What this book covers
Chapter 1, What is Cloud Pak for Business Automation?, discusses the motivation for digital transformation, and what drives companies to invest in automation technology. We will discuss IBM’s solutions and some of the benefits of them as compared to others in the market. We will also provide an overview of the architecture and technologies.
Chapter 2, RPA, Workflow, Decisions, and Business Applications, provides an in-depth look into the current industry view on Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Workflow and Decisions. We will also discuss the specifics of what we currently support today in IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, and what kind of solutions you can build with these technologies.
Chapter 3, Process Discovery and Process Mining, introduces two techniques for documenting and discovering the hidden business processes within any organization. Through a collaborative approach that we call Playback, we provide a mechanism via IBM Blueworks Live to allow Business and IT professionals to collaboratively document the as-is and to-be processes. In addition, through the use of IBM Process Mining, you can discover hidden processes by analyzing the actual execution traces of the enterprise.
Chapter 4, Content Management and Document Processing, looks at how at the core of every business are documents – for example, medical records, contracts, invoices, and so on. As such, effective management of the document lifecycle is vital to the health of any organization, particularly in highly regulated industries. This chapter will explain Enterprise Content Management and how the modern day content management system can work together with AI to speed up the extraction of information from documents, especially when used together with RPA to provide end-to-end automation.
Chapter 5, Task Automation with RPA, explores that while RPA can be used to automate many tasks, its sweet spot is around Task Automation. In this chapter, we will use IBM RPA to build automation to speed up order processing by reading information from an Excel spreadsheet and entering that information into SAP.
Chapter 6, Chatbot with RPA, looks at one of the unique capabilities of IBM RPA, which is the ability to build chatbots and interactive voice agents without extensive knowledge of Natural Language Processing (NLP) or dependency on other language services. This chapter will outline the steps necessary to build a chatbot with IBM RPA, but will also discuss when a more elaborate solution might be needed.
Chapter 7, Workflow for Process Automation, teaches that even though RPA is called Robotic “Process” Automation, RPA is not intended to be used to automate the entire end-to-end process. In this chapter, we will use the Workflow as an end-to-end process to automate the hiring process of an organization. We will also look into how RPA bots can work collaboratively with Task and Knowledge workers to maximize efficiency.
Chapter 8, Automate Decisions to Speed Up Your Processes, describes how Decision management can be used to automate your business rules and how you can embed those rules within your applications. We will provide a premier to DMN, short for Decision Modeling Notation, and how one can use a low-code experience to create decisions that will be run millions of times per day with responses in milliseconds.
Chapter 9, Manage Documents with Content Management, discusses how managing the content lifecycle is an important aspect in many automation solutions. Control of who has access to documents and how documents will be stored, accessed, modified, or deleted must be carefully designed to ensure proper compliance in many industries. This chapter will describe how one can set up a content management solution and extend it to meet the needs of the organization.
Chapter 10, Extracting Meanings with Document Processing, looks at how despite the push for digitization of content in the last many years, there are still a lot of paper documents. It will often require human workers to read and interpret the information – whether it is semi-structured data such as a tax form, or unstructured data such as invoices, utility bills, and so on. This chapter describes how to set up an automated document processing pipeline using the Automation Document Processing technology in IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation.
Chapter 11, Engaging Business Users with Business Applications, highlights that even with techniques such as RPA, Workflow, Document Processing, and the use of AI, not everything can be fully automated. In many cases, we still count on human intuition and knowledge to perform some of the work and make decisions. This chapter will discuss how to build a responsive business application that enables business users to interact with different automation technologies.
Chapter 12, Workforce Insights, teaches you that while it is important to create an automation solution, it is also important to understand how well the automation is working. As part of Cloud Pak for Business Automation, we provide the ability to use AI to provide recommendations and to use business data to create dashboards for business managers to observe and manage the workforce.
Chapter 13, On-Premises and On-Cloud Deployments, describes the various deployment environments that are supported by IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, and the pros and cons of each.
Chapter 14, Deployment Topology, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery, shows us that although business automation solutions are often a critical part of enterprise automated solutions, it is crucial to consider many factors that will impact the availability, stability, and performance of the solutions. This chapter will examine the different aspects that must be considered by the solution architects as they apply to Cloud Pak for Business Automation.
Chapter 15, Automating Your Operations and Other Considerations, describes the techniques that can be used to automate the setup, daily operations, and maintenance of the solutions. This will get into integration with CI/CD pipeline for solution deployment, leverage GitOps to manage production setup, customize operators, and so on.
