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
 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)

Core capabilities

Content
Automation can manage and govern large amounts of content.

All enterprises rely on content; both structured 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. Tapping into previously unused data and promoting employee collaboration provides many benefits, and concerns about information access, privacy, and security can be addressed by automation.

Cloud Pak for Automation provides low code consumable tools, APIs, and application connectors that make it easy to consume content in business applications. It also delivers previously unreachable business insight with the help of AI to extract intelligence from content.

 New in 20.0.3  Enterprise Records and Content Collector for SAP are optional components of the Content Manager 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 IBM FileNet® Content Manager.

Workflow
 New in 20.0.2  By automating steps in your end-to-end process workflow, you can increase agility, visibility, and consistency across hundreds of processes.

A workflow strings particular work items and content that is used in doing business together to create processes, and helps to identify patterns that can be improved. 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.

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

For more information, see IBM Business Automation Workflow.

Decisions
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.

The ODM event emitter supports application servers such as Liberty, which is the server that is used in Cloud Pak for Automation and WebSphere® Application Server, JBoss, and Tomcat on-premises.

For more information, see IBM Operational Decision Manager.

Capture

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. Cloud Pak for Automation can help to capture and understand this content by using artificial intelligence (AI). IBM Business Automation Content Analyzer is an AI-based data capture API that can be added to your content or capture management system with minimal document training.

 New in 20.0.3  Automation Document Processing provides a tailored solution that reads your documents, extracts data, and refines and stores the data for use.

For more information, see IBM Business Automation Content Analyzer and IBM Automation Document Processing.

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.

Cloud Pak for Automation is designed to increase business productivity and make operations more intelligent. Building automation solutions Using the Cloud Pak for Automation software