In today’s volatile and hyper-competitive business landscape, companies need to pay close attention to how its underlying workflows are being managed not just to avoid delays and errors but, most importantly, to achieve organizational goals, easily and faster. How should businesses accomplish this? Through intelligent process automation (IPA).
As the next generation operating model, IPA redefines how organizations improve business processes and workflows by integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence to assist knowledge workers in removing routine, repetitive, and replicable tasks. As a result, businesses can improve their business productivity and response time, minimize operation risks, and improve customer journeys. And leading the innovation behind this market is Nintex.
SourceForge recently caught up with Ryan Duguid, the Chief Evangelist at Nintex, to discuss how businesses can leverage workflow automation as part of their IPA strategy to accelerate digital transformation across the enterprise. Duguid also shares how Nintex empowers today’s modern workforce by managing, automating, and optimizing everyday business processes and improving the way employees work.
Q: First and foremost, can you share with our readers a brief history of Nintex? When and how did the company get its start?
Ryan Duguid, the Chief Evangelist at Nintex
A: Nintex has been committed to innovation and growth since its inception more than a decade ago. The company was founded out of a system integrator in Australia called OBS in 2006. The founders realized the need for a tool to deliver higher quality solutions in less time, with lower cost resources.
Nintex has since expanded to nearly 500 employees that serve more than 8,000 enterprise customers in more than 90 countries. We have an extensive global partner network and a rich history of automating processes for SharePoint and Office 365, the latter of which recently surpassed 105 million workflow executions.
In July of this year, Nintex acquired New Zealand-based Promapp to bring industry-leading process mapping and management capabilities to our customers, and in turn, help Promapp customers automate processes that they have visually mapped.
Today, thousands of enterprises worldwide and across industries such as banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, government, manufacturing and healthcare, standardize on the Nintex Platform every day to manage, automate and optimize simple to sophisticated business processes.
Q: What are your company’s mission and vision? What issues does Nintex seek to solve?
A: Nintex’s mission is to improve the way people work through process management and automation. According to customers, creating workflows with Nintex is an effortless task, saying it’s “easy to start and hard to stop.”
Catering to the expectations of their customers for a robust custom forms product, Nintex Forms was launched as a front-end data-capture solution, which in combination with Nintex Workflow, helps build and customize forms in a visual drag-and-drop format. Apart from offering secure access to forms and processes, irrespective of the place or device it is being accessed from, the solution redefines traditional workflows. Nintex Workflow enables users to build and deploy business targeted applications that can be either department specific or enterprise-wide.
Q: What are some of the industries you serve? Who are your current customers or clients?
A: Nintex is used broadly across all industries and we have a high concentration within energy, financial services, government and health/life sciences. Within those industries, Nintex solutions are used by IT and Ops professionals across multiple departments such as customer service, sales and marketing, human resources, financial, legal and information technology to solve business pain points.
Q: What exactly is workflow automation? How does this solution help enterprises automate the long tail of business processes? And in what ways can workflow automation accelerate digital transformation?
A: Workflow automation boosts the efficiency of organizational processes by automatically carrying out repetitive and manually-intensive tasks, freeing employees for more valuable work and removing the potential for human error. Workflow automation minimizes risks by building these processes into automated systems which significantly increase the chances of tasks being done correctly and on time.
For enterprises, workflow automation enables a greater connection between multiple areas of the business. Nintex workflow capabilities connect applications, content, and systems of record with the people tasked with making decisions and doing the work.
Using automated workflows for business practices provides the following benefits:
- improves customer acquisition, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention;
- creates happier more engaged employees;
- drives a faster pace of innovation;
- increases the quality of products and services;
- lowers risk while driving up compliance;
- creates a competitive advantage and differentiation; and
- ensures profitability.
When it comes to digital transformation, many businesses see the vision of being 100 percent digital as a ‘bridge too far.’ However, modern workflow technologies have been developed that don’t require installing whole new systems or embarking on bet-the-farm technology projects. Workflow automation can start as small as making a modest improvement to a single step of a single process and grow from there. By starting small, results are seen quickly, investment and risks are minimized, and success can be built upon quickly.
Q: Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is a new breed of technology innovation that blends workflow automation with machine learning and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). For individuals that are unfamiliar with IPA, can you provide a brief overview in the simplest of terms? How does this solution empower today’s modern workforce?
A: IPA is really the merging of existing technology enhanced by innovation in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. At its core it’s about capturing data through electronic forms, automating processes, generating documents, increasing effectiveness of decision makers and workers, and uncovering opportunities for optimization. When combined with the type of no-code/low-code development methodology that Nintex has advocates for, organizations are positioned to automate more processes than they could ever imagine.
Q: Can you provide us with some use cases of Nintex Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)?
A: Nintex solutions are used to manage, automate and optimize everyday business processes to improve the way people work. The Nintex Platform is designed for IT and Ops professionals to help them make collaboration more efficient inside and outside of organizations by quickly connecting people, content, and systems of record.
As enterprises identify these time-consuming manual processes, they increasingly adopt more Nintex workflows. Nintex customers often start with just a few workflows, recognize the value they’re receiving, and quickly create more. The adoption of the technology spreads until many customers run thousands of automated workflows across office locations and departments. Here are a few examples of how we’re making an impact with IPA:
With Nintex, Hillphoenix is automating their inspection process, taking it from a system based primarily on spreadsheets and handwritten notes, to one supported by a digital platform. Since implementing Nintex, Hillphoenix has seen about 1,750 inspections and anticipates the long-term measurable benefits of this new process to be a reduction in internal defects and warranty claims.
Hillphoenix, a manufacturer of large refrigeration units, was in need of a solution that would better streamline the company’s everyday inspection efforts. The Hillphoenix team implemented the Nintex solution based on two foundations: eliminate waste and reduce defects incorporated with the inspection process.
Before Nintex, the inspection was completely paper-based and handwritten notes were used to record quality findings. These notes were then recorded and managed through Excel spreadsheets. This increased the risk of errors, wasted inspection time with paper forms, limited tracking records, necessitated hefty excel files, and created more cumbersome processes. Additionally, it hinged on an individual’s ability to readily analyze inspection data. Hillphoenix inspectors spoke varying levels of English which resulted in inaccuracy in inspection records. The process was dependent on deciphering unstandardized terminology. Analytics were dependent on inspection data that was copied from Excel spreadsheets, sometimes up to 24 hours after the inspections were completed.
After deploying the Nintex solution, the inspection process transitioned from a paper-based process to a fully digital system. The implementation of this project streamlined the business internally and reduced cost and improved customers’ experience by improving the quality of their products.
Q: What is your advice for organizations wanting to integrate Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) into their business workflows? And what are some key considerations when investing in the right solutions for process automation?
A: When implementing an intelligent workflow, companies need to remember their end goal of being digitally well-equipped and able to remain ahead of competitors.
With that in mind, anyone or company that wants to build an intelligent workflow needs to actually understand what it is they do today, first mapping the process out, then automating in and then finally looking for opportunities for optimization.
That is where Promapp comes in. Nintex acquired Promapp, which helps companies successfully map, manage and collaborate on their processes, in July 2018. Customers and partners can easily design, deploy and manage their business processes and address process automation scenarios that have been difficult or expensive to solve.
The design of those processes can also evolve over time to align with new company goals, partnerships or teams, making it possible for business processes to become truly agile.
Q: Tell us a bit more about Nintex Intelligent Process Automation. How can this cutting-edge technology optimize the modern workplace and support transparency, efficiency, and responsiveness across the entire organization?
A: With IPA, enterprises can trade in repetitive, human-driven processes with strategic automation that gains intelligence as it goes on — intelligence that will become critical for the organization’s ultimate destination of successful digital transformation. In fact, Nintex recently released research called, State of Intelligent Process Automation Study, to access where companies are at on their digital transformation journeys and the role of IPA technologies. To learn more, download the ebook at www.nintex.com/stateofIPAstudy.
Q: What makes Nintex Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) unique? What are the core capabilities of Nintex IPA that make it stand out from other solutions in the market?
A: Nintex is the global standard for process management and automation. Together with partners, Nintex is shaping the future of the emerging IPA market. Here are the core capabilities of the Nintex Platform:
- Process Mapping & Management – visually map and maintain 100’s/1000’s of business processes, take accountability, and drive process improvements including identifying areas ripe for automation.
- Process Automation – utilize workflow automation, document automation, forms, and mobile apps to streamline the digitization of business processes across teams, content sources, and systems of record.
- Advanced Workflow – quickly transform any business process with clicks, not code – no matter how sophisticated the process.
- Forms and Mobile Apps – easily design responsive, branded forms that capture required information and create apps that connect users to critical processes.
- DocGen™ – automate the generation of consistent, compliant, and customizable documents from any source.
- Xtensions – provides seamless integration to cloud services, business applications, and content stores with nominal coding.
- Process Intelligence & Optimization – leverage Promapp, Nintex Hawkeye, and third-party AI services to further optimize and enhance business processes.
- Process Intelligence – gain transparency into how business processes run and their effectiveness as well as identify areas for improvement.
- Machine Intelligence – optimize manual steps by leveraging machine learning and natural language processing capabilities of Nintex partners.
Q: What trends, technologies, or methods do you think will emerge and shape the future of business process automation, and how is Nintex meeting these?
A: With the rise and increasing sophistication of machine learning and AI capabilities, businesses will be able to do more with the data they have on hand from automating their routine processes. Today, Nintex partners and customers can design a workflow based on what they know works for their organization.
In the not too distant future, users will leverage AI capabilities that can make suggestions about how to best automate those routine tasks and improve user interfaces and process outcomes by leveraging huge amounts of data.
Q: What’s next for Nintex? Are there any new developments or product offerings and features you are working on?
A: Nintex has their eye on continued global growth while remaining committed to shaping the future of Intelligent Process Automation and ensuring our customers and partners are successful in their digital transformation journeys. Nintex is constantly innovating and remains one to watch.
About Nintex
Nintex is the global standard for no-code process management and automation. Today more than 8,000 public and private sector clients across 90 countries turn to the Nintex Platform to accelerate progress on their digital transformation journeys by quickly and easily managing, automating and optimizing business processes. Visit www.nintex.com and experience how Nintex and its global partner network are shaping the future of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA).