What is business automation?

Most automation takes simple, manual tasks and automates them. Here are some of the types of automation a business can use. 

• Advanced automation
• Business process management
• Intelligent automation
• Process mining
• Robotic process automation
• Workflow automation

Advanced automation brings together humans and machines to integrate multiple systems across the organization. Supporting more complex processes, advanced automation relies on unstructured data coupled with machine learning, natural language processing and analysis. It promotes knowledge management and decision support for specialized work.

Business process management (BPM) helps organizations discover, measure, improve and optimize business strategy and processes. Different than project management, BPM is concerned with the whole end-to-end process.

Driven by AI, intelligent automation means that machines can “learn” and make decisions based on situations they have encountered and analyzed. For example, in customer service, virtual assistants powered by AI can reduce costs while enabling smarter interactions between customers and human agents. The result is a better customer service experience

Process mining involves using specialized algorithms to event log data to identify trends, patterns and details of how a process unfolds. Process mining applies data science to discover, validate and improve workflows. It combines data mining and process analytics to identify how to improve those processes.

Robotic process automation (RPA), also known as software robotics, uses intelligent automation technologies to perform repetitive office tasks of human workers, such as extracting data, filling in forms, moving files and more. Process automation helps organizations achieve uniformity and transparency.

Workflow automation replaces manual tasks with software that executes all or part of a process. United Foods used IBM® Cloud Pak® for Business Automation to streamline over HR, finance, and reporting workflows, boosting productivity and driving enhanced visibility into the business’s operations.

Whether you’re running a small business or a large enterprise, automation is an excellent way to streamline operations and drive business growth. Automation tools are designed to replace human labor with machine labor so you can put those human resources to work elsewhere in the business.

To realize the full potential of automation, businesses need to consistently utilize proven automation software and best practices across all workflows from creating faster, digital customer experiences to simplifying internal processes. However, not all solutions contain the full range of technology needed to automate end-to-end operations. This can lead to many point solutions, higher costs and an inability to scale.

Business automation is critical for a rapidly changing world. For example, predicting which customer behaviors will persist post-pandemic from wildly fluctuating demand to heightened health and safety precautions can be tricky.

But one area you can control is how you manage the experiences you create for your customers. Automation, especially automation combined with AI, can help you fix or refine these experiences, resulting in higher sales, better use of resources and greater customer satisfaction.

One of the best ways to do this is through an automation platform that helps you:

• Apply intelligence
• Augment workforces
• Automate core operations
• Drive cost savings
• Enhance processes and optimizations

Use the data from automating your operations with machine learning and AI to recommend actions and free up people for more strategic tasks. For example, organizations can use ML to analyze their sales forecasts to understand potential strengths and weaknesses. A ML process may identify a large customer in danger of churning before a sales analyst identifies the same issue.

Organizations are interested using digital workers, which are robots trained to perform specific tasks, or processes in partnership with humans, to speed up decision making and improve efficiencies. Humans can interact with these digital workers to improve project management, so they can focus on other issues.

Apply core automation capabilities document processing, workflow orchestration, decision management and content services to key operational areas to meet business needs.

Helping employees save time and accomplish tasks quicker reduces human resources costs and enables employees to handle a broader workload.

Building out automation solutions helps create operational efficiencies or hotspots in your operations. Building these automated processes can solve those issues or otherwise help organizations fix their processes.

• Application development
• Customer service
• Finance and accounting
• Human resources
• Marketing activities
• New product development
• Sales processes

IT teams can use automation to increase app development. They can increasingly use intelligent automation to write code, build apps and conduct product QA. Logistics company VLI turned to IBM to help automate several labor-intensive software automates processes, such as access certifications, access requests and password management. IBM’s automation ensured access requests were granted 99% faster than before.

Organizations can automate initial conversations with customers by deploying chatbots to collect information and potentially answer a question without needing human intervention. It can also automate call transcriptions for aggregation into data intelligence and for supervisors to better track protocol.

By automating financial planning and accounting functions, companies can free up time for important tasks like analysis, strategy and collaboration with stakeholders. In accounts payable (AP) management, for example, organizations can automate capture data, matched invoices to payments and route approvals. Technologies can also automate accounts reconciliations and generate financial reports. This reduces human errors around data and helps prevent fraud through background controls. For example, a global reinsurer in Switzerland used IBM software to automate its quarterly closing tasks and saved USD 40,000 per quarter.

Human resource management systems can automate a wide range of HR tasks, including job application processing, interview scheduling, employment offers, employee onboarding, payroll management and benefits administration. It can also create targeted notifications so executives and managers can receive updates on where relevant prospects are in the hiring process. Using analytics, these systems can also provide insights into workforce productivity.

With email marketing automation, companies can use software to send out emails to a client distribution list on a predefined schedule, reducing the costs of running the campaigns manually. They can also send out real-time emails depending on triggering actions. For example, if someone requests more information, an organization can automate an email that provides additional context. Marketing efforts can be tied into a customer relationship management (CRM) system and even do things like target customers with automated follow-up messages via social media.

Intelligent automation technologies can better help organizations organize and understand first- and third-party data to identify new opportunities for digital product expansions. Australian earthmoving equipment manufacturer Komatsu turned to IBM to develop a digital experience, powered by automation tools. Using IBM webMethods integration platform as a service (iPaaS), an email now creates an automated workflow without needing a host of applications. It led to 30% faster development and deployment.

Sales automation tools like Salesforce and other software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools enable sales teams to spend less time logging their deal-related activity and more time making the phone calls that close deals. The tools can automate repetitive tasks throughout the sales process, whether it’s qualifying leads based on their buyer journey, assigning prospects to the right rep or creating data-backed sales forecasts. It can also power changes in pricing depending on internal or external events like demand, inventory and quality assurance.