3 Ways Intelligent Automation Can Transform Back Office Functions

Every enterprise has back-office functions such as records maintenance, invoicing, payroll, purchase order processing, or data entry tasks that require significant financial and human resources.

These day-to-day tasks are also characterized by high error rates, manual, repetitive, and data-intensive across functions such as HR, finance, sales and marketing, supply chain, and procurement. Sometimes enterprises deal with legacy ERPs and CRMs for capturing and inputting data from multiple spreadsheets and documents.

However, when enterprise systems are not integrated, employees end up spending time outside these systems to manually collate data and information, thus increasing the cost and risk to the organization.

One of the ways of streamlining back-office functions is through intelligent automation. With intelligent automation, enterprises can enhance the accuracy of back-office functions, improve overall efficiency and bring down the costs of operations.

This blog explores three ways intelligent automation can transform the back-office function. 

Learn More: What is Process Automation?

What is Intelligent Automation?

Intelligent automation (IA) is defined as the use of cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing with RPA to mimic human intelligence. Intelligent automation helps streamline processes, cuts costs, and improves the efficiency of business operations. 

Some key elements of IA include AI-powered process discovery, Robotic process automation (RPA), task mining, natural language processing (NLP), and conversational AI.

Learn More: Understand Task Mining and Process Mining, Software & Tools

3 Ways Intelligent Automation Helps Drive Back-Office Transformation

1. Automating Repetitive Tasks

Back-office operations often involve repetitive tasks that take up valuable time and resources. Intelligent automation technologies like RPA, IDP, email automation, and workflow automation can help ease this burden.

For instance, a financial institution where the loan application process is critical. Traditionally, employees manually review and verify application documents, enter data, and cross-check information. This manual process is time-consuming and prone to errors, leading to delays and customer dissatisfaction.

With intelligent automation technologies like RPA and IDP, the loan application process can be revolutionized. Bots can extract relevant information from application forms, validate it against predefined criteria, and update the systems automatically.

This automation reduces time and effort, minimizes errors, and expedites the loan approval process. It improves efficiency, reduces turnaround times, and enhances customer satisfaction.

Learn More: How to Achieve Successful Automation Outcomes?

2. Optimizing Workflows for KPI Success

Automation in back-office operations goes beyond basic task automation. It harnesses the capabilities of AI and ML to provide intelligent automation solutions for optimizing workflows.

These solutions not only automate tasks but also analyze data, support informed decision-making, and execute complex processes accurately.

To maximize the benefits of automation, it is crucial to align it with the business goals. This alignment involves creating a strong case for automation and setting clear expectations for desired outcomes.

When stakeholders understand the purpose and expected results, they can make informed decisions regarding automation implementation, leading to successful integration.

By connecting automation initiatives to business KPIs, organizations can drive measurable results and continuous improvement. Whether the goal is process streamlining, redundancy removal, or improved visibility, aligning automation with KPIs establishes a clear link between automation and business outcomes.

This alignment empowers organizations to make informed decisions, maximize the value of automation investments, and achieve meaningful improvements across the board.

Learn More: How to Identify High-ROI Automation Opportunities

3. Driving Process Optimization

Process optimization is a key objective for organizations seeking to enhance efficiency and productivity within their back-office functions.

By implementing advanced process discovery tools, organizations can gain valuable insights into their existing processes. These tools capture and analyze data from various systems and applications, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the workflow landscape. This analysis uncovers inefficiencies, redundancies, and areas of improvement, paving the way for targeted optimization efforts.

Intelligent automation plays a crucial role in amplifying the potential for process optimization by establishing automation pipelines. By building these pipelines, organizations can seamlessly orchestrate workflows, leading to smooth and synchronized operations.

Learn More: What is Process Intelligence?

Automating Back Office Functions with Scout AI Model

The Scout AI model generates a work graph — a map of hidden pains teams experience at work and their impact on business outcomes. Scout, a multi-modal transformer model, learns from your organization, builds the work graph, and reveals what you do not see – the hidden pains your teams experience at work and how they impact business outcomes.

Scout^®contextualizes these hidden pains to your unique business environment, interprets them for all stakeholders, and democratizes access to this data. Scout^® also autonomously generates solutions to resolve your teams’ pains.

By transforming interaction data into business value, Scout^® helps enterprises uncover gaps and inefficiencies and identify the right processes for automation.

To get started with Scout^®, click here.