CAN’T TOUCH THIS
A process seamlessly adapting to its environment, optimizing itself without human intervention or support – is that even a process anymore?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Optimizing processes by cutting out yet another inefficiency, leveraging yet another lean opportunity, only brings you so far. There is a limit to how classical processes can respond to complex events in real time. Driven by AI, inflexible, human-dependent processes can be replaced by powerful reasoning systems. These systems fluidly adjust to whatever situation occurs, anticipating next-best actions and resources needed on the fly. And while learning from what works, they increasingly become hands- and care-free. Stop! Hammer Time: the touchless enterprise is coming.
Manuel Sevilla Expert in Residence
WHAT
- Business Rules Management System (BRMS) solutions externalize decision logic from applications, allowing both IT and business experts to define and manage decision logic. This logic can then be executed by Business Rule Engine (BRE) systems.
- Dynamic case management systems capture and process business events across process silos, providing end-to-end intelligence and optimized outcomes on a case-by-case basis.
- Any process can be mirrored and monitored through a digital twin, even when this pertains to the “classic” enterprise (ERP) management processes, such as supply chain, finance and administration, and HRM.
- Provided with enough time series datapoints, analytics and AI can increasingly enable descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, and self-learning autonomous capabilities – usually in this specific sequence.
- Combined with intelligent process automation capabilities (as a combination of process automation and AI’s cognitive power), these insights can be turned into immediate, “touchless” actions within the business operations.
USE
- Commerce Bank and Copart (an online vehicle auction firm), leveraged the CommercePayments PreferPay platform to reduce the insurance salvage settlement process down from 30 to only five days.
- A Swiss insurance company plans to enhance auto claims efficiencies, and implement real-time damage assessment and estimation for enhanced speed and accuracy in the claim settlement process.
- A large consumer goods company adopted touchless process for part of the sales and operations planning, generating electronic purchase orders every day – based on real-time data.
- A US-based footwear retailer implemented touchless payment system, empowering customers to have complete control over the checkout experience, giving them the option to pay using contactless payment methods and digital wallets.
- In the US, “Alexa, pay for gas” is live at more than 11,500 Exxon and Mobil stations. On pulling up to the pump, customers can say, “Alexa, pay for gas,” and Alexa will confirm the station location and pump number, before activating the pump and automatically pay after fueling.
IMPACT
- Split-second responses to high-volume data streams and events in real time, particularly regarding the IoT (Internet of Things) and online customer channels.
- Providing superior, efficient, and seamless end-to-end customer and employee experiences (see Experience2) that improve satisfaction and loyalty of both parties.
- Dealing with the scarcity of skilled and qualified human resources, not only by simply automating replicable tasks, but also by radically reimagining processes as “touchless” and “handsfree” by design.
- Eliminating the need for any human presence in business operations, improving personal safety, but also saving office space and travel – and consequently, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions.
TECH
- Business rules and decision management: Prowler.io, Drools Open Source, Oracle Policy Automation, Pega Customer Decision Hub
- Complex event processing: Amazon Kinesis, SAP Complex Event Processing, Tibco Business Events, Apache Flink, Esper
- Process flow and automation: Celonis, Aera Technology, UIPath