Intelligent Process Automation: How and Why Businesses are Using it?

Intelligent automation is the combination of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) to automate business processes to reduce human effort and improve operational efficiency. The cognitive abilities of AI enable seamless automation of all processes, including those that require human intellect – judgment and analysis – which is why it is also sometimes referred to as cognitive automation. Intelligent process automation improves business outcomes through –
  • Streamlining the decision-making processes
  • Simplifying processes, freeing up resources for other vital areas of business
  • Enhancing operational efficiencies for business transformation.
AI Technologies for Intelligent Process Automation
Benefits: How Intelligent Automation Helps in Resolving Day-to-day Business Challenges
MarketsandMarkets forecasts the global Intelligent Process Automation Market size to grow to USD 25.9 billion by 2027.
Numerous surveys reveal a common trend that an increasing number of organizations across the world are implementing and scaling intelligent automation technologies. The number one benefit of embracing intelligent automation is cost reduction and this is a top priority for most organizations worldwide. Deploying intelligent automation leads to enhanced process efficiency, cost efficiency, better levels of customer satisfaction, optimized office operations, reduced risks, increased productivity, and innovation, and much more.
Redundant legacy processes, and repetitive and tedious tasks that require intense human intervention prevent businesses from scaling up. And stagnated growth impacts ROIs.
Intelligent process automation automates business processes in ways that eliminate human dependencies, minimize the scope for any human errors, and increase process accuracies through the following –
1. Efficient End-to-End Document Processing
Processing large volumes of documents has been a major pain area for almost all enterprises across industries for a long time.
With intelligent process automation and document processing applications, structured and unstructured documents get easily processed with the highest accuracy rates. Data entry errors are reduced significantly, saving time for the workforce to focus on other key growth areas of the business.
2. Proactive Handling of Customer Requests & Complaints
By leveraging intelligent process automation, businesses can strengthen their customer service capabilities and ramp up complaint handling. Automation enables quick analysis of the nature of the complaint, and its content so that it can be directly routed to the right channels. This screening allows workload prioritization.
3. Improved Onboarding
Intelligent automation platforms have made effortless onboarding possible across industries. For example, in the banking and financial services industry, remote onboarding through contactless & paperless procedures, online eKYC verification, e-signature, ICR/OCR document scanning & data extraction, are some of the many processes driven by intelligent automation.
Another example would be how HR departments of enterprises can deploy Intelligent Automated HR Systems to accelerate employee onboarding/offboarding – saving time and resources while offering a better experience to the employees.
4. Enhanced Sales & Marketing Opportunities
Ask a sales & marketing employee how challenging it is to make a sale. In an age where every industry faces stiff competition and enterprises struggle to meet their business targets, intelligent automation can be of great help. There is a massive cross-sell revenue opportunity within the existing customer base of businesses, and intelligent automation can tap this proactively through automated cross-selling tools.
5. Inventory Control
The manufacturing departments of enterprises can easily streamline their back-end processes with automated inventory control systems like ERP systems. Intelligent automation enables automating supply chains, keeping track of inventory, handling shipping, and synchronizing the omnichannel order and inventory data. Automated inventory control is gaining significant momentum in recent times, allowing manufacturers to diversify their product & service offerings.
Use Case: An Intelligent Automation Platform for Healthcare RCM
Revenue cycle inefficiencies are a perennial concern for the Healthcare industry. Every Healthcare business out there wants to maximize its revenues and reduce costs, and an Intelligent Automation (IA) platform can make this possible.
A Clinic in Orlando was spending hours manually completing tasks such as entering data from tens of hundreds of files every day. These manual processes were laborious, prone to errors, and highly time intensive. Such inefficiencies also meant compromised net revenue capture, which in turn impacted the management’s decision-making.
To change course, the Clinic decided to invest in automation, and this choice turned out to be a game-changer. With the help of a technology partner, the Clinic was able to assess how to use an IA platform strategically to derive financial value within the revenue cycle.
Healthcare providers like this Clinic are increasingly using intelligent process automation platforms to identify new revenue streams and reduce costs by automating time-consuming revenue cycle tasks.

Planning to Embrace Intelligent Process Automation? Consider these Four Points

To reiterate, intelligent process automation is assisting businesses in achieving the highest levels of efficiency and accuracy in their core processes. However, there is a need for the management and the SMEs to identify those areas where using intelligent process automation can create maximum business impact. The following points should also be evaluated when you are considering intelligent process automation for your business –
1. Understand the Problems you are Trying to Solve
Do not embrace any technology for the sake of trying it out. Evaluate the pain points of your organization. Identify bottlenecks that are impacting your process efficiency. Linking it to use cases where you get a better idea of how intelligent process automation can benefit your business will help you convince all stakeholders of the effectiveness of this solution.
2. Get Prepared with Data
Most technologies only solve problems when they are fed with good-quality data. Artificial intelligence also needs good quality data as fodder to drive an intelligent process automation platform.
3. Ensure you have the Right Resources
Often, organizations start their digital transformation journeys without the right team. This can become a major roadblock in the successful integration of new-age technologies. Having a Technology and Solution Partner onboard can help fill this void and assist in training the team members to drive your digital initiatives.
4. Focus on Project Governance
Having the right leadership and governance team is vital to identify projects, monitoring them, understanding the challenges, and accelerating the process to reach completion.

The Way Forward

Intelligent process automation has been one of the fastest embraced digital 2.0 technologies by organizations as part of their digital transformation roadmaps. KANINI’s deep expertise in product engineering combined with Data Analytics & AI helps enterprises prepare for intelligent process automation with the right tools and frameworks. We provide zero-touch automation for processes like Order Processing, Invoice Processing, Reports to Reconciliation, Provider Data Management, Claims Management, etc. Get in touch to know more from our experts.
Author

Srini Karunakaran
Srinivasan Karunakaran, Chief Operating Officer at KANINI, is a tech-savvy IT services delivery specialist with close to 25 years of demonstrated industry experience. He is a strong operations person with extensive experience in Global IT Software Development & Delivery, Business Relationship Management, and Operations Management. Srini is highly skilled in strategic planning and has successfully implemented innovative engagement models that drive cost-effective IT service delivery.
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