Exploring the benefits intelligent automation can bring to industries

Building better business applications helps companies stay ahead of the competition. Using outdated and inefficient processes can slow progress, lead to poor employee and customer outcomes, and place obstacles in the way of innovation. This is why many modern businesses are beginning to make use of intelligent automation.

However, getting processes automated isn’t always straightforward. Although automation promises increased productivity among other benefits, starting an automation initiative can be a time, money, and risk-intensive task. Not to worry - keep reading to learn how to properly implement intelligent automation at your organization.

What is intelligent automation?

Intelligent automation marries the strategy of process automation with analytics and decisions generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The ultimate goal of intelligent automation is to reduce the number of manual labor tasks that needed to increase overall efficiency and productivity.

Recent predictions by Gartner suggest a growing demand for intelligent automation, with more than 90 percent of enterprises predicted to have an automation architect by 2025. A recent report by McKinsey also suggests that 57 percent of global companies have already begun their automation journey.

Key benefits of intelligent automation

Failing to exploit the latest technology to improve business outcomes quickly puts your business behind. To best understand how intelligent automation is proving vital in many sectors, consider the following key benefits: 

• Improved accuracy: Unlike your employees, intelligent automation processes don’t become fatigued and make errors when tired. Moreover, the “intelligent” part of the picture improves accuracy by correcting inputs, missed steps, and incomplete processes over time.
• Increased productivity: It’s relatively common for intelligent automation to reduce process times by half or more. By handling automated tasks that much faster, companies can often step up their productivity as a result.
• Continuity of service: Because automated processes and software can work around the clock, deploying intelligent automation can make it easy to meet demand at any time, including off-hours and peaks.
• Scalability and agility: The scalability of intelligent automation makes it easy to expand capabilities to meet high demand and scale back down when not being used to reduce costs. 
• Strategic focus: Businesses can utilize intelligent automation to handle large volumes of simpler tasks, freeing up trained employees to focus on cutting edge innovation and higher-order tasks.  
• Cost savings: When specific processes and tasks are automated intelligently, companies realize cost savings both from increased efficiency and by eliminating some of the need for paying employees to do that same work.

Increasingly, deploying intelligent automation strategies can make the difference between beating a competitor to market or not. This is because it leads to process streamlining, increased efficiency, and reduces the need to put employees in charge of repetitive or well-defined tasks (freeing them up for innovation and creative tasks instead).

12 use cases for intelligent automation

Now that you understand the many benefits of intelligent automation, the next question you might have is how you can use this technology in your organization. Below are 12 use cases meant to provide a broad sense of what’s possible through intuitive services like Microsoft Power Automate:

• Employee onboarding: By utilizing Microsoft PowerApps, which can interact with other Office 365 workloads and tap into data services, companies can create an automated onboarding process for new hires.
• Mobile app for inspections and review: Power Apps can also be used to create a customized inspection app that allows retailers, construction companies, and healthcare providers to capture photos of products and other details in a common data service layer.
• New user setup scenarios: Streamlining new user setup processes is also possible with Power Apps. Many organizations now combine PowerApps forms with Microsoft Flow for this type of workflow automation.
• Service request apps: Power Apps also helps organizations build interactive help desk tools that allow users to submit IT tickets through an app or to collect service requests, purchase orders, and more.
• Automation of email answers and approvals: Power Automate enables the creation of automated intake processes or automation of email forwarding and replies as well as internal request approvals.
• Manual process automation: Banks and credit unions can create digital forms that customers can fill out via a mobile device, which are then automatically uploaded to a centralized, secure database.

From the examples provided above, it is clear that you can use intelligent automation in just about any sector to improve workflows and streamline processes. In the end, automation makes it possible for businesses to spend less time and money on predictable and repetitive tasks and instead focus efforts on innovation and market strategy. So, did you ever think about how to leverage Intelligent Automation best practices into your industry? We’ve collected a couple of use cases that work best:

• Healthcare industry: The healthcare industry, notorious for the amount of paperwork it creates, can see significant benefits from intelligent automation applied to admission and discharge, staff onboarding and rotation, billing, test results, and more.
• Construction industry: Intelligent automation applied to the construction industry allows companies to operate autonomous machinery remotely, automate invoicing, document management and estimates, and even utilize virtual reality for project planning and training.
• Manufacturing industry: By making use of Microsoft Power Automate, manufacturers can not only automate workflow and production, but inventory, orders, purchasing, and delivery as well. 
• Retail industry: Business process automation enables retailers to automate return processing, HR processes, inventory and freight management, sales analytics, and more.
• Finance industry: Many opportunities exist for intelligent automation in the world of finance, including aiding in the digital transformation of core business operations by automating validation processes, accounts payable functions, loan applications, and business rules. In fact, finance companies that deploy intelligent automation see cost savings of 20-25 percent.
• Oil & gas industry: Intelligent automation helps oil and gas companies increase operational efficiency by automating data analytics, real-time report generation, real-time testing, safety checks, and supply chain management.

Leveraging SoftwareOne’s Automation Services for process optimization

SoftwareOne offers Automation Services designed to help your organization automate processes quickly and efficiently, saving you time and money while reducing risk. Key concepts underlying SoftwareOne’s Intelligent Automation offerings include the following:

• Robotic process automation (RPA): RPA refers to the use of software robots to enable artificial intelligence. With RPA, organizations can emulate and integrate human interactions within digital systems to execute a business process.
• Low code: Our intelligent automation services deliver a software development approach that abstracts and automates every step of the application lifecycle, enabling rapid solution delivery.  
• Cognitive service: By using machine learning algorithms, we help organizations solve problems and democratize AI by packaging it into discrete easy-to-use components.
• Automated flow: We enable process automation based on workflow rules where human tasks, data, or files are routed between people or systems based on predefined rules.
• Business process orchestration: With Intelligent Automation Services, you’ll achieve the standardization of processes by introducing automation, validation, workflow, and controls where appropriate.

Using these principles, we can help you create business applications to improve data capture and employee experiences, orchestrate entire workflows, and automate application integration and execution of structured tasks.