but also rely on the cognitive decision making capabilities to make key decisions on the next stages of those actions.

This is the core of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). 

Intelligent Process Automation is the evolution of a series of automation techniques which can carry out both tasks and decisions. One survey by Deloitte found that 58% of executives who responded were already beginning their intelligent automation journey. 

But what are the key elements of Intelligent Process Automation, and why should you be using it within your business?  To clearly understand it, we need to understand the techniques it employs, what they allow, and how they work together.

The Key Elements of Intelligent Process Automation

The key elements of Intelligent Process Automation are:

Automation of processes: 

Process Automation (PA) – a mature concept focused on the automation of any type of repetitive task within a process using programming, and requires application integration at a database level. Partial automation is another element of process automation that assists the work actions performed by humans to facilitate their processes, but does not fully automate them. 

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – a concept that mimics human actions to capture data, run applications, trigger responses, and communicate with other systems to perform a variety of simple tasks. 

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Artificial Intelligence (A.I). – a range of technologies and techniques that allow machines to perform actions such as decision making, image recognition, anomaly detection, and more. 

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With Intelligent Process Automation, the A.I. mimics human cognition, making decisions much faster and with fewer errors – helping it to improve over time. It is often able to reduce the need for human intervention to a minimum, while still allowing humans to take control when needed.

Why Should You Use It?

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Process Automation and Robotic Process Automation, due to their many benefits and clear demonstration of value. 

But while they are effective solutions, the types of processes they can automate are limited.  Standard automation methods such as these are often unable to impact workflows involving unstructured content, which makes up over 80% of data in most cases.

However, Intelligent Process Automation has the ability to perform tasks requiring cognitive processing and complexity, making it ideal for the tasks that are too complicated for standard methods, but too repetitive and time-consuming for humans. For businesses, this amplifies the impressive value already generated by less sophisticated automation techniques. 

Because Intelligent Process Automation is able to carry out repetitive tasks accurately while making key decisions, the margin for human error is significantly reduced. While humans may become fatigued when carrying out repetitive tasks, automation does not, meaning that it can achieve a much higher and precise level of accuracy.

What ROI Can You Expect?

When investing in any new technology, a key factor is being able to predict the overall ROI it will bring. Calculating the ROI of your Intelligent Automation project allows for more than a financial estimate: it can also help you determine which processes to automate in the first place, depending on the ease of implementation and the immediate benefits it can provide. 

However, while Intelligent Process Automation can provide immediate benefits, such as time and cost reduction, other benefits will provide more value across an extended period of time. 

With our expertise in automation, whenever we partner with an organization, we can help them break down the key benefits by taking into consideration the value for the customer, the employees, and the shareholders. Get in touch to find out how we can help.

Getting Started with Intelligent Process Automation

Intelligent Process Automation is being implemented across businesses in all sectors to help them improve their processes, reduce costs, and enhance efficiency. With more companies opening their eyes to the benefits, those who fail to adapt will be left behind. 

Our free eBook breaks down into further detail what Intelligent Process Automation is, what it can achieve, and how businesses like yours can get started.