Unlocking Efficiency with Enterprise Process Automation

Enterprise process automation (EPA) is a fascinating field that strategically leverages technology to integrate, streamline, and automate business processes across an organization. EPA solutions have evolved at a breakneck pace over the last couple of years.

The convergence of intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), and business process management (BPM), along with AI, has driven a massive change in how companies and software vendors envision the product life cycle. The continued acceleration of digital transformation is leading to an increased interest in intelligent automation platforms. These solutions are increasing efficiency and cutting costs in several industries.

How to Choose the Right EPA Solution for Your Business

Market Overview
Vendors in this market today are taking a holistic approach to move beyond siloed IT and business process automation. The goal is to provide highly integrated solutions containing RPA, IDP, BPM, and process and task mining, using AI throughout the platform. The focus is on gaining greater business value and organizational agility in a highly efficient operation.

Most vendors are adding and boosting functionality to enhance no-code and low-code capabilities and tightly integrated components. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been advancing rapidly, so look for significant AI enhancements in these solutions as this EPA market evolves. Generative AI will be one of the most interesting emerging features that vendors investigate, and we anticipate that vendors will find creative and innovative ways to leverage generative AI in the near future.

To speed adoption and time to market, many vendors offer a large number of prebuilt components, templates, bots, and integrations. Some provide plug-and-play options, while others offer customization.

Buyer Requirements
Ideally, prospective customers should have a hyperautomation strategy to help guide the requirements of the solution. However, it is not necessary to have a complete vision to gain benefit from these tools. IT and business leaders should work together to determine use cases for an implementation roadmap that takes into account data readiness, ease of integration, ROI, and upstream and downstream teams, systems, and processes that are impacted.

Industry-specific and departmental functions are also key elements that need to be understood in order to compare the tools. Potential buyers should compare requirements and vendors with an eye toward performing a proof of concept (POC) with the vendor. A POC will help ensure the solution will work for an organization. It can also indicate how easy to use and to implement a solution may be.

Next Steps

EPA is not just about efficiency; it’s about transforming organizations and driving value through technology-driven processes.

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s EPA Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, you can access the research using a free trial.