Enterprises have been evolving their digital transformation plans for several years. But the global pandemic is accelerating this transition, as customers increasingly demand frictionless experiences as a condition of their business. And employees must have the digital enablement they need to do their jobs virtually and serve their customers. As a result, organizations are looking at their business-critical processes and workflows to formulate their digital transformation game plans.
However, not everything can be transformed at once, so organizations must prioritize automating information-intensive, mission-critical workflows that will result in the fastest time to value and the greatest ROI.
In part three of The Kofax 2020 Intelligent Automation Benchmark Study conducted by Forrester Consulting, we discovered three characteristics these high-priority workflows have in common—a kind of “DNA” that organizations can look to for guidance as they embark on their own digital workflow transformation journeys.
These are workflows that include document intelligence, process orchestration and connected systems.
- Document Intelligence: To automate manual and time-consuming workflows, organizations need to be able to ingest, classify and extract unstructured data from financial documents, contracts, forms, images or digital assets, and turn that information into actionable data insights for further processing. Document intelligence within an intelligent automation platform can be thought of as pre-built intelligent document processing capabilities that make artificial intelligence (AI) accessible to non-technical business users, letting organizations classify documents, extract information and take action with data.
- Process Orchestration: According to survey respondents, automations are put at risk when organizations do not have the ability to manage and scale that automation over time. An intelligent automation platform capable of handling process orchestration allows organizations to add and manage digital workforce capacity on-demand, with the flexibility and agility needed to scale and optimize service levels.
- Connected Systems: Not all automation platforms are alike. Some provide a single native capability, like RPA, and then use services or APIs to loosely integrate with other essential automations like cognitive capture and process orchestration. But, according to the survey, enterprises prefer a more holistic approach where the vendor pre-integrates multiple, or all, of these capabilities natively on an end-to-end underlying platform.
Document intelligence, process orchestration and connected systems are key elements of the workflows businesses are prioritizing in their transformation journeys. The research report also details the specific types of workflows containing these elements that organizations are prioritizing, such as customer engagement workflows, financial and accounting workflows, and operational workflows.
Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz provides further details of the report at Kofax’s Virtual Intelligent Automation (VIA) Series “Ask the Experts” webinar replay.