Insights
How to Capitalize on the Benefits of Intelligent Process Automation
Sajesh Gopinath, General Manager at UST SmartOps
IT organizations could analyze their ticket system to identify unrealized efficiencies, or health payor organizations could streamline their claims adjudication process.
Sajesh Gopinath, General Manager at UST SmartOps
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Collectively, we produce over 2.5 exabytes of data every day, a figure that includes all of the information produced by businesses as well. It seems like this treasure trove of data would be invaluable to a business — think of all the patterns, predictions, and actionable wisdom that lies locked away in your data!
Trouble is, those insights are truly locked away, and data tends to be scattered about and siloed. If you want to capitalize on the hidden troves of data your business generates every day, you need to turn to business process analysis.
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What is business process analysis?
Simply put, business process analysis is the assessment of the efficacy and efficiency of the many, many processes that make up your business. Ideally, your business process analysis will unearth opportunities for improvement, enabling your organization to increase productivity, control costs, become more profitable and reach other business goals.
A business process evaluation could assist a telecom in predicting peak usage hours so they could determine when to activate more network bandwidth and server processing, for instance, or it could improve the invoicing process of an enterprise company to save time and cost.
IT organizations could analyze their ticket system to identify unrealized efficiencies, or health payor organizations could streamline their claims adjudication process. Virtually any business can benefit from a thorough process analysis to become more efficient, save on costs, and raise its bottom line.
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How should we conduct a business process analysis?
Broadly, business process analysis follows four basic steps.
- Identify the process to analyze
- Collect the necessary data
- Analyze the process in its current state
- Develop a plan to make the idealized future state a reality
Most businesses have a general idea of what processes could stand to be improved, know how to go about analyzing their problem and how to make a plan to fix that problem. Accessing the data that this whole process runs on, however, is no easy task.
DIVIDER
How to find your hidden data
Broadly, business process analysis follows four basic steps.
- Identify the process to analyze
- Collect the necessary data
- Analyze the process in its current state
- Develop a plan to make the idealized future state a reality
Most businesses have a general idea of what processes could stand to be improved, know how to go about analyzing their problem and how to make a plan to fix that problem. Accessing the data that this whole process runs on, however, is no easy task.
DIVIDER
How to find your hidden data
In a typical organization, so much of the necessary data is siloed. Information is stored across departments, isolated within individual roles and locked away in different formats like spreadsheets, text documents or even video.
With all of these isolated pools of data and different data formats, it can be hard to identify patterns. Without the ability to compare and contrast, to view a problem through a different lens, the business suffers.
There are a variety of ways you can comb through your business to unlock your data. You could always take the old-fashioned and laborious route — that is, tasking a team with looking through every document, spreadsheet, recording and manual that may be related to your target process.
This, however, clearly isn’t the optimal approach. If you don't have an expert team on hand, you'll need to bring on individuals with the necessary data science skills to collect and analyze your data. However, even with the right talent, this is a time-consuming task that isn't the best use of your team's time. What's more, your team is made up of people — fallible people who sometimes make mistakes. Since a business process analysis is only as good as the data that it's conducted upon, errors in data collection can cause you to reach the wrong conclusions about where to go next.
Instead, you'll want to use an automated solution. Broadly, there are two approaches to process automation: robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent process automation (IPA).
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How to process different types of data
Unstructured data? Turn to IPA Structured data? Use RPA for analysis
Some may be more familiar with robotic process automation, or RPA, which mimics mouse movements and keyboard strokes. Depending on the nature of your business process analysis, an RPA approach could be sufficient.
If your data collection efforts just require you to, say, click in one field and copy-paste the data to another thousands of times, RPA is the way to go. RPA can easily replicate tedious work relying on structured data — that is, clearly defined and easily searched data.
RPA, however, doesn’t do so well when processing unstructured data.
Unstructured data? Turn to IPA
Ninety percent of the data that we produce are unstructured; they're locked away in images, video, recordings and other messy formats that machines don’t interpret too well. But just because these data are unstructured and unfriendly to machines, doesn’t mean that extracting them is a job for humans.
Unstructured data extraction and processing is still a very repetitive and time-consuming task. It's easy for humans to make errors in carrying out, which is why a business process analysis should rely on intelligent process automation, or IPA.
IPA is quite similar to RPA except that it incorporates artificial intelligence. This makes it better at understanding context and ingesting non-standard data formats that don't always sit well with less intelligent techniques. IPA uses advanced processes like NLP (natural language processing) and OCR (optical character recognition), which enable the program to understand words on scanned documents and other formats just as well as a human.
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Choosing the right business analysis platform
If you're planning on running a business process analysis, you'll want to evaluate your different data sources. Are there a lot of images, PDFs, interpersonal communications, and other unstructured formats? If so, an IPA solution is where you'll want to go to first.
Once you’ve unlocked your data from the many siloes spread out across your organization, it will be available for you to analyze and interpret. A business process analysis only works as well as the data that it’s conducted on, so getting as much relevant data as accurately as possible is key to identifying opportunities for growth and improvement in your business.