Looking to Intelligent Process Automation at Nintex xchange

 We’re in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution: the era of Intelligent Process Automation.

Intelligence has become the new currency of businesses. And thanks to it, we’ll witness historic breakthroughs in realms such as personalized medicine, connected cities, home automation and more.

A greater slice of the business world is catching on to the push for automation: 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies have automated and optimized business processes. Though despite these exciting breakthroughs, there are sectors of the business world where automation can still be integrated. McKinsey & Company estimates that 68 percent of enterprise processes still remain highly manual.

But shifts in how businesses approach process automation, including increased autonomy for line of business (LOB) workers and their affinity for no code applications, show we’re headed in the right direction.

This week at Nintex xchange – our Intelligent Process Automation conference held in San Diego – we’ll delve into the future of automated work processes.

Line of Business Versus IT

IT departments have become bogged down by broken processes and remain understaffed thanks to the skills gap. Meanwhile, LOB professionals attempt to pick up the slack by taking technology decisions into their own hands. In fact, LOB outspent IT $150.7 billion to $64.7 billion in 2017.

A common cycle that modern businesses get stuck in follows a pattern: The organization faces a major challenge in scaling its pace or production speed. To address it, they must digitally transform or face serious loss in efficiency and profit. But IT can’t keep up with the LOB demand, so the backlog begins to grow.

In response to the backlog, LOB employees recognize their greater buying power. They try to solve the crisis on their own by purchasing applications to remedy the situation. But purchased, packaged applications fall short and the need for customization and compliance drives the cycle back to IT. And it starts over again, bringing the organization deeper into a hole.

The Future is “Build,” Not “Buy”

What’s clear from the vicious cycle of patchwork solutions is that the LOB wants the flexibility of customizable applications with the quick deploy time of packaged applications, since IT cannot meet the demand. Enter low code and no code applications – customizable solutions that don’t require the knowledge of a data expert to get up and running. When it comes to process automation, organizations are choosing to build from low or no code rather than buying a packaged one.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 75 percent of application purchases supporting digital business will be “build,” not “buy.” Purchased, non-customizable applications cost far too much for companies to maintain. And the required spend is stifling digital innovation: 70 percent of all technology spending goes toward maintenance, outsourcing and operations. Only the remaining 30 percent goes to new digital projects.

Nintex nixes that industry problem by offering the best of both worlds. As the leader in no code process automation, we operate at the LOB level while impressing IT with our sophistication. Today, Nintex is blazing a trail into the era of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA).

The Formula for Intelligent Process Automation

So what is Intelligent Process Automation? There are six core capabilities for any IPA platform:

• Advanced workflow – Take advantage of a drag and drop, no-code workflow capable of automating any business process – from simple to sophisticated.
• Document generation – Automatically create consistent, compliant, up-to-date documents with the push of a button.
• Mobile apps and forms – Leverage mobile devices and forms to capture critical data – online or offline – to guide an automated process.
• Robotic process automation – Automate actions users would typically perform, such as form fills, a highly repetitive process with structured data.
• Process intelligence – Use real-time analytics and insights to govern, analyze and drive the efficiency of your process automation portfolio.
• Machine intelligence – Intelligently optimize your processes and get assistance in completing tasks to increase process efficiency – all with best-of-breed machine learning and natural language processing.

In addition to the six core capabilities, any Intelligent Process Automation platform should meet the following requirements:

• Intuitive – Regardless of your role in an organization, your workflow and content automation tools must be easy to use and understand. Think no-code solutions that are easy enough for LOB and still trusted by IT.
• Integrated – For process automation to be easy and adoptable, IPA capabilities must be deeply integrated into the enterprise tools your LOB relies on. It should work where you work, meaning users are able work from within their systems of record, like a CRM or ERP.
• Intelligent – By automating and optimizing millions of workflows that run billions of times across every industry, an IPA platform should be your digital process automation coach. It should learn from intelligent actions that provide AI-as-a-service to optimize your critical business processes without a data scientist.

Humans and machines are working in harmony to automate and optimize every process in the modern workplace. We are heading into the age of Intelligent Process Automation, paving the way for peak customer experiences. With more than 75 million automated workflow executions under our belt, Nintex is ready to lead the IPA charge.

Couldn’t make it to xchange this year? Stay tuned to our blog and social channels for coverage of what’s new in process automation, including innovative use cases and updates from our partners.