The New Landscape of Process Automation

Disruptive forces have a way of making companies reevaluate their business models.

At the beginning of 2020, many businesses were already dabbling in reevaluating their operations. Once the COVID pandemic hit, that reevaluation took on a new focus and priority. One question quickly dominated companies across all industries: How can I optimize my deliverables from both a process and a tool perspective to make them more efficient and better deliver them to my customers?

If the pandemic has taught businesses anything, it’s that they need a more fluid business operating model. Companies that adapted quickly survived, while those who didn’t – or couldn’t – suffered. This has been true across industries, whether we’re talking about automotive, banking, hospitality or anything else. Every industry has operating process models connected to traditional business systems that make up their value chain.

Today, rather than creating specific new workflows to address current realities, operating processes and workflows need to be put into an intelligent process automation platform that can adapt to whatever disruptions arise. An intelligent process automation platform offers the agility to solve even the most novel business problems that arise. For example, corporate legal can be empowered to collaborate within departments and across an entire enterprise to implement the business model you need to meet today’s challenges.

When implementing changes to your current business model, it’s essential to keep a customer-centric focus. Despite disruptions, you want to continue to deliver the maximum quality services and products to your customers. One critical way to make that happen is through business process automation. When the pandemic hit, many companies were able to optimize and automate processes on the IT side of things, but they struggled to do the same for the business side. AI-driven process management allows you to introduce efficiency and predictability that complement your existing business operations and adapt to whatever disruptions arise.

One of my colleagues at Forrester coined a term that is reshaping knowledge work: Enterprise Service Management (ESM). ESM brings efficiency, predictability, and automated workflows to everyday business operations across all departments of an organization, not just IT.

Take, for example, how our corporate legal customers use our workflow and intelligent process automation platform, Onit Apptitude. Apptitude enables the ability to track work to approve, facilitate, automate and drive operations. It supports collaborative services across departments, automates departmental handoffs, and provides businesses with more predictability to know when efficiency needs to be increased as demand surges, observe trends and improve processing efficiency in the future.

We recently published our Onit Apptitude Solutions Catalog, which gives real-world examples of how corporate legal customers embrace intelligent process automation and  ESM. One large company created an App to manage all of the necessary business processes, reviews and approvals to transfer assets between portfolio companies. It also generates the legal documents needed to memorialize the transactions. As a result, the efficiency the App generates makes it easier for the staff to handle higher volumes of these complex financial transactions in less time. Another global corporate legal department uses an Onit-based App as a policy endorsement drafting portal. Insurance underwriters can submit policy endorsement drafts for review and approval, saving time and improving response rates with self-service and automation.

To date, we have 5,500 Apps and 130 solutions built on Onit Apptitude and users on multiple continents using this technology.

Legal operations (also referred to as legal ops) is an important emerging domain and a critical piece in your digital value chain. To function in today’s demanding environment and navigate the uncertainties that continue to rise, organizations need to capitalize on a scalable workflow and intelligent process automation platform that supports not only legal but all of their digital enterprise functions. Your platform now becomes the link between digital and operations to deliver your brand promise. Organizations with any vertical can benefit from formalizing work, increasing access to systems, validating and tracking information, and coordinating knowledge workers across departments. This means automating business functions like legal operations now becomes a critical and connected component in your value chain that adapts to challenges and thrives in disruptive times.

Here are three ways to learn more about business process automation:

• Sign up for this upcoming webinar, featuring Daniel Lee, Director Of Legal Operations – Technology & Analytics for DaVita. In it, he will discuss the power of a business process automation platform for enterprise legal management. (Thursday, September 17, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. CDT)
• Check out this blog post, which shares how legal operations professionals have solved business process challenges with Onit Apptitude.
• Listen to this on-demand webinar, Transforming Legal Service Delivery And Enabling Self-Service At Pearson. Robert Mignanelli, SVP, Associate General Counsel, Global Product/Technology, Pearson plc, shares the company’s transformative journey to move from a highly bespoke legal services model into a more standardized and streamlined way of delivering support to the business.