In this digital era, businesses are constantly modernizing their infrastructures and processes to not only optimize value and reduce costs, but to also future-proof themselves. However, enterprises have sometimes jumped the gun and adopted technologies without a strong digital strategy, thanks to the digital transformation imperative. A rushed adoption of emerging technologies has caused difficulties for enterprises instead of helping them unlock new opportunities.
New-age technologies thrive on data and its seamless management, and as such, also generate data that are crucial to deriving vital insights for informed decision-making. Data- and analytics-driven insights play a critical role in optimizing business processes. But a myriad of technologies functioning concurrently on legacy systems can lead to teething issues that slow down operations and prevent enterprises from maximizing value. This is where integration-led automation (ILA) becomes paramount for enterprises to build future-facing digital strategies for business processes.
Building a robust integration strategy for business process automation
Domain-specific apps are helping shape business process operations across organizational functionalities. Salesforce and SAP Concur were the early birds in the field as they implemented the SaaS model around a decade ago. Adoption of applications depends on the particular use cases which can be automated easily and quickly without burdening enterprise IT. For instance, RPA-based bots are assuming more important roles with minimum IT intervention.
But these apps must work in unison to generate the desired results. For that to happen, enterprises need to implement an integration strategy that leads to seamless business process automation (BPA). A strong integration strategy can offer enterprises improved scalability and agility, while also increasing availability and enhancing productivity.
ILA framework: Preventing data fragmentation and improving efficiencies
By implementing apps without a sound data integration strategy and a sustainable framework, data fragmentation is a highly likely possibility. The data from these apps reside in separate servers/databases and fail to interact with each other, causing the risk of data fragmentation. End-to-end visibility of data is key to growth and automation of business processes require a holistic approach to the visualization of data. This requires a comprehensive integration strategy that can drive mission-critical BPA to success. An ILA framework-backed integration strategy becomes essential for enterprises to unify their apps and make them function in harmony.
Data integrity is also essential to automating business processes. Growing team sizes can also risk magnifying data integrity issues due to inaccurate data entries. An ILA framework not only increases the efficiency and accuracy of data processing, but also steers seamless transformation by empowering business users to self-serve and explore use cases on a unified, enterprise-wide platform.
An integration-led automation (ILA) framework not only increases the efficiency and accuracy of data processing, but also steers seamless transformation by empowering business users to self-serve and explore use cases on a unified, enterprise-wide platform.
The HCLTech approach: Automating business processes for holistic growth
The ILA framework forms a crucial part of comprehensive integration and a strong business process automation strategy. At HCLTech, our proprietary ILA framework follows a three-step methodology that starts with identifying the integration need by looking into processes holistically. As a part of the strategy, we discuss various tried and tested integration approaches with our client based on the level of automation maturity. We consider several relevant parameters before integrating the apps with the aim of implementing BPA holistically. We follow a process-oriented ILA approach to automate the business processes and help organizations make the right investments at the right time and in the right direction. Due diligence in ILA is pivotal for customers to identify ineffective processes which can obstruct enterprise growth. In doing so, we help our customers invest intelligently in agile and scalable integration infrastructure to resolve repetitive issues in real-time and take one step further to sustained success.
