Intelligent Process Automation: Efficient Operations & Enhanced Processes

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been with us for a while. It had been a revolutionary approach when it appeared in the early 2000s, significantly influencing many sectors throughout the world. Nowadays, many companies have enhanced their processes using automation technologies.

However, it was originally designed to automate simple and repetitive tasks rather than situations requiring decision-making. To illustrate, automated invoice processing, handling simple delivery requests and entering them to a Resource Planning System are very common RPA use cases in businesses. While these simple processes are being automated, businesses are also increasingly asking for more complex tasks to be simplified because it enables new opportunities for automation and paves the way for increased automation rates and more productivity. This ultimately means better Return on Investment (ROI).

These requests often include the processing of unstructured data and require a solution that involves cognitive decisions such as checking invoice compliance or analyzing texts or images sent by clients to modify delivery requests. To put it into context, Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) emerged due to heavy demand by businesses and has evolved as a sophisticated collection of technologies that provides solutions where RPA alone falls behind. IPA removes the barriers by enabling the automation of advanced tasks by enhancing RPA with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR), image recognition and natural language processing (NLP).

Naturally, IPA comes with challenges, similar to other advanced technologies. IPA requires higher commitment during and after the implementation phases in comparison to RPA-only applications. Since IPA is a combination of different technologies, implementation experience and expertise with each contributing technology become crucial factors. Therefore, experienced professionals are necessary to smoothly implement and successfully scale up the intelligent automation of business processes.

• Increases automation rates and enables much better ROI outcomes
• Complex tasks and processes requiring autonomous decisions are accomplished with IPA, resulting in the reduction of workloads which ultimately contributes to increased employee satisfaction
• Enables more automation opportunities where normally RPA is incapable of accomplishing and manual intervention would be required
• Complex processes are managed rapidly and efficiently, allowing businesses to operate much more smoothly and reducing response times. Responsive and efficient companies achieve much higher customer satisfaction.
• In addition to RPA-based solutions, IPA further boosts process quality by removing errors and failures in tasks where automated decision-making is the key.

As a global consulting company, Adastra has provided successful digital solutions to leading companies around the globe and executed several automation projects internationally. In addition to our successful automation projects, Adastra professionals are specialists in other fields including machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud data engineering. Our experts have in-depth knowledge and the necessary skill set to support your business to benefit from IPA-based solutions, which makes Adastra an ideal solution partner to support your digital transformation journey.