Automation capabilities
IBM Cloud Pak® for Automation provides technologies and services that are designed for all of your digital business operations.
IBM Cloud Pak for Automation includes five categories of capabilities.
- Platform Foundation
- Low-code authoring interfaces
- No-code authoring interfaces
- Core automation capabilities to manage your business and integrate artificial intelligence (AI)
- Monitoring and optimizing services
- Platform Foundation
- New in 20.0.2
Cloud Pak for Automation includes a set of 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 uses 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 Business Automation Studio and Business Automation Navigator.
User Management Services (UMS) provide SSO and Teams options, which provide users of multiple applications with a single sign-on experience and centrally administered teams. For more information, see User Management Service.
The Cloud Platform License Service collects and measures the license usage of the capabilities. You can use the Metering Service to view and download detailed usage metrics for the applications and cluster.
- Low-code authoring interfaces
- The low code tooling available in the platform is exposed as designers (Application
Designer, Decision
Designer, Digital
Worker, and Content Analyzer) in Business Automation
Studio.
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, or you can work in a more detailed view if you want to manage your projects.
New in 20.0.3 Automation Document Processing provides AI-powered services that automatically read and correct data from your documents. The low code applications enable users to design deep learning models without the need of data scientists and provide 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 Automation Document Processing. - No-code authoring interfaces
- Workstream Services, which enables business users to build automation applications with little
or no code is exposed in Business Automation Navigator.
Workstream Services is a productivity tool that helps you to define who (role-based user assignments) can build, publish, and run repetitive work that is not part of a mainstream process. For more information, see IBM Automation Workstream Services.
- Core automation capabilities to manage your business and integrate artificial intelligence (AI)
- Monitoring and optimizing services
- IBM Business Automation Insights although functionally
part of the Platform Foundation, provides specialized visualization for business owners and machine
learning capabilities from operational data.
Business Automation Insights stores and processes events that are emitted by the Cloud Pak for Automation core capabilities.
With IBM 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 have near real-time visibility on the business operations.
Business Automation Insights can apply machine learning algorithms to the centralized operational data to provide guidance to business owners on how to improve operations. Machine learning comes in the form of Jupyter Notebooks, which data scientists and developers can reuse. For more information, see Machine learning with Business Automation Insights.
Designed to be open and customizable, Business Automation Insights can be enhanced with new dashboards and new machine learning algorithms to better adjust to specific business domains and objectives. Open means interoperability of applications and the sharing of large volumes of data. Open also provides enterprise-grade security in a hybrid multicloud environment to connect and exchange data.
For more information, see IBM Business Automation Insights.
The following diagram shows the Platform Foundation of Cloud Pak for Automation, the tools it provides and how the core capabilities integrate with them. Business Automation Insights is an option for many of the capabilities whether they are integrated into the platform or are stand-alone.