Digital Business Automation vs. Automation: Are They Different?

Automation is the current buzz. If organizations haven’t already started implementing automation, now is the time to start. Automation holds immense potential, encouraging organizations to place higher value on employee satisfaction and improving productivity. Investing in business process automation is a quick way to improve overall workflow and efficiency. Digital Business Automation, the integration of advanced technologies to automate complex business processes, is an emerging industry concept that demands consideration from businesses worldwide.

Digital Business Automation versus automation, deciding which process solution will suit your business the best depends on your specific needs. Understanding the differences between automation and Digital Business Automation helps companies to determine which technologies will best suit their long-term goals and current organizational needs.

Differences Between Digital Business Automation and Automation

The main difference between Intelligent Automation and Digital Business Automation is the scope and capabilities. While Intelligent Automation aims to enhance efficiency, Digital Business Automation surpasses this by encompassing holistic process optimization, agility and innovation. As an extension of automation, Digital Business Automation kicks things up a notch by adding advanced technologies to the automation process. While the former focuses on automating only specific tasks, the latter extends automation’s capabilities.

What Is Automation?

Automation allows businesses to use technology, tools, or systems to perform tasks, processes, or operations. Automation can free workers from mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on value-adding work. Think about the technology that goes into computers. Software or machines take over repetitive tasks and other rule-based activities to streamline operations, especially administrative tasks. Businesses’ process automation can save time, reduce errors and increase workflow efficiency. Mundane processes that are easily automated include:

• Invoicing
• Staff schedules
• Document routing
• Customer support
• Employee onboarding
• Data entry and deletion
• Compiling expense reports

Organizational departments that benefit most from automation software include human resources, sales, project management, customer support, and operations management. Aside from increased productivity, making the switch to automation will also:

• Improve efficiency: Automation optimizes resource utilization, expedites basic troubleshooting, and refines operational workflows, leading to heightened productivity.
• Enforce standardization: By harnessing automated technology, enterprises can consistently apply the most optimal techniques, ensuring uniformity and effectiveness across operations.
• Drive accountability: Software automation fosters heightened transparency, paving the way for identifying opportunities for enhancement within daily processes.
• Elevate customer experience: Through impeccable output quality and swift turnaround periods, businesses can cultivate greater customer loyalty by seamlessly integrating automation into their operational frameworks

What Is Digital Business Automation?

Digital Business Automation is a business-driven, iterative, disciplined approach to automation and combines different technologies and tools to create an end-to-end automated ecosystem. Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and RPA are a few of the advanced technologies that take workflow efficiency to the next level. The goal is to automate everything in an organization that can benefit from automation by creating an intelligent and agile system that evolves with the company’s growing needs and drives transformative results. Think of Digital Business Automation as a bundle consisting of automation tools, packaged software, and intelligence like ML or AI.

Inserting this technology into business architecture opens a door to improve turnaround times for key processes within the organization, gives employees more time to focus on high-end work as AI completes manual tasks, and creates a more supportive environment for employees, with the bonus of happy customers, thanks to consistent, high-quality work or service provision.

Why Digital Business Automation Is Vital 

Maximize productivity, minimize overheads, and enjoy a new level of performance at work with Hyperautomated solutions. Businesses that need to keep up with increased demand, create new work processes, encourage employee growth, and boost consistency will benefit from Digital Business Automation. By stepping into this future, businesses will enjoy a positive change in legacy operations, reduced costs, and increased data accuracy. They’ll also see improved customer experiences due to more consistency in deliverables. Here are five game-changing Digital Business Automation capabilities:

• Process Mapping and Mining: Process Mapping helps an organization build visual workflow representations to evaluate operational efficiency. Process mining is a data-driven methodology that uses event logs to visualize, analyze, and improve business processes by uncovering patterns, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies.
• Business Automation Workflow (BAW): Workflow automation involves using technology to design, execute, and manage a sequence of tasks or processes within a business, reducing manual intervention and increasing efficiency.
• Business Rules Management (ODM): Operational Decision Management, also known as business rule automation, is the practice of using software systems to manage and apply a set of predefined rules and logic to guide real-time operational decisions within a business process.
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM): ECM is the hub that stores and manages all digital content within an organization. This set of document automation technologies integrates with Microsoft Office suite and improves information governance.
• Data Capture Automation: Intelligent Optical character recognition (iOCR) technology converts printed or handwritten data into digital data. This technology makes processing large amounts of documents more accessible and faster, with no manual input.

Is Digital Business Automation the Best Fit for Your Organization? 

Thanks to endless software customization opportunities, Digital Business Automation benefits most businesses in almost any industry. 

Three industries that can benefit the most are:

• Health care: Health care services have vast amounts of administrative work, repetitive processes, and regulations to comply with. Organizations in this industry can offer automated services and speed up operations by incorporating NLP into their online systems.
• Financial services: Professionals in this industry can reduce manual intervention, provide more accurate calculations, and offer assistance in real-time.
• Industrial operations: BPM helps to produce higher quality products and optimize legacy systems to ensure faster turnaround times that keep up with supply and demand.

Careful analysis and understanding of your business needs are essential to determine if this technology integration aligns with your goals. Speaking with automation experts and evaluating successful cases in your industry will provide you with valuable insights to factor into your decision-making. 

• Assess your processes: Identify areas where there are a lot of repetitive, rule-based tasks which can benefit from automation.
• Efficiency and productivity: Find processes that will benefit from increased productivity by automating specific tasks.
• Resource allocation: Digital Business Automation may need some initial investments and training, so look at your organization’s resources like budget, skill sets, and technology infrastructure.
• Security and compliance: Businesses that deal with sensitive data will benefit from Digital Business Automation to helps them meet necessary security compliance standards.
• Innovation potential: Digital Business Automation can enable your business to explore new opportunities through innovative solutions or improved customer experiences.

Transform Your Business With Digital Business Automation From Salient Process

Businesses can unleash their full potential by making informed choices between automation and scaling beyond toward Digital Business Automation, seizing new opportunities, and paving the way for a prosperous and resilient future.

At Salient Process, we value the significance of a holistic digital transformation. Our goal is to help you to align your procedures with overarching business objectives. Our dedicated team diligently grasps your specific requirements, crafting personalized plans for success. With our Digital Business Automation solutions, your business can quickly meet its digital transformation goals, taking the whole organization to new heights of efficiency and innovation.

Revolutionize your business today. Request a free consultation with Salient Process.