Technology giant, IBM, and developer of robotic process automation software, Automation Anywhere, have announced a collaboration to deliver solutions that will help companies automate employees’ data intensive business processes.
According to both the companies the collaboration is intended to make it easier for companies to improve processes across their enterprises and free employees to focus their time on more creative and customer-facing aspects of their jobs.
The two companies plan to integrate Automation Anywhere’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform with IBM’s portfolio of digital process automation software. Automation Anywhere’s RPA is used to create software bots to handle repetitive, task-based business processes whereas IBM’s software is used by organizations to design, run and manage complex business processes.
Once the technologies are integrated the partnership will be able to offer clients the ability to use Automation Anywhere’s RPA platform to create software bots that execute tasks within larger business processes managed by IBM’s software. Companies will be availing a set of tools to create and use software bots to streamline digital tasks across more of their processes, whether running in the cloud or on-premises systems.
“The ability to smartly process and manage data is fast-becoming a competitive advantage,” said Denis Kennelly, General Manager, IBM Hybrid Cloud solutions.
“The combination of the Automation Anywhere and IBM process management platforms provides a powerful new way for companies to streamline business processes so employees can spend less time filling out forms and more time working with customers.”
Scheduled for the third quarter, the new offering will be particularly relevant to companies where employees routinely have to manually complete tasks within business processes. These are especially prevalent in the banking, financial services, insurance and healthcare industries which have data-intensive, manual processes, such as filing insurance claims, processing bank loans, paying vendors for services and opening customer accounts.
For example, a bank using IBM Business Process Manager could use Automation Anywhere’s platform to build software bots to streamline the processing of new loans or accounts. The bank could create a bot that helps complete the application by automatically capturing data from different files or even emails submitted by the applicant.
Or insurance companies using Automation Anywhere’s RPA solution could use IBM’s BPM solution to improve responsiveness and customer satisfaction. The result in both cases could lead to faster turnaround times for approvals and reduced errors associated with managing business processes manually.
“This new capability to help companies better manage almost any part of a business process with speed, efficiency and reliability is extraordinary, enabling companies to become digital enterprises,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-founder, Automation Anywhere.
“The collaboration between IBM and Automation Anywhere takes business process management to a new level, liberating employees to focus on the things they do best while bots are focused on what they do best.”