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83% of enterprises are already using an automation platform or plan to implement one into their business processes, according to a survey by OVUM. Many business leaders are familiar with robotic process automation (RPA) where robots can perform simple rules based tasks. Now they are educating themselves on intelligence process automation (IPA) to automate more complex tasks with AI.

There are numerous benefits of automation associated with adopting low risk, non-invasive IPA, but enterprise organizations often have trouble weighing the cost and resources of IPA implementation against the ROI they expect to see from it. Early adopters are proving that the ROI is worth implementing IPA. According to KPMG, successful process automation projects save companies 40% – 75%, with payback that varies between several months and several years.

IPA can typically be completed quickly without disturbing existing processes and systems and continuously provides benefits for enterprises long after implementation. Understanding all the benefits of automation will increase your success and your ROI.

Continue reading below to discover the 5 benefits of automation that will impact your enterprise.

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Authentication & Authorization

Automation Hero provides multiple options for authenticating and managing end users including, LDAP, Active Directory (AD) OAuth2 and SAML. Administrators can configure Automation Hero’s security to use their existing LDAP, Active Directory system or OAuth2 framework and SAML as the system of record for centralized management.

This includes user identity and credentials. End users can authenticate into Automation Hero using familiar credentials, which are checked against LDAP/AD/OAuth2/SAML on every login and they are identified as a member of group(s) just like in LDAP/AD including rested groups and multiple domains Access to Automation Hero is denied if the remote system no longer sanctions the end user to simplify Automation Hero administration and allow users to use common credentials for Automation Hero access.

All authentication history is captured and stored in dedicated logs to facilitate security audits. Automation Hero provides role-based access with delegation, reserving certain actions for administrators only. Artifacts remain under the control of the author until shared at the group level. This applies to data stores, sources, uploaded files, data flows, and sinks. Automation Hero supports connectivity to LDAPS (often called LDAP over SSL). LDAP communications between applications are not encrypted by default.

Custom roles allow IT to control which users can perform specific tasks within the Automation Hero application. The viewing, creation and execution of flows (such as ingest and analytics) are governed by role membership, as are performance of administrative functions and the scope of artifact sharing. Automation Hero maintains a “private folder” of data in distributed file systems or network attached storage. Access to raw and imported data and analyses results can be restricted by a user.

Encryption Al data is encrypted during transport and storage (at rest). Encryption strength and algorithms are customizable. To secure traffic between the end-user’s browser and the Automation Hero application server, Automation Hero supports the use of HTTPS (HTTP over SSL). This requires a simple configuration change to Automation Hero and for end-users to use the correct URL. All end user credentials, data store passwords and keys (SSH, EC2, etc.) maintained by Automation Hero are masked in the UI and encrypted in the Automation Hero metadata store.

• Pluggable encryption algorithms and strength
• Encryption of data from source to data flow
• Encryption of data from data flow to sink
• Encryption of any temporary written data (e.g. when data needs to be cached for a reduce-side join)
• Encryption key rotation (on request)

Automation Hero Security

As some implementations need to be optimized for security and some for performance, Automation Hero allows granular configurations of individual security capabilities, including: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance Automation Hero is GDPR-complaint based on the below measures and is configurable based on the customer’s policy.

• Encryption of all communication between the node if configured
• Https access for the web-based admin console
• Integration into authentication providers such as OAuth, OAuth2, LDAP, SAML or Microsoft Active Directory
• Audit and access logs
• Any company using Automation Hero and their respective customers have the right to access, or the right to obtain confirmation as to what purpose Automation Hero is processing their data
• Any company using Automation Hero and their respective customers can easily update their own personal information to keep it accurate
• Any company using Automation Hero and their respective customers have the right to request Automation Hero erase their data, cease its dissemination and have third parties discontinue processing their data
• Automation Hero maintains confidentiality through data encryption
• Automation Hero automatically deletes unused data (configurable)
• Automation Hero excludes opt-out customer data points (configurable)
• Data use is based on purpose limitation and data minimization

Automation Hero makes an effort to provide various security dimensions for our customers, all of which are transparent and enterprise-ready.

Automation Hero’s robust security protocol ensures customers can combat security threats and protect personally identifiable information (PII). Our authentication, authorization and encryption capabilities secure the system while keeping it in full compliance. We will discuss each dimension separately in its respective section.

In naming Automation Hero a Leader In its 2023 Radar Report for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), GigaOm pointed to Automation Hero’s “considerable strengths in AI/ML/NLP and deep learning.”

GigaOm also states that “the Hero Platform_ provides greater accuracy than many IDP solutions and has differentiating capabilities in terms of handwriting recognition. It is a functionally rich, enterprise-grade IDP offering that should be considered by enterprises looking to drive AI-led transformation in document-centric workflows and processes.”

GigaOm defines IDP solutions as those that “enable the digitization of paper-based information assets and documents (such as PDFs, emails, invoices) containing unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data. IDP solutions offer artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning capabilities to improve data extraction accuracy and the degree of straight-through processing (STP).”

GigaOm’s Radar Report offers “a forward-looking assessment, plotting the current and projected position of each solution over a 12- to 18-month window.”

Insurance employees spend 10 – 15% of their time on repetitive computer tasks, which wastes several hours each week. Yet, these tasks don’t help them better serve their customers or earn the company revenue. The productivity problem is amplified as more insurance roles are left unfilled in the tight job market and work piles up on current employees.

Intelligent process automation (IPA) solutions are a beacon of hope for insurance companies, as it frees people from their backlog of work and helps companies see major productivity and profit.

Here’s what our insurance automation platform can do for your enterprise:

• Customer profile/data updates: Updating a customer’s address in a database or forwarding a service request to the proper department.
• Document generation: Pulling data from emails, spreadsheets, applications, etc. and auto-populating a closing form or claim document.
• Scheduling meetings: Scheduling a meeting in an employee’s calendar based on an email interaction.
• Claim processing: Porting information from a database to an application or vice versa to reduce the amount of “copy-and-paste” tasks a claims officer must perform.

Seasoned financial Executive Matthias Schmuecker joins leading intelligent automation startup

SAN FRANCISCO, BERLIN and LONDON, March 18, 2020 — Following Automation Hero’s impressive Round A, the intelligent automation company today announced Matthias Schmuecker is joining as the team’s first Head of Finance. Based in Automation Hero’s San Francisco headquarters, he will lead global financial strategy and operations.

Schmuecker joins Automation Hero from Mixpanel where he led the company’s finance and accounting department during a period of rapid international expansion, scaling the company from 250 to 400 employees during his tenure.

His hire comes at a pivotal time for the technology company, which has raised $19.5M to date as the team continues to unveil new products, expand into new regions and grow its range of customers globally.

“We couldn’t be more excited to bring Matthias on board. During this time of hypergrowth and increasing customer demand, his impressive reputation for execution and achieving results will help bring us to the next level,” said Stefan Groschupf, founder and CEO of Automation Hero.

“I can’t imagine a better time to join Automation Hero. I believe the automation space is ripe for disruption and given the smart and passionate people, powerful technology and strong product market fit, I am confident that we can develop and execute plans to drive a consistent upward trajectory,” Schmuecker said.

With more than 13 years in finance, Schmuecker brings with him extensive tech and growth experience. Prior to Mixpanel, he was the director of finance at HackerOne, a security platform that connects businesses with penetration testers and cybersecurity researchers. He also held financial roles with Keynote Systems (now Dynatrace) and UnityMedia. Schmuecker started his career as an auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers where he conducted and led multiple business process reviews and technology audits.

Industry-first point-and-click AI Studio democratizes AI for next-gen RPA 

SAN FRANCISCO, BERLIN and LONDON, Nov. 14, 2019 — Companies today routinely spend five to seven times the level of software spend for RPA products on services (Gartner). In further challenging traditional Robotic Process Automation (RPA), intelligent automation startup, Automation Hero, today announced new, groundbreaking capabilities of its AI Studio. This is the first self-service environment to provide a no-code graphical user interface for less technical users for faster and easier access to AI.

Traditional RPA technology is limited to basic screen automation – the time-intensive task of manually extracting information from one application, validating it and then pasting it in another application. While successful, this technology is brittle, unscalable and fails to tap into the potential of AI. To integrate AI, current RPA vendors rely on manual and time-intensive custom coding, which has tradeoffs, such as versioning, governance and deployment.

Automation Hero uniquely solves this problem by natively embedding the capabilities of AI into an end-to-end, highly scalable and web-based platform making intelligent automation work for the whole organization. This directly impacts the ability of organizations to take full advantage of adding intelligence to automation for more complex business processes. 

Bridging tech and business

Data scientists are expensive and often in short supply. As a result, there has been a rise of data-centric users demanding faster and easier access to leverage the possibilities of AI for business needs.

To satisfy these needs, AI Studio provides a visually rich environment to quickly get up and running with building, training and validating AI models using a point-and-click experience. Users do not require any coding knowledge to take advantage.

“RPA vendors are promising AI but failing to deliver it,” said Stefan Groschupf, founder and CEO of Automation Hero. “We’re on a journey to democratize AI and end-to-end automation. By simplifying the user experience of our full-featured intelligent automation platform we empower our customers to accelerate their automation projects and reduce their reliance on service providers.”

Benefits of native AI

By giving users direct control of AI and automation all under one hood, organizations have full control over enterprise concerns such as security, compliance, governance and version control. 

AI models are more relevant and valuable when trained on current and applicable data rather than pre-packaged data sets. And, an end-to-end platform allows users to easily train and deploy the latest and greatest version with a single click. 

AI Studio also offers a “bring your own” option that allows data scientists a fast and seamless way to upload their own models through an API or GUI. Data scientists are often disconnected from the systems that deliver business value and their platforms rely on brittle integration and lack transparency and governance. With AI Studio, these advanced models can now be natively integrated into more complex business processes for added intelligence. 

Real AI business use case examples

With Automation Hero’s latest release, businesses can automate more complex processes in shorter time, in cloud or on-premise and with more intelligence. 

Create, train, validate and deploy AI models that can: 

• recognize the intent of an incoming request regardless of the source (email, fax, mail, etc.) and route to the right person
• translate complex government forms into processable data (customized OCR)
• extract dark data from emails to automate customer quote requests
• classify documents for claims management into the appropriate category(ies)
• translate hand-written text into processable data for medication prescriptions

A new approach to process mining with actionable AI

SAN FRANCISCO, BERLIN and LONDON, April 22, 2020 — As business processes grow more complex, organizations are turning to process mining to audit and analyze current performance for process improvement opportunities.

But traditional process mining tools lack the ability to make those findings both actionable and intelligent. Today, intelligent automation startup Automation Hero is fundamentally changing how companies approach process mining by introducing Hero_Sonar.

Beyond discovering processes ripe for improvement, Hero_Sonar turns low-quality data into valuable insights and from there into AI decision models. The AI models can then be used to automate business processes in Automation Hero’s point-and-click Flow Studio. 

This is incredibly important in the current health climate as hospitals improvise quickly in the face of new challenges. Automation Hero can help hospitals see what is happening, find what is working and more importantly, turn those decisions into an AI model for automation. By combining a hospital’s historical data of what has been successful with anonymized individual patient data, patients can be treated appropriately, more quickly. This can include issuing prescriptions faster for non-COVID patients, treatment options for current patients and using symptom analysis to faster predict how to treat new patients.

Automation Hero is committed to making this technology accessible in the fight against COVID-19 and is offering its platform free of charge to the healthcare community. For more information, visit: .

“Businesses need to improve current processes, but they struggle with how to approach the problem,” said Andrew Brust, founder and CEO of Blue Badge Insights. “By bringing process mining together with AI, not to mention its core automation and data integration capabilities, Automation Hero closes the loop between these workloads. Along the way, it busts the software category silos in which each of these functionality areas has been held captive.”

More real-world examples:

• Service Desk: When handling escalations via email or call, intelligent process mining can help employees determine the next best step. By training an AI model to predict escalations from historical data, low escalations can be automatically handled and high escalations routed to the appropriate channels.
• Insurance:  When analyzing how insurers handle claims, intelligent process mining can show patterns in approvals and automate fairer outcomes.
• Sales: When analyzing the customer journey through process mining, an AI model can be trained to predict churn or cross-and-upsell opportunities.  

Deeper insight

Process mining is historically limited to visualizing processes from single data sources or requires long, expensive data prep processes. In most companies, data comes from multiple sources, is large and never clean.

Hero_Sonar leverages the power of the Automation Hero platform to harmonize data of any size or system, structured or unstructured, with easy point-and-click functions. Visualize data in detail-rich responsive dashboards.

Intelligent automation

Current process mining tools visualize historical data but fail to make that data actionable. At best, they provide a chart to help build automation bots in a completely different environment. 

With Hero_Sonar, turn process maps into AI models that can be used to automate processes or augment employee decision-making. Imagine training an AI model with the wisdom of company experts. 

Real-time business impact

Automation tools such as RPA run as a black box with no insight into how they work. Business-critical automations require better.

As part of an end-to-end platform, Hero_Sonar seamlessly integrates with Flow Studio to give clear visibility into what is happening on a business (e.g. average number of quotes sent) or technical (e.g. how many emails were processed) level.

Comprehensive reporting 

Combine process mapping with general-purpose dashboards for a more holistic business view.

“We continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI,” said Stefan Groschupf, founder and CEO of Automation Hero. “Best-of-breed products only solve a small part of the larger business automation effort. But when all of these tools come together in an end-to-end platform, it’s a powerful combination that gives our customers more value faster.”