Outsmarting Murphy’s Law: How today’s Dynamic Case Management Solutions Rely on Smart Process Applications to Handle Exceptions Along with the Rules

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” – Woody Allen

While the promise of rules-driven systems that rely on computer intelligence to manage data, documents and decisions every step of the way has been with us for more than two decades, early forays into business process automation hit a wall when it came to handling exceptions to the rules. This has been particularly true for systems that attempt to automate case management, where well- defined rule sets to handle things like managing payments, bidding on contracts, processing loan applications or organizing and managing legal matters, often ran afoul of a corollary to Murphy’s Law; for every rule, there is an exception.

Managing Cases and Herding Cats

According to a 2014 AIIM Survey on Case Management and Smart Process Applications, a majority of respondents said that half or more of their business processes were not straightforward or predictable. Sixty two percent of those surveyed said that most of those processes involved assembling a case folder, claim file, project folder, proposal, etc.

The solution to the problem of business processes that won’t conform to a standard rule set has been a new generation of self-learning systems that use computer intelligence to identify and adapt to exceptions. These so-called Smart Process Applications are able to apply context to the content associated with a business process to determine how to select, modify or re-direct the next steps in an automated workflow and, when needed, to learn how to handle exceptions based on input/feedback from a human operator as part of the process.

NFlexibility and Adaptability are Key

Survey respondents identified the following requirements as critical to success:

1. Compliant but adaptive workflow, allowing flexibility in processing but ensuring end-to-end visibility and enforcement of necessary policy and regulation for a given process
2. Integration with multiple repositories, records archives and line of business systems
3. Monitoring, reporting and analytics that provide a single view of a case, including recommended actions a process stakeholder can take to advance the course of the case toward conclusion/ resolution.
4. Multi-channel customer engagement, so that information can be captured from documents and web forms and outbound communication to stakeholders of case-related information

To learn more about how Smart Process Technology can help your organization to intelligently automate business process in a way that adapts to exceptions and changing business conditions, contact Artsyl Technologies and request a demonstration of the docAlpha Smart Process Platform.

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