How your business can benefit from Robotic Process Automation

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A while ago, we announced the IBM and Automation Anywhere partnership poised to deliver an advanced Robotic Process Automation-powered (RPA) platform. So what does this mean for your business? Here are some key takeaways.

First, some details on value that the Automation Anywhere and IBM joint offering can bring to companies. Though there are other companies offering a combination of Business Process Management (BPM) and RPA, IBM and Automation Anywhere bring a depth of knowledge and breadth of capabilities that are unmatched in this area. Forrester ranks IBM as a leader in BPM software and Automation Anywhere as a leader in Robotic Process Automation in its most recent Forrester Wave reports. This partnership will enable companies to leverage superior solutions for managing and improving routine processes, freeing time and resources to create greater business value.

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Customers are already using the two offerings. IBM software manages process flows and decisions, and Automation Anywhere software automates human tasks and legacy integrations. One of the main goals of this partnership is to better integrate the offerings and make it even more beneficial for customers to use them together.

You might be wondering how RPA will be integrated with IBM BPM. If you currently have BPM, you can add RPA to it by referring specific work tasks to automated RPA bots—for example, loan origination with manual data entry.  If you currently have RPA, you could add BPM to orchestrate multiple RPA activities and to handle RPA exceptions—for example, order process tasks with exceptions. In fact, BPM Express is bundled with Automation Anywhere Enterprise in the new RPA offering to provide this joint value.

For IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) users who are looking to adopt RPA, ODM can be used to manage and automate decisions required in an RPA task—for example, shipping charge calculations based upon complex business rules followed by manual data entry.

These integrations could drive faster turnaround times for approvals and reduce errors associated with managing business processes manually.  Digital process automation offerings will provide these integrations with the availability of the RPA offering, followed by additional updates and enhanced integrations later in 2017 and in 2018.

How will this partnership affect other service providers and customers that are currently working with different RPA platforms? IBM digital process automation customers who are already using alternate RPA platforms will not be adversely impacted. IBM digital process automation offerings can work with RPA offerings sold by other providers. But the new joint solution will make it easier to use Automation Anywhere’s RPA capabilities within IBM digital process automation software.

Want to know more? Come to the Business Process Transformation Congress in Utrecht on October 31^st. Doug Coombs (IBM) will give a presentation about RPA in combination with Business Process Management.

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