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By Mike Randash

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

This quote by Helen Keller summarizes business process automation today. Many tools are available to assist with automating tasks but the true potential is realized when these individual tools are put together in a complete solution along with human interaction.

How can your organization increase productivity and accuracy?

Many business tasks require the gathering of information from internal or external sources to start a process. Previously, paper forms provided the needed information, but e-forms now provide an efficient alternative for data gathering. AIIM reports that capturing data from a paper form costs about $10 on average. The studies also indicate that 3% of all paper forms are misplaced, 1% are lost, and costs are significant for paper, printing, storage, and data entry errors.

Workflow automatically assigns and tracks duties to alleviate process bottlenecks and approve efficiency. According to AIIM, the biggest benefits from workflow and business process management are faster processing of critical business activities, fewer errors, and better exception processing. Workflow is the glue that holds processes together while humans and robots (attended and unattended) complete tasks to execute transactions.

Events or time triggers begin the execution of unattended robots. The robots complete batched repetitive manual tasks in place of humans. This typically involves the movement of data by leveraging the user interface of applications, either internal or external. Unattended robots can work continuously to carry out actions 24/7/365 and they never need a vacation.

Humans trigger attended robots as they perform their assigned workflow steps. The robots immediately complete tasks that are part of the overall work assigned to the human. Attended robots are typically on the user’s workstation. These robots are like personal assistants since they respond only to human-triggered events to complete the automated front-office tasks.

Bringing it all together

For example, an active military person fills out a web-based e-form to request a payment deferment on a student loan. That e-form triggers a workflow process to begin the steps necessary to stop future loan payments. The first step of the workflow uses the e-form data to start an unattended robot to complete research on individuals that submitted e-forms. The robot gathers active military dates and confirms the dates with external government websites. The robot also checks the status of all loans on all systems. If the robot can determine an individual is in active military status and the loans qualify, the robot updates the status on all loans to defer payments. If for some reason, the robot cannot clearly identify the individual and the active military dates, all data gathered is loaded into the workflow task for a person to work on as an exception process. The employee uses attended robots to interact with the front-office systems to complete the exception task.

The unattended robots and attended robots are here to complete the mundane tasks for the human employee. The human employee is now able to focus on knowledge-based activities that require more expertise and human judgment.

Digitech Systems enables efficient processes by giving humans the automated support they need to cost-effectively complete their work accurately. Contact me if you have questions!

Make sure you visit our Process Automation Tools webpage as well for additional resources.