Across the business landscape, companies of all sizes are undergoing a digital transformation, harnessing technology to reinvent themselves, innovate and expand. And with the emergence of low-code automation solutions, technology has become even more accessible, empowering non-technical users to play a bigger role in the digital shift

As digital transformation spreads throughout the organisation, companies are setting their sights on digital workflow transformation. This means optimising and automating how employees execute tasks and workflows within traditionally complex business processes, as well as how customers engage with those companies in streamlined, satisfying ways.

Organisations wanting to achieve business agility and innovative digital experiences should quickly look to an intelligent automation strategy. Why? Because through document intelligence, process orchestration and connected systems, intelligent automaton unleashes the full power of your workforce, and creates better customer experiences. It delivers the optimisation and innovation required for true digital workflow transformation, creating a unified, powerful workforce of human and digital workers who can better engage customers.

---

"A robust intelligent automation platform includes capabilities to connect intelligent automation with other technologies and software companies have already invested in. Simple integration with existing applications, databases and web services empower organisations to develop new business models, leverage data securely, and accelerate automation deployment with low-code integration and pre-built connector frameworks."

---

WHAT IS DIGITAL WORKFLOW TRANSFORMATION?
Digital workflow transformation is the automation of workflow execution along a high-value business process. It's achieved by leveraging digital and automation technologies to unlock the power of data, orchestrate human and digital workers, and connect formerly disparate systems.

Enterprises achieving digital workflow transformation are able to:

• Fuel innovation across the entire organisation
• Accelerate the speed at which work is accomplished, improving productivity
• Obtain more value from structured and unstructured data
• Become more competitive
• Be more agile and responsive to changing customer and market demands
• Drive efficiencies across remote workforces.

To succeed with digital workflow transformation, organisations must identify high-value opportunities for automation delivering efficiencies and a quick ROI. The fastest paths use an intelligent automation platform providing a suite of integrated applications, citizen developer tools and powerful embedded artificial intelligence (AI).

AI should act as an extension of your workforce, applying cognitive services to think, act upon and interpret data. With embedded AI technologies of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), and low-code development capabilities, organisations can effectively orchestrate, govern and optimise data, people and automation to:

• Unlock data insights and streamline content-centric processes
• Maximise workforce capacity by automating highly manual, routine workflows quickly
• Achieve greater compliance and decision-making
• Enhance collaboration across your digital and human workforce
• Increase business agility and deliver rapid, personalised service to customers.

Companies leveraging intelligent automation technology can transform business operations, create powerful and effective partnerships between human and digital workers and deliver more satisfying customer experiences.

How can you achieve digital workflow transformation with intelligent automation? A successful intelligent automation platform automates, optimises and enables innovative solutions to complex business processes. Intelligent automation paves the way to digital workflow transformation in three ways:

1. Document intelligence Organisations must be able to process high volumes of documents and unstructured data for successful automation and digital workflow transformation. In most companies, 80 percent of information and documents are unstructured, resulting in manual and inefficient document processing bottlenecking business processes. That's why document intelligence is a foundational requirement for digital workflow transformation that's being used to further automate workflows in complex business processes - including loan applications, employee onboarding, research, patient admissions, sales order processing, customer service and contract management.

It's essential to establish the specific features and functionality that are important. For instance, standalone optical character recognition (OCR) isn't enough. Digital workflow transformation calls for cognitive capture, combining intelligent document processing capabilities and embedded AI.

Cognitive capture uses machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and workflow orchestration to classify documents, extract information and gain actionable insights from structured and unstructured data. Companies can ingest, classify and extract unstructured information from financial documents, contracts, forms, images and digital assets. Tasks that were once manual and time-consuming can then be completed quickly and more accurately. Unstructured information is transformed into actionable data that's used to make better business decisions.

In this context, pre-built intelligent automation solutions making best-in-class document processing accessible to non-technical users are the best investments a firm can make. In a real-world example, a financial institution used cognitive capture technology to automate the customer onboarding process. Now customers can apply for accounts via mobile device, without visiting a branch. Since intelligent automation was implemented, customer accounts have grown by 50 percent. In addition, the percentage of people who complete the application process has risen from 30 to 80 percent. Cognitive capture made it possible for the bank to grow its customer base and become more competitive in the market.

2. Process orchestration Digital workflow transformation requires organisations to expand workforce capacity across omni-channel workflows. By doing so, they maximise agility and provide superior customer and employee experiences. Automation of manual, repetitive tasks is also key to sustaining a leadership advantage over the competition.

To automate repetitive tasks, many companies are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) for task automation. But while this is an important piece of the puzzle, end-to-end workflow automation goes beyond RPA. It also calls for process orchestration to unite complex-task and deep-process automation within end-to-end workflows.

Process orchestration makes it easy to build, run and manage high-value process workflows at scale, such as new customer onboarding, claims processing, loan automation or supplier management.

Intelligent automation platforms including process orchestration enable companies to create digital workflows and manage them in collaboration with users, systems and data. Intelligent automation makes it easy to add and manage digital workforce capacity on-demand. Companies gain the flexibility and agility to scale as needed and optimise service levels. Employees are freed up to take on higher-value, strategic work improving employee satisfaction and productivity.

Process orchestration fosters a seamless collaboration between human and digital workers improving operations and output. In fact, one company used process orchestration to tackle two million contracts and thousands of annual financial claims. The results speak for themselves:

• 75% faster claims adjudication;
• 30% boost in productivity;
• 25% reduction in customer calls to inquire about progress;
• 15% improvement in customer satisfaction.

The bottom line: Process orchestration is a key requirement for any organisation needing to build and manage a digital workforce driving business growth and profits.

3. Connected systems
Connected systems are the driving force behind the innovation, productivity gains, data insights and agility that come with digital workforce transformation. In fact, high-value automation often begins and ends with key business systems. So, it's important all automation efforts efficiently and securely leverage data across documents, workforces and systems.

Connected systems bring together all critical business systems - including enterprise applications, legacy systems, mobile and chatbots - across internal and external business processes. When systems are connected, organisations can streamline data and bring innovative business models to market more quickly. They can also speed automation and deliver a faster ROI.

A robust intelligent automation platform includes capabilities to connect intelligent automation with other technologies and software companies have already invested in. Simple integration with existing applications, databases and web services empower organisations to develop new business models, leverage data securely, and accelerate automation deployment with low-code integration and pre-built connector frameworks.

ENABLE THE INNOVATOR - AND THE ENTERPRISE
When administrators and developers are able to have a low-code experience, they can more easily solve business problems and scale innovation across the organisation by:

• Fuelling transformation by empowering employees to solve business problems with the power of low-code automation development;
• Increasing access to untapped knowledge;
• Freeing up IT to focus on more critical tasks;
• Reducing development costs with a high-productivity toolset.

UNLOCK DOCUMENT VALUE
By achieving greater efficiencies and harnessing the value in documents, data and content, organisations can accelerate business transformation and:

• Reduce deployment time with built-in "AI for anyone";
• Rapidly unlock the value of unstructured business data;
• Become the 'data driven' enterprise of tomorrow - today;
• Improve compliance and accurately detect fraud.

ACCELERATE WORK AND DRIVE PRODUCTIVITY
Deploying "smart" digital workers to enhance workforce productivity with decision making, faster task processing, and low-code digital workflow capabilities enables organisations to:

• Maximise workforce capacity with an "on-demand" digital workforce;
• Achieve faster wins and ROI with low-code workflow development;
• Improve employee productivity by deploying digital workers to take on mundane and repetitive tasks;
• Streamline business operations and orchestrate end-to-end digital workflow;
• Reduce errors and improve process adherence across the board.

AUTOMATE TODAY, SCALE TOMORROW
It's essential for an organisation to have the ability to combine an agile intelligent automation platform with a broader ecosystem of technology options adding flexibility and the power of choice. Together with governance capabilities and security, there's a clear path to solving today's problems, and still growing and scaling to meet tomorrow's needs. Best practices include:

• Start small, win fast and grow
• Reduce IT management costs and accelerate deployment with a pre-integrated platform
• Ensure your automations are enterprise ready, with global reach, smart integration, and deployment of choice - from on-premise to SaaS/cloud software deployment
• Manage the digital workforce and your multi-vendor automation environment with security controls and analytics.

Intelligent automation technology can quickly make digital workflow transformation a reality. However, as companies map out their strategies, it's important to select an intelligent automation platform that's equipped with the capabilities outlined above. It's worth the effort: intelligent automation arms enterprises with the technology to make digital workforce transformation truly obtainable, so your human and digital workers can work like tomorrow - today.

More info: www.kofax.com