Explore what business automation is, why it's important, and how you can leverage it within your organization.
For decades, automation has impacted nearly every industry, from ATMs to assembly lines to healthcare systems. But artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are taking automation to a whole new level. This so-called “intelligent automation” is changing the way humans and machines interact, enabling companies to improve efficiency, drive revenue, and grow in challenging markets.
In fact, research shows that automation can yield huge returns. The IBM Institute for Business Value estimates that AI-driven automation will create billions of dollars in labor value in 2022 alone.
In this article, we discuss the changing landscape of business automation, why it's important now, and what to consider when using automation within your organization.
What is business automation?
Business automation is a term that refers to the use of technology applications to perform repetitive tasks, freeing up employees for higher-value work. This includes business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), and AI-powered automation.
A few years ago, automation required a large mainframe and a team of experts to maintain it. Cloud-based automation platforms now make that capability available to businesses of all sizes. Types of business automation include:
- basic automation: Basic automation involves automating simple, basic tasks. Basic automation tools digitize repetitive tasks, eliminate errors, and accelerate the pace of transactional work with little or no coding. Business process management (BPM) and RPA are basic automation examples.
- Process automation: Process automation manages business processes to ensure uniformity and transparency. Process automation, often handled by specialized software, increases productivity and efficiency while also providing valuable business insights. Process mining and workflow automation are examples of process automation.
- Advanced automation: Advanced automation brings humans and machines together and integrates multiple systems across an organization. Advanced automation to support more complex processes relies on unstructured data combined with machine learning, natural language processing, and analytics. Facilitate knowledge management and decision support for professional work.
- intelligent automation: Intelligent automation with AI means that machines can “learn” and make decisions based on the situations they encounter and analyze. For example, in customer service, AI-powered virtual assistants enable smarter interactions between customers and human agents while reducing costs. The result is a better customer service experience.
Why is business automation important?
Whether you run a small business or a large enterprise, automation is a great way to streamline operations and drive business growth. Automation tools are designed to replace human labor with machine labor, so those human resources can be put to work elsewhere in the business.
To realize the full potential of automation, companies must consistently use proven automation software and best practices across all workflows, from creating faster digital customer experiences to simplifying internal processes. Must be used. However, not all solutions include all the technology needed to automate end-to-end operations. This can require many point solutions, increase costs, and make it impossible to scale.
Benefits of business automation
Business automation is essential in a rapidly changing world. For example, it can be difficult to predict what customer behavior will continue post-pandemic, from wildly fluctuating demand to increased health and safety precautions. However, one area you do have control over is how you manage the experiences you create for your customers. Automation, especially when combined with AI, can help modify or improve these experiences, resulting in increased sales, better resource utilization, and improved customer satisfaction.
One of the best ways to do this is to use an automation platform that helps you:
- Detect processes. It helps you pinpoint inefficiencies and hotspots in your operations to determine where automated processes can have the greatest impact. This includes process mining and modeling.
- Applying intelligence: Use data from operational automation with machine learning and AI to recommend actions and free up people for more strategic tasks.
- Increase your workforce: Build RPA tools and deploy digital workers to work alongside humans when higher levels of productivity can be achieved or when backup is needed.
- Automate core operations: Apply core automation capabilities (document processing, workflow orchestration, decision management, content services) to key operational areas to meet business needs.
Common uses of business automation
Business automation is perfect for streamlining processes across almost every area of an organization.
- marketing activities: Email marketing automation allows businesses to use software to send emails to a client's distribution list according to a predefined schedule, reducing the cost of running campaigns manually. You can tie your marketing efforts into your customer relationship management (CRM) system and even do things like target customers with automated messages via social media.
- human resources: Human resources management systems can automate a wide range of human resources tasks, such as processing job applications, scheduling interviews, job offers, onboarding, payroll management, benefits management, and more. These systems can also use analytics to provide insights into employee productivity.
- sales process: Sales automation tools like Salesforce and other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools allow sales teams to spend less time recording deal-related activity and more time making calls to close deals. You can spend a lot of time. This tool allows you to perform repetitive tasks throughout the sales process, such as identifying leads based on buyer journeys, assigning prospects to the right agents, and creating data-driven sales forecasts. It can be automated.
- Finance and accounting: By automating financial planning and accounting functions, businesses can free up time for important tasks such as analysis, strategy, and stakeholder collaboration. For example, accounts payable (AP) management automates data capture, automatically matches invoices and documents, and automatically routes approvals. This reduces data errors and helps prevent fraud through background controls.
Business automation and IBM
IBM provides a single platform for both business automation and IT automation, helping organizations around the world effectively automate both. For example, a global reinsurance company in Switzerland used IBM software to automate its quarterly close tasks and save US$40,000 per quarter.
IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation is the powerful tool behind it all. Automation platforms provide AI-generated recommendations, analytics to measure impact, and user-friendly low-code tools to help organizations reduce time spent on manual processes and reduce customer wait times. Helpful. IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation lets you eliminate repetitive tasks and reallocate resources to higher-value work.
To learn more about IBM's AI-powered automation, read our Intelligent Business Automation Buyer's Guide and subscribe to the Business Automation Insider newsletter.
