Insights from the digital event: “Discover how to take the automation of your business processes to the next level thanks to artificial intelligence.”
It won’t be the first time you’ve read that digitization has gone from being an option to being an obligation. Hybrid work and the competitive advantage provided by new technologies have pushed companies to accelerate their digitization to adapt, modernize and continue to compete in their sector.
Now, with corporate resources and assets already digitized, many business processes continue to be manual and repetitive tasks. This implies that they are not very efficient and, therefore, more expensive. This is where the automation of processes comes into play, with undeniable utility, so that people dedicate themselves to tasks of greater value to the business. But it’s not just about automating repetitive tasks, we can take automation to the next level thanks to artificial intelligence .
However, building AI from scratch is difficult, expensive and time consuming, so in most cases it will not be a cost-effective option. Therefore, the optimal thing is to take advantage of existing solutions such as Power Platform , a set of intelligent tools in the Microsoft cloud that help us digitize, create and automate our business processes.
How to apply artificial intelligence to process automation, without science fiction
In this context, from Softeng we have organized a digital event with the aim of sharing, without technicalities and with practical examples, how we can maximize the potential of Power Platform tools combined with artificial intelligence in the Microsoft cloud to automate and enrich the business processes more efficiently and take advantage of all the information it provides us; and take automation to the next level.
Through a demo, Marc Jordana and Joseph Valdivia, experts in Microsoft 365 , have carried out a process of automating a usual financial process for managing invoices, which is very manual and repetitive, using RPA desktop flows and applying a artificial intelligence layer to extract the information that interests us from each document – specifically, pdfs -, just as a person would do, and, as a last step, store it centrally in a database in Dataverse to have all that information of value available to exploit it later.
Five practical tips
As a conclusion of the digital event, we can extract 5 practical tips to carry out the automation of your business processes by applying Microsoft artificial intelligence , in order to achieve greater efficiency and solve operational problems in any of the business areas: human resources , marketing, finance, etc
1. Identify the ideal use cases
It identifies very well which processes can be automated, in which it will provide greater value and priority. Here, less is more . So we recommend starting by automating those simpler tasks, and little by little incorporating new processes.
2. Well define the flow of the process to automate
Order is the basis of any process, and even more so when we talk about robotic automation. Precisely establishing all the steps of each process to automate and defining its optimal flow is essential and will save you inefficiencies in the future.
3. Know the automation tools
It seems obvious, but automation tools and AI algorithms include many options. Having the right technological training is going to make the difference between realizing the potential of automation or generating a lot of headaches, time and money.
4. Test and test before launching the automation
Experience teaches us that it is extremely important to take into account all the possible casuistry to push to the limit and thoroughly test the process that we have automated before putting it into production, in order to avoid problems and to generate more work than added value. Invest time in testing it to earn it later.
5. Have a specialist partner
Unlike point 3, it may not seem so obvious, but having an expert team that has the technological specialization and experience to accompany you and recommend best practices ends up being the best investment.
featured question
Q. The demo shows how Dataverse data is entered from the process I automated. If the same is done for all the processes of the organization, can all that information be used for something else?
A. Of course. At the end of the day, Dataverse is our business database, and therefore, we can take advantage of all the information that we store in it to create our business intelligence reports and even use it for our data analysis processes. In fact, we tell you that at the next digital event that we will hold at the end of September, we will show you how you can exploit your business data – be it in Dataverse or in another type of database – through tools in the Microsoft cloud.