A New Way of Looking at Business Processes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have gained significant momentum over the past few years; businesses from all industries continue to embrace the technology at rapid rates, adoption stands to increase even further. More and more companies are beginning to see the positive impacts that this technology can bring to a company. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of all customer interactions will be managed without a human.

Powering up Process Intelligence with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools have helped provide high overview analytics to help process leaders make more informed decisions by utilizing massive amounts of data collected to display key performance indicators (KPIs). Using BI, you can analyze big data and view summaries of the data in real-time. However, like many other technologies, it has limitations. While BI type software can shed some insight on business operations, it has always required a hypothesis on where to shine the light to see where things work well or improperly. That means users need to understand the process and be able to ask the right questions. Without those questions, traditional BI type analytics cannot uncover anything. Aside from that, processes tend to be rather complex, which means it is difficult to gain a detailed explanation of what is really going on. This is a problem because BI can display the operational metrics, but need to be interpreted by humans. Now the problem is that different people will look at the same metrics and see different meanings.

This is where Process Intelligence (PI), a new type of Big Data Analytics for business processes, comes in. PI leverages process mining, industry best practice analysis tools, real-time monitoring through text messaging, e-mail, and webhooks, as well as prediction with AI. This type of technology changes the way business users understand processes.

Why is this type of tech so earth shattering? Because process intelligence offers 100% transparency into how processes are working in real life, enabling them to pinpoint business process inefficiencies. There’s just not any other software solution available today that enables such deep understanding and monitoring of business processes. With today’s process intelligence solutions you see the “as-is” state, including all the advanced analytics, and have the ability to drill down into the granular details of processes. Process Intelligence can explain why processes are broken and how to fix them by giving the data you already have a ‘full body scan’; this scan presents you with unbiased analytics to solve problems you didn’t even know you had.

AI-Enhanced Process Management Has a Central Role in Digital Transformation

The road ahead for BPM and AI is quite bright! With AI, processes are being transformed on an entirely new level; many businesses are continuing to make the decision to implement AI to improve their company. AI is empowering human intelligence to continually improve user interactions and process execution. Until recently, consultants were the best solution to improve business processes. Although, with the plethora of manual tasks involved in process understanding and analysis, consultants have been known to be expensive and not to mention, with them being human, they come with their own biases and preconceptions. The benefits of objective analysis quickly becomes clear to business users utilizing advanced process analytics – no more biases and no more guessing games. You can now analyze processes from the data you already have. You can’t afford to not know anymore!

This objective view of the process flow that is now being presented to businesses provides them with the opportunity to introduce Robotic Process Automation (RPA) into their processes to create Intelligent Automation. With AI and RPA coming together, the bots can continuously learning new paths that improve performance and reduce time constraints, which ultimately leads into true Intelligent Automation.

What Intelligent Automation means for Continuous Process Improvement

Intelligent Automation uses advanced process analytics to observe historical patterns and flag future constraints that are not easily perceived by a human. The advanced decision automation capabilities can be based on both process-mining algorithms and machine learning techniques. This then allows for the ability to analyze business process execution and predict certain behaviors that may result from specific steps within the process. Intelligent Automation can be used in this way to make recommendations for automated or human decision-making in real time to create a more streamlined and efficient process flow.

True Intelligent Automation, applied correctly, has the ability to predict constraints that may happen and align them with the available resources. This means that instead of being reactive to issues you may encounter, you can become proactive about them and avoid potential bottlenecks, backslides and delays. You may be wondering how is this done? Through utilizing advanced process mining, process-flow pattern detection, and combining it with machine learning these types of technologies are able to guide corrective actions and update bots in real time – closing the loop on automation.

Without Intelligent Automation, organizations will continue to stay reactive to problems. When monthly or quarterly reports are due, employees will be consistently checking trying to find the issues that have already been done, and in which cannot be changed. Thinking about the concept of not acting before problems occur when technology like this exists today seems like living in the “Stone Age” of technology.

So why would anyone wait to begin utilizing this type of technology? Those who do are gaining an incredible competitive advantage that includes saving time and money. Early adopters are experiencing better process execution and continue to enable process excellence. It allows for higher skilled workers to focus on the more difficult and time-consuming work. Because of their extremely sophisticated technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are now mainstream business tools being used in various technologies including process intelligence. These technologies are now being used all over the world.