AI and The Next Era of Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) tools help organizations mobilize resources, automate routine manual tasks, and enable self-service where none existed before. Today, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) become more and more prevalent, businesses are considering whether the same technology could be used to push their BPM tools even further. The idea of connecting AI technology to existing BPM software (commonly known as iBPMS) tools allow companies to do even more work to cut human errors out of processes while also delivering a better finished product to customers.
AI-driven technologies are beginning to change the way enterprises conduct business. Once centered on the priority of cost-cutting and process efficiency, modern BPM systems are more focused on providing the ultimate customer experience. Joel Hans, former managing editor or Manufacturing.net, discusses the relationship between AI and BPM in his article, stating that AI technology is becoming predominant in marketing tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and is likely to be one of the first places where AI-enabled BPM tools make the most progress.
Hans provides a great example of this when he says,
“Let’s say there is a marketing and sales team that often parses online dashboards to figure out which customers are the highest-value targets for some personalized email campaigns. Each of these employees needs to take time with not only the overall dashboard, but also the individual accounts to determine which type of personalized is best. By using supervised machine learning, a BPM tool would be “taught” how to navigate these dashboards and find the most valuable targets. The AI picks up on which area of the dashboard are clicked on most frequently, which numbers are relevant, and starts to recognize patterns in the process—even more rare edge cases that make the human workers spend a little bit more time.”
By eliminating the manual processes from determining the best possible targets for marketing, the “smart” BPM tool (iBPMS) allows the employee to focus on more complex business processes that drive more productivity.
There are a lot of AI-related technologies that are complementary to BPM when it comes to improving business processes and application efficiency, compliance and continuous improvement. AI technologies can be used in BPM in a non-intrusive way (for example, as a plug-and-play component) to provide visibility, analysis and better understanding of business operating models – through real-time information on current performance and indicators for potential improvements.
BPM software is still about coordinating people, systems, processes (and applications), but intelligent BPM is about making sure that all those various users get real-time information and proactive predictions, recommendations and insights to continuously innovate and improve their experiences. Of course, intelligent BPM is also about making sure that processes, applications and systems can reshape and adapt themselves as they run and can select the best actions to be executed…so users get better experiences and a better understanding around business operating models.
Looking for more? Download our Business Process Management Buyer’s Guide for free to compare the top-24 products available on the market with full page vendor profiles. The guide includes four key capabilities to look for in a BPM platform, plus questions to ask before purchasing. It’s truly the perfect resource for anyone looking to find the right BPM for their business/organization, or those looking to replace an existing one.
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