How to get the best from IoE across the enterprise
Internet of Everything is a relatively new concept that combines people, processes, data and things and is considered the next developmental stage of the IoT. IoE exists across the front, middle and back office operations of an enterprise in any industry sector. IoE’s significant in this context holds the key to transforming work so that it’s smarter, faster, more efficient, cohesive and productive.
To fully grasp IoE‘s potential, enterprises must understand what roles things, people, data and processes play within enterprise IoE. A thing is an element of a tech system capable of gathering information and sharing it with other elements of the system. People play a central role in providing intelligent connections that can analyze received data and make decisions based on the data gathered. As the data volumes grow, managing it becomes more complicated and requires proper analysis to generate beneficial insights. Finally, the processes include how all the other elements combine to provide a smart, viable system.
The big challenge is ensuring that all of IoE’s elements seamlessly work together at an optimum level. However, because of increasingly disjointed systems, disparate data and manual workflows that exist across the enterprise, the potential of IoE isn’t being realized; especially at the speed now required by business operations.
How enterprise IoE is being digitally enabled
Enterprises are increasingly seeing intelligent automation that runs a digital workforce as the main gateway to exploiting and realizing IoE capabilities. This is because digital workers uniquely operate and learn like humans while also interoperating with systems of any age and technology without needing APIs. Essentially, IoE uses a digital workforce that finally gets the best out of people, technologies, data and processes to drive the digital transformation of IoE.
This smart digital workforce excels at interoperating with data across all IT systems, interweaving AI capabilities to carry out work. A digital workforce can read different screens, layouts or fonts, application versions, system settings, permissions and language to help prioritize workloads based on ever-changing digital environmental conditions. Digital workers can also ingest, process and derive contextual meaning and sort semi-structured and unstructured data from any source or language, all while providing quality checks, detecting errors and passing exceptions to humans.
All these activities are performed by digital workers with total integrity 24/7 and up to 150 times faster than humans with zero errors. This also means that rather than performing soul-destroying activities as human IoE middleware, people can spend more time focusing and thinking about delivering higher value, more strategic activities. For example, workers can now analyze and interpret data that digital workers can’t understand, making process data judgements to analyze business processes and apply this business intelligence to spot opportunities, potential efficiencies and solve problems.
A recent report by Blue Prism found that 92% of knowledge workers and senior IT decision makers surveyed view digital workers as an important factor in driving digital transformation, enabling them to swiftly scale the deployment of other emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, natural language processing and data analytics. Enterprises are employing and integrating these technologies so they can identify patterns of use and previously hidden behavior. They’re streamlining operations and eliminating costly, time consuming and error-prone activities to accelerate decision making and services for better customer experiences.
Crucially, all these digital worker-driven activities discussed can be done safely, compliantly and transparently by non-technical people, without the need for changing existing systems or performing any costly IT integration effort that would otherwise prevent operational agility.
Enterprise IoE in action
A British car manufacturer has saved multi-millions of pounds using digital workers to gather essential data and create powerful algorithms that generate insights into cost savings and commercial opportunities. In addition, a global chocolate manufacturer saved $7 million by employing a digital workforce to streamline its supply chain. Early each day, digital workers identify mislabeled products and inform supply chain personnel, who then correct inventory immediately.
A British retailer is also using digital workers to quickly detect fraudulent purchases based on customer behavior and account history. By doing so, they intercept the delivery of goods to fraudsters and protect customers.
In addition, a large European multinational uses digital workers to automate the extraction and processing of data from digital documents to classify different types of documents. This provides quality checks that detect errors, manage the data flow and ensure accuracy. Another month closing finance process is being managed by a single digital worker, which has already reduced completion time from hours to minutes.
Final thoughts
By unleashing the potential of IoE, digital workers will be key to driving organizational adaptation and resilience, streamlining, accelerating and automating work to provide an engine for sustainable growth, helping to deliver strategic goals that make the enterprise smarter, more agile and efficient.
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