What is Intelligent Process Automation?
Intelligent process automation (IPA) is the new upgrade to the basic automation. It is the next level in the ongoing growth of process automation with machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP). Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is the combination of technologies that come together to manage, automate, and integrate digital processes. The primary technologies that make up IPA include Digital Process Automation (DPA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Digital Process Automation (DPA): It describes the agile set of intelligent process automation technologies that have evolved from their roots in Business Process Management Technology. DPA provides the agility and insight needed to enable an integrated approach to automating business processes. It enables the user to manage the flow of data across the user’s enterprise and makes it easier to identify areas for improvement and make agile changes.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA): It brings speed and efficiency to IPA. Deploying robots that mimic human actions to help reduce very manual and labour-intensive tasks, such as re-keying data from one system to another.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): It contributes great intelligence and decisions to the mix. This brings another level of thinking to the automation as AI can analyze data in a way that a human could not, recognizing patterns in data and learning from past decisions to make increasingly intelligent choices.
IPA mimics activities carried out by humans and, over time, learns to do them even better. Traditional levers of rule-based automation are augmented with decision-making capabilities thanks to advances in deep learning and cognitive technology. The promise of IPA is radically enhanced efficiency, increased worker performance, reduction of operational risks, and improved response times and customer journey experiences.
Benefits of Intelligent Process Automation
Orchestration of humans and robots –Intelligent Process Automation can help to co-ordinate work between robots, people, and systems preferably than simply deploying technologies like RPA in silos and leaving them to complete individual tasks. Robotics are all well and good, but unless the user integrates them with an IPA platform, the user will end up with isolated solutions as opposed to enterprise-wide solutions.
Freeing up employees from routine tasks – Employees can be free from labour-intensive tasks by RPA and set to work in more efficiency areas. The user can rest assured that the correct decision is being made by combining with DPA and AI, because it is planned out in the workflow with AI helping to make informed decisions along the way.
Ensuring proper governance and minimizing risk –The user can reduce the risk of errors such as incorrect data entry by automating end-to-end processes. RPA takes care of this automating tasks, but if it breaks or deviates from the organizational standard, IPA gives the user the peace of mind knowing that the user’s processes are consistently being completed.
End-to-end visibility of processes and the customer journey – It can be hard to see the enterprise-wide result when individual automation technologies are deployed. Using IPA, the user can see the entire process, allowing the user to identify bottlenecks or points at which the customer journey could be smoother.
Agility and speed of process change – IPA enables the user to not only accelerate end-to-end processing but also makes it easy to make agile changes to processes and the technologies that support them. This helps organizations to continually improve their business processes.
How it is Different?
Traditional process automation works by following clear, step-by-step rules. Whether it’s BPA or RPA, it will do the same things the same way every time. These tools don’t adapt, they do as they’re either told or shown.
Meanwhile, intelligent process automation is more flexible. It includes all the capabilities found in RPA but adds extra scope and functionality. This means that when it comes to using intelligent process automation, there’s less handholding/hard coding required to set the needed rules. Plus, IPA can learn from feedback and adapt to changes in real-time.
What is the main Difference Between RPA and IPA?
Intelligent Process Automation and Robotic Process Automation are similar processes; but IPA can cover a larger scope of work than RPA. RPA is generally meant to be used for defined, rule-based processes. Relatively, IPA is used for more complex operations that can benefit from the use of AI, machine learning, NLP, predictive analytics, and other technologies including RPA. IPA can also handle more types of data formats, as well as enable more types of intelligent decision-making. Both IPA and RPA are valuable and have their own best use cases. However, IPA first requires the foundation of RPA. In addition, an effective IPA strategy requires IT and data science teams to collaborate more in-depth than is necessary with RPA.
Summary
IPA is the product of combining AI and automation. It brings new abilities to your automation options, allowing the user to gather the benefits of automation in more areas of your daily workload.
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