Serviceaide Automation Orchestrator (AO) provides companies with transformational agility to streamline and innovate business activities into unified automated processes. You can reduce cost and cycle time; and improve quality and predictability of business activities. The focus on driving business efficiencies requires an increase in automated workflows and processes. Serviceaide has the tools to help you achieve your goal.
Serviceaide’s Automation Orchestrator is a visual orchestration tool that automates processes by providing a new architecture, an orchestration layer, outside and above existing systems. This layer exists to unify and integrate systems and people into a cohesive process that can remove bottlenecks from manual and disconnected activities. An outcome previously impossible with siloed legacy systems. The AO tool provides visibility and metrics for each process execution. Measured continuous improvement is possible by analyzing costs, cycle time, quality, and calculation of the ROI on improvement efforts.
Research by major industry analysts, such as Forrester and Gartner, show that business process automation projects deliver 30-50% productivity gains for processes involving primarily back-office staff; and typically deliver 15-30% productivity gains for processes involving knowledge workers.
Innovation takes many forms. Adding, replacing, or integrating new technologies. Introducing new or optimal methods into existing activities or processes: Or completely redesigning a function. Most legacy systems can’t be easily changed. They don’t possess adaptable workflows and connectors into other systems. They also do not easily facilitate collaboration across inter-departmental teams. This stifles both creativity and innovation. Serviceaide Automation Orchestrator provides a framework that can address these issues. It integrates systems in place as its orchestration layer runs outside and above existing systems. It also allows integration of new technologies at any step (or new step) of an automated process. AO provides a new architecture, a new framework that protects existing legacy investments (and the people trained to use them) by enabling changes and additions without affecting existing systems.
For example, many companies are considering adding a virtual agent. The driver could be to reduce costs or increase self-service. It could be to extend capabilities so employees can leverage their mobile phone to conversationally initiate a process, reroute or deal with approvals, or retrieve reports. There are many different use cases. With the AO tool in place, you can implement a virtual agent without impacting existing systems. The virtual agent would be plugged into the new orchestration layer—not each legacy application. This allows you to leverage new technologies and solutions without having to rip out your legacy environment. Collaborate and democratize automation. Processes can be composed visually using a drag and drop interface creating an easy-to-understand flow that all stakeholders can review and agree upon. This boosts process robustness and quality. It also serves as a check and balance to ensure cross-departmental goals are met through buy-in and the synergy of team collaboration.
You can’t improve what you can’t see and don’t measure. It is commonplace to see email and phone calls used as the “infrastructure” supporting a business process, and manual integration involving duplicate entry tasks, or ad-hoc scripts or tools. These practices make operations opaque to a company, and the tribal knowledge driving these functions is not secure and easily lost when an employee departs. This situation is not auditable, it is error prone, lacks repeatability, measurements, and creates a staffing and possibly a security and compliance risk. Business improvement requires codifying the steps into a formal process with clear outcomes, and a means to provide holistic visibility and measurements across all activities.
Serviceaide AO metrics, at both the process level and task level, make improvement opportunities apparent and provide a means to baseline and see the effect of changes, and the means to calculate the ROI of improvement efforts. These metrics can be shared as corporate business analytics to provide further insight into areas as diverse as demand forecasting and workforce scheduling. The result is that functions and business services are secured, delivered on time, every time and SLAs and OLAs are met.
Your environment may include HR systems, CRM systems, IT systems, Workforce Management systems, Legal, and ERP systems that have specific functions. However, they weren’t designed to talk to each other, to coordinate multiapplication functions and connect stakeholders in other departments. A complex process such as on-boarding a new employee is a multiapplication workflow, involving coordination and collaboration across multiple departments’ staff and their systems. Serviceaide Automation Orchestrator can choreograph this into an interwoven multi-step flow moving data across systems and managing the approvals and notifications, reducing cycle time, cost, and improving a new employee’s experience. The value to enterprises is realized in one tool that can handle diverse needs—whether its complex processes with dozens of steps in multiapplication flows, single step processes, processes scheduled to run once a month, or those running on demand thousands of times an hour.
Companies today are varied with operating systems on-premises and in the public, private and hybrid clouds. Technology landscapes continues to evolve and service different business requirements. AO can handle heterogenous workflows where legacy applications and SaaS services must be combined to fulfill the tasks required for a process. The benefit is agility. Migration to cloud computing will continue to evolve and mature. The ability to easily make changes at the orchestration layer reduces the switching cost and risk of moving applications to the cloud.
Ad-hoc email, and phone call driven process activities are a compliance nightmare and are immediately flagged in any audit. The problem is a lack of traceability and repeatability in every execution. Each process Serviceaide Automation Orchestrator executes is logged, providing a complete audit trail from who initiated the process to the approval and impact it had. The solution couldn’t be simpler. The process model itself is inherently documented, and that model defines the execution flow meeting the requirements of any audit.
Serviceaide Automation Orchestration’s architecture is an industry best practice as it was created to allowthe addition or replacement of systems or tasks comprising a business procedure without affecting all the other involved systems and people. The impact of swapping out a system or assigning a new team is limited to that system, affected stakeholders and the overarching flow. This avoids the technical debt of point-to-point integration, and dramatically improves agility by reducing the cost, time, and impact (risk) of changes. Importantly, the AO architecture helps you avoid costly integrations and provides a tool where future needs can be handled efficiently and quickly.
Often simple tasks may require only a few manual steps but when the volume is high, they become a chronic cost and create staffing issues. Legacy systems may prevent automation of these tasks due to a lack of workflow capabilities and connectors into other systems. Serviceaide Automation Orchestrator can pull the process up and over these systems without affecting them, reducing costly employee overhead costs and the drudgery of routine work. You can also eliminate related training costs for new employees.
You can identify means to innovate without it being a large scale and costly project. Serviceaide Automation Orchestrator tooling provides the infrastructure to help manage an initiative to improve and streamline processes. AO provides an end-to-end framework to structure collaboration needed for innovation ideation; lifecycle development and test; and operational measurements to follow through and continuously optimize the process. Begin the process by visually mapping the current state or “as is” activities. Then progress collaboratively into the ideal “to be” optimal flow with a means to visually represent and review the process. The key is the Serviceaide AO tool enables a best practice method that reduces the initial uncertainty of where and how to get started and reduces the overall effort to create new process definitions.
A Serviceaide AO implementation brings a library of pre-built workflows to jumpstart automation projects, as well as access to over a hundred application connectors that facilitate integration with existing systems. The connectors are easily added to handle any common application. Serviceaide AO is available as SaaS or on-premises subscription using a container-based infrastructure to simply deployment and management.
DevOP: Software deployment, patching, new installs
HR: Recruiting, employee onboarding, training certifications, approvals, notifications, employee requests
IT: Service catalogs, ebonding, software distribution, resets/unlocks, start stop services, outages
Sales operations: Quotes, order to cash, approvals, entitlements
Facilities: Equipment provisioning, depot repair, warrantees, incident management
Legal: Contract distribution, sign-offs, compliance audits, LDO tasks
Purchasing: Request flows, approval flows, status notifications, reconciliation, receiving
Sec Op: Phishing response, alert enrichment, endpoint malware triage, threat response, vulnerability remediation
