10 Intelligent Automation Examples for Your Organization

Blog: ProcessMaker Blog

More and more organizations are turning to intelligent automation to increase productivity and reduce costs. Intelligent automation has a broad range of potential use cases. In this article we will look at 10 intelligent automation examples that can help transform your organization.

Mortgage cross-selling

The mortgage lending market is highly competitive. Three banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase account for some 40% of all mortgage originations. Those left competing for the remaining 60% or so of the market are forced to pay large customer acquisition costs. Despite these challenges, most banks have overlooked perhaps their greatest asset – their existing customers. In fact, only 20% of customers obtain a mortgage from their primary bank.

For these reasons, more and more banks are turning to intelligent automation to cross-sell mortgages to existing customers. Intelligent automation platforms leverage large amounts of customer data to identify cross-selling opportunities. For example, the system can notify bankers when customers exhibit certain behaviors indicative of home buying. A relevant behavior could include something that suggests a change in job status (i.e., new source of deposits). Once notified, bankers can reach out to customers using the most effective means of communication according to their data profiles.

Procure-to-pay (P2P)

Traditional procure-to-pay (P2P) processes are full of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Typical P2P tasks include things like vendor evaluation and selection and extracting invoice and payment data from multiple sources and systems. Third-party sources can include things like banks, vendors, and logistic companies, while examples of systems include CRMs and ERPs. A lack of integration requires employees to perform manual tasks.

For these reasons, many organizations have turned to intelligent automation to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their procurements processes. Robotic process automation (RPA) resolves integration challenges, helping to streamline important P2P tasks like purchase requisition, purchase orders, invoice approval, and vendor management.

Employee onboarding and offboarding

Employee onboarding and offboarding are both tedious processes that consume a tremendous amount of resources. New hires must be trained, paperwork completed, and new tasks assigned. When it comes to employee offboarding, common tasks include obtaining a letter of resignation, processing payment of remaining salary and expenses, and ensuring the safe return of company property.

With intelligent automation, organizations can ensure that all required onboarding and offboarding tasks are completed. For example, when new employees are hired they will be provided with everything they need to perform their jobs like computer access and a security card.

Quote-to-cash process

A fast quote-to-cash (Q2C) process is essential for any organization. To maintain cash flow, organizations must get quotes out, fulfill orders, bill customers, and get paid. Yet many businesses continue to rely on manual processing, which is not only slow and expensive but is prone to costly errors.

Intelligent automation streamlines the quote-to-cash process. Automation technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) automatically extract information from documents like contracts or invoices. Some other Q2C tasks suitable for automation include order fulfillment, new customer onboarding, and account provisioning. Freed from manual tasks, employees can focus on higher-value tasks like generating more sales and providing superior customer service.

Customer relationship management

CRM software has been around for several decades. Yet CRM systems and processes are still riddled with inefficiencies. CRM software is a powerful marketing tool, but it can create extra work for sales teams. Employees are often required to manually search for and enter data. This keeps sales teams from doing what they do best – interacting with customers and closing deals.

CRM intelligent automation eliminates manual tasks, freeing up representatives to focus on strategic work and sales. Some examples of key CRM intelligent automation features are contact management and advanced analytics. Contact management features make it easy for teams to search and access customer data as well as integrate data with other third-party applications. With advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, sales teams can create detailed sales forecasting models and engage in data-driven decision making.

Inventory control

Traditional inventory control processes require extensive manual processing. Manual tasks include things like generating work orders, creating invoices, and shipping. For organizations that have moved to omnichannel marketing and sales processes, manual inventory control is no longer feasible.

Automated inventory control systems streamline complex back-office processes. With intelligent automation, organizations can automate their supply chains, track inventory, handle shipping and fulfillment, and sync omnichannel order and inventory data. Automated inventory control will become increasingly important as organizations continue to diversify their product and service offerings.

Customer onboarding

First impressions are everything. Ensuring that customers have a positive onboarding experience goes a long way towards improving customer satisfaction and retention rates. Yet traditional customer onboarding processes are inefficient and lengthy. This is particularly true in an industry like banking where strict regulations complicate the onboarding process.

With intelligent automation, organizations can significantly reduce manual tasks to speed up the onboarding process. Some examples of the use of automation include electronically capturing information from documents through robotic process automation (RPA) and automating communication with customers (i.e., automated welcome emails). Organizations can also boost compliance by removing costly errors from manual data entry processes.

Product lifecycle management

Product lifecycle management is not a new discipline. Yet the changes in the ways that we work combined with shorter development cycles has reemphasized its importance. Effective product lifecycle management requires organizations to contend with many moving parts. There must be established and efficient workflows in place to ensure that things run smoothly.

Intelligent automation offers many benefits for product lifestyle management. Some examples include:

Identifying bottlenecks in workflows
Raw material identification
Streamlined communication channels
Efficient inventory management features
Reduced costs through the reduction of administrative tasks

Quality management

According to some estimates, the hidden costs of quality management can amount to upwards of 20% of the total cost of goods sold. This is because manual quality management processes are both difficult to control and offer no visibility across processes.

With intelligent automation, stakeholders can easily view performance data and employee tasks in one centralized location. Organizations can also use automation to perform quicker and more accurate tests, as well as integrate with a document management system.

Campaign and advertising approval process

With advertising expanding to encompass more and more channels, it has become increasingly difficult to cost-effectively manage marketing campaigns. Simply put, manually creating, and posting content and ads on many different platforms takes a lot of time. Making matters worse, employees are often forced to track down management to get approvals before launching campaigns.

With intelligent automation, organizations can create workflows for automated approval processes. Marketing team members can simply submit an approval request electronically. The request will be routed to the designated team member for approval and the employee notified when it has been approved. Instead of spending days or weeks waiting for a signature, campaigns can be approved and launched in a matter of hours.

ProcessMaker offers industry leading low-code intelligent business process management software (iBPMS) that helps organizations to introduce intelligent automation into their workflows.

The post 10 Intelligent Automation Examples for Your Organization appeared first on ProcessMaker.