Automation capabilities

Foundation

Cloud Pak for Business Automation includes a set of common tools like Business Automation Studio and Business Automation Navigator. Studio provides a unified authoring environment and an entry point to various designers. Navigator enables business users to work with content from various sources and use business automation applications that are built to help them in their daily job. The included services provide better integration and a unified experience with single sign-on (SSO) and team management.

For more information, see the Business Automation Studio and Business Automation Navigator section in Common tools.

Low-code authoring interfaces

The low code tools available in the platform appear as designers (Application Designer, Decision Designer, and Document Processing Designer in Business Automation Studio of the Common tools).

Business Automation Studio is the single place where you can author user applications and where you manage the projects that you use to build these apps. You can work in a simple view if you want to create, assemble, and publish projects. Else, you can work in a more detailed view if you want to manage your projects.

No-code authoring interfaces

Workstream Services enables business users to build automation applications with little or no code. It is available in Business Automation Navigator.

Workstream Services is a productivity tool that helps you to define through role-based user assignments who can build, publish, and run repetitive work that is not part of a mainstream process. For more information, see Managing workstreams.

Automation accelerators

Cloud Pak for Business Automation also includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) assisted capabilities for process mining and RPA-driven automation to resolve business and IT challenges and inefficiencies. Business analysts and process stakeholders can use process mining to discover end-to-end processes, identify bottlenecks, and suggest improvements. Visualizations and simulations help to clarify potential enhancements, increase automation, and improve return on investment (ROI).

Core automation capabilities to manage your business and integrate artificial intelligence (AI)

The following core automation capabilities are designed to optimize business management and integrate artificial intelligence (AI).

Workflow automation

By automating steps in your workflow, you can increase agility, visibility, and consistency across hundreds of processes and cases.

A workflow strings work items and content together to create processes or cases, and helps to identify business patterns to improve. A loan application, for example, might involve dozens of steps, any one of which might be small and routine, but the result of the workflow can deliver critical results to a customer.

Business Automation Workflow generates BPMN and Case events that can be captured in Document Processing, aggregated into business-relevant KPIs, and displayed on meaningful dashboards to analyze business data.

For more information, see Workflow automation.

Decision management

Companies make thousands of operational decisions per day, but relatively few are based solely on personal judgment.

Most of the time these decisions involve detailed, repetitive work that is done according to business policies or industry regulations. These repeatable business decisions can be captured and automated to improve your responsiveness, minimize compliance risk, and streamline workflow processes. Separating business rules from your applications provides the flexibility that is needed to quickly respond to customers and changes in the marketplace.

Automation Decision Services provides a fully fledged decision modeling environment. Business users can take control of the decision-making process and initiate and build enterprise-scale decision automations.

Operational Decision Manager can be used to commit your policies to decision services that run on execution servers for client applications. ODM supports different web servers, including WebSphere® Application Server Liberty, which is also the server that is used in Cloud Pak for Business Automation.

For more information, see Decision management.

Content services

All enterprises rely on content from structured content in databases and unstructured content in business documents, photographs, email, audio and video files, and social media. All of this data and information that is contained inside must be managed and stored.

The Content pattern provides low code consumable tools, APIs, and application connectors that streamline and automate business processes. It can be used to access and manage all forms of content, and automate records management. It also delivers previously unreachable business insight with the help of AI to extract intelligence from content.

Enterprise Records and Content Collector for SAP are optional components of the Content pattern. You can use Enterprise Records to create and maintain accurate, secure, and reliable records for both electronic and physical information. Content Collector provides advanced archiving capabilities that help SAP users run their businesses more efficiently.

For more information, see Content services.

Document processing

All companies have data that is trapped inside their unstructured documents. Many organizations struggle to collect and understand this data to make it available for decision making. Document Processing can help to capture and understand this content by using artificial intelligence (AI). Document Processing enables users to design deep learning models without the need of data scientists and provides trained models for recognized document types such as purchase orders, tax forms, utility bills, and invoices. You can create new intelligent document processes and extend applications to take advantage of uncovered patterns and insights. The services are intended to establish such high confidence levels that manual validation is reduced to a minimum. For more information, see Document processing.

The following diagram highlights that the core automation capabilities all help to build the tools (applications) that employees need to do their work.

Monitoring and optimizing services

Business Automation Insights provides specialized visualization of operational data for business owners through storing and processing events. The Cloud Pak for Business Automation core capabilities or custom sources can emit these events.

With Business Automation Workflow, you can monitor BPEL processes and export data from Business Performance Data Warehouse into Business Automation Insights without losing historical data and KPIs.

The events are aggregated into business-relevant metrics, and displayed in pre-built or user-configured dashboards to provide near real-time visibility on the business operations.

Business Automation Insights is an option for many of the capabilities whether they are integrated into the platform or are stand-alone deployments. For more information, see Discovering IBM Business Automation Insights.