Why is the number of robotic process automation vendors increasing? What tools are used to achieve effective process automation? And what precisely is workforce transformation? As you create your process automation strategy, it’s quite crucial that you explore these primary questions. Process automation utilizes an assortment of tools to digitize operational process and automate business activities that were traditionally executed by humans. In certain cases, the automation clearly surpasses human capabilities. Automation tools are a blend of evolving as well as established toolsets. Here are the five of them.

 

  1. Document digitization tools: These are tools that go beyond normal OCR (optical character recognition) and include cognitive abilities. They can effectively convert unstructured paper documents, emails, and other electronic documents into usable data. This could enable any automated business process understand particular types of documents and their pertinent business process.
  2. Desktop automation: This is perhaps one automation tool that has affected the desktop publishing and client management niches the most. Basic automation like Microsoft Excel macros would definitely fall under this category. And there have been customized versions of the tool that even offer a bit more than MS Excel does.
  3. RPA management software: RPA is a blend of workflow execution and UI (user interface) recognition technologies. Together, they imitate how any human agent utilizes a keyboard and a screen to drive applications to execute tasks that are based on systems. There are several robotic process automation tools in this category that have been known to be more efficient or more accurate than humans.
  4. Business processes management software: These RPA tool enables coordination across all of the other toolsets mentioned above, and they support UIs that blend – in the background – varying legacy systems. From experience, depending on business process, anywhere between 25% and 100% of dreary human intervention can be eliminated and replaced with more organized, efficient enterprise automation. This could considerably decrease cycle times, enhance process quality, decrease costs, and enable the reallocation of workforce to more specialized value-adding activities.
  5. Real cognitive capabilities, that comprise natural language processing and machine learning: Cognitive tools assume several varying forms and they can efficiently interact in varying human-resembling ways that include speaking, web form-based dialogue, chatting, and so on. Once cognitive tools have been properly and correctly trained to interpret large sources of information, they have a very effective and efficient ability to enable much better decision making. This is a key difference between RPA tools and all the other previously available toolsets.

Cognitive tools can effectively help humans to identify the best possible solution to any given business situation. Furthermore, they can execute much of the lower-level (like call center tasks) decision making activities that were previously handled by humans. These abilities could utilize vast unstructured and structured knowledge bases to enable banks and several other financial services companies to attain their strategic priorities in ways that were formerly quite unimaginable.

Individually, each tool set’s ability is limited in offering considerable enterprise value. This is probably why the number of robotic process automation vendors keeps rising. But the key remains to take an organized approach to automation which aligns every tool’s strength to the appropriate task.