Process Automation: Companies Are Establishing Competence Centres

According to new study “Provider Lens Intelligent Automation” by ISG, demand for solutions & services for process automation is increasing. They can be used to implement cross-company use cases. In the corona pandemic, the degree of maturity of process automation has increased significantly. One of the essential development steps is the establishment of competence centres in which user companies pool the resources of their automation programs across departments.

Centralization gives rise to new options for the systematic rollout of intelligent automation solutions along the entire value chain. Software companies and IT service providers support this development with platform offerings on which various automation technologies can be linked in a process-oriented manner.

This is one of the central results of the new provider comparison “ISG Provider Lens Intelligent Automation – Solutions and Services Report,” which the consulting company Information Services Group (ISG) has now presented. The study examines the know-how and implementation skills of 84 service providers and software providers. These are active on the market.

Process Automation: Solution Providers Expect Revenue Growth

“In 2022, most providers of intelligent automation solutions expect a sales increase of at least 20 percent,” reports Heiko Henkes, Director & Principal Analyst at the Information Services Group (ISG). He cites several factors as reasons for this growth: “On the one hand, we still have the classic drivers such as greater customer satisfaction, shorter throughput times, more attractive jobs and higher data and process quality. On the other hand, it is increasingly important to find timely answers to the rapidly increasing loads in the supply chains.”

Digital disruptors would show the added value that end-to-end solutions for process automation bring, especially for supply chain issues. Here the business and the IT organisation are very closely intertwined. According to Henkes, such a design allows alternative scheduling decisions to be made in real-time. Another field of application is in the area of ​​manufacturing. The IT-supported process automation contributes here to reducing batch sizes so that more and more far-reaching customer requirements can be fulfilled. And without losing sight of the production costs.

Legacies From Previous Process Automation Initiatives

Despite this, most user companies are currently still struggling with the legacy of previous process automation initiatives. These arose primarily in the context of individual corporate divisions and have developed in a correspondingly heterogeneous manner. As a result, one would encounter many isolated solutions in which very different technologies and data models are used.

The resulting frictional losses severely limited the scalability of the solutions. Against the background of this experience, more and more companies would now decide to set up cross-divisional competence centres. The centres base their work on a consistent process and technology framework. The new study by ISG summarises this offer segment under the term Intelligent Business Automation (IBA).

Intelligent Business Automation Combines Technologies For Process Automation

Providers of Intelligent Business Automation bring together the technologies relevant to the customer in a consistent automation suite. The integrated technology fields range from analytics to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine/deep learning to natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision.

Process Discovery & Mining plays a key role. This makes it possible to determine precisely those use cases that have the tremendous potential for automation in a customer’s current process organisation. To make reliable suggestions for expanding intelligent automation solutions in close cooperation with the customer’s specialist departments, relevant industry knowledge is necessary for leading IBA service providers.

The Market For Artificial Intelligence For IT Operations

In the Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) submarket, ISG examines IT service providers with a proprietary offering for artificial intelligence in IT operations. AIOps platforms help companies to automate complex IT operations in multi-cloud environments. The aim is to maximise the performance of workloads that are becoming more and more distributed while reducing costs and ensuring the compliance and security of IT operations.

To do this, AIOps solutions offer capabilities such as automatic troubleshooting, self-healing, predictive maintenance, and automatic orchestration of fixes. ISG expects the AIOps market to grow significantly over three to five years. Given the complexity of AIOps, companies are looking for service providers with already developed, integrated, and pre-trained algorithms or solutions that help them accelerate their digital transformation and minimise the existing complexities.

Conversational AI Market

In the Conversational AI (ConAI) market segment, ISG evaluates AI-based, automated dialogue systems providers. Solutions for this interact with users via text or spoken language. To understand the moods, emotions, and attitudes of human users, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies are used for sentiment analysis. Based on search algorithms and data classification approaches, the applications can process ever-larger amounts of data, including unstructured data, to an increasing extent.

In addition, low-code/no-code environments democratise AI development. As a result, business users become independent developers who can drive faster and more flexible implementations. The most critical use cases currently include the support of virtual agents, language assistants, and chatbots in contact centres.

Intelligent Document Processing Market

In the Intelligent Document Processing market segment, ISG analyzes providers who offer proprietary software solutions for the automated recognition, analysis, and processing of documents. Intelligent document processing (IDP) uses AI technologies. These include machine learning, deep learning, or computer vision to filter large amounts of unstructured data. These come from various sources such as e-mail, PDF, Excel, Word, or image files. This data is processed, stored, and made available to other business applications.

To limit the number of manual intervention points to a minimum and automate the document processing workflows across entire business processes, companies are looking for IDP solutions with high data throughput and equally high precision in data acquisition. According to the study, intelligent document processing has developed into an important tool, where paper-based documents are still an integral part of the process chains in many places to meet the changed framework conditions that have arisen in the course of the pandemic.

Process Discovery & Mining Market

In the Process Discovery & Mining market segment(PD&M), ISG evaluates providers of proprietary software solutions for the automatic detection, monitoring, and improvement of business processes. The providers examined offer technology platforms that combine process mining, discovery, and task mining to visualise, design, and optimise business processes. By showing the performance of the current process organisation, PD&M solutions create a reliable data basis to determine worthwhile starting points for further process automation projects. In addition, the first providers can analyse processes almost in real-time. Thus, PD&M solutions are developing into a serious tool for the development of alternative proposals when there are current business problems,

Process Automation: Evaluation Of Vendors

The comparative study ranks IBM as a leader in three market segments and Accenture, Atos, and Capgemini in two components each. The providers Abbyy, Almato, Amelia, Artificial Solutions, Arvato, Automation Anywhere, Axians, Celonis, CGI, Cognigy, Datagroup, DXC Technology, Google, ITyX, Kofax, Microsoft, NTT DATA, Rossum, SAP Signavio, Software AG, TCS, UiPath and Wipro each receive this award in one market segment. In addition, Abbyy Timeline, Genpact, Infosys, and Sinch Chatlayer are each named Rising Star in a market segment. According to the definition of ISG, these are companies with a promising portfolio and high future potential.

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