In the age of digital transformation, it’s important to stay on top of the new and evolving technology available. According to a recent study by Forrester, 21 percent of firms seem to think their transformation is done, and another 22 percent are just now investigating transformation, or not transforming at all. Since digital transformation is an ongoing process, these groups are setting themselves up to end up behind the curve.
If your organization falls into that 43 percent, there are simple ways to begin a digital transformation. This involves process automation. If you’ve never heard the term “process automation,” don’t worry. In this article, you’ll learn how to transform your enterprise. This includes the fundamentals of intelligent process automation (IPA), robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), and the future of work.
What is business process automation?
Any organization in any field can use business process automation to streamline mundane tasks that take up too much of their workforce’s time. Using tools and technology to expedite projects, simplify processes, or eliminate recurring tasks are all examples of BPA. In addition to saving time, BPA is also widely known for helping organizations cut costs as a result of the added efficiencies to their teams’ workflows.
As BPA continues to grow and evolve, there are new software and technology available everywhere, which can be overwhelming at times. It’s easy to focus on the newest and shiniest product when you always think about digital transformation. However, it’s far more efficient and economical to consider technology that evolves with a company and learns more as the company learns more.
Capacity empowers businesses to integrate knowledge across every arm of their organization. By tapping into apps, documents, spreadsheets, web pages, and even the minds of employees, Capacity connects all company knowledge—making it all instantly accessible via chat.
Searching through hundreds or thousands of resources to locate one single document takes time. Combing through the document to find the desired knowledge takes even more time. Capacity connects to resources to stop teams from wasting time searching, so they can focus on meaningful tasks. This automated, straight line to knowledge streamlines the onboarding process, customer support, loan and mortgage process, sales pipeline, and more.
Capacity’s AI supercharges traditional process automation, not only due to the deep learning it facilitates but also the wonderful user experience we’ve taken great care to create. We’ve integrated more than 50 of today’s most popular enterprise apps, and our Developer Platform (BETA) enables organizations to connect any app or system they could possibly want, proprietary or otherwise. Capacity can meet your team wherever their workflow takes them.
What is robotic process automation?
Robotic process automation emerged from business process automation, so organizations use RPA for similar reasons that they use BPA: to automate processes, streamline tasks, and reduce costs. However, RPA introduces automated software, for example, a chatbot, that fields inquiries and provides actionable responses.
Robotic process automation is a fantastic tool for automating simple tasks throughout a workflow. But getting value out of RPA is easier if a company already leverages digitized, repeatable processes like those mentioned above.
Capacity also offers an AI bot created to help businesses do their best work. The bot can “live” wherever teams work, so they don’t have to toggle back and forth between systems and platforms to find the information they need. Capacity plugs into major messaging apps and emails, so the user can simply ask Capacity a question in their preferred communication channel, just like they would a coworker. Our AI-powered knowledge sharing platform is available 24/7, so even if a user is out of the office, they can open up their messaging app and get an answer in milliseconds.
While it is true that a simple question-and-answer pair will work for some scenarios, a follow-up question can add clarity. Intelligent workflow automation can help provide instant and accurate information. Capacity’s Guided Conversations feature acts as automated workflows for organizations. Rather than simple, canned answers, Capacity leads users through targeted, step-by-step conversational flows to guide them to the best answer.
What is intelligent process automation?
Intelligent process automation simplifies the mundane and repetitive tasks from the workforce like business process automation and robotic process automation. However, IPA takes automation one step further by repeating its users’ activities, learning through conversations, and improving responses over time. Essentially, intelligent process automation is what fuels RPA technology.
By bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning into a bot, the bot can operate on its own after learning information from the resources in its knowledge base. The bot can also learn from people’s response patterns, the type of questions, the number of questions asked, and more. As a result, the longer a bot works and aligns itself with a company’s needs, the more ROI it delivers.
At Capacity, we believe knowledge sharing is the key to helping teams work efficiently and make good decisions. But it’s important to supplement that knowledge with structure. Building an engine for rules is critical for ensuring compliance across your organization. For example, Capacity can record every detail of a particular process and store it in the knowledge base. Once Capacity captures that knowledge, it can be leveraged later to ensure compliance, for example.
Capacity also uses natural language processing to understand patterns when phrases differ slightly but have the same meaning. It facilitates spell check, word importance, word order, term frequency, acronym translation, phrasal matching, word vectorization, and more. No teammate or customer is ever left misunderstood and no question is left unanswered.
No matter how complex the process, any team can interact with Capacity using natural language and a modern interface. Users receive instant access to accurate information and structured workflows on processes, so they can make the right decisions.
How can I apply automation in my organization?
Regardless of where your organization stands in process automation, change management will be necessary. In the current stage of digital transformation, it’s important to evolve, grow, and make improvements to stay competitive.
Change management often involves updating business processes and then training the entire organization to adapt to those changes. With Capacity, on the other hand, you’ll collaborate in training a best-in-class AI system only once. After that, it will answer the questions and guide people through your processes for years to come.