How to make your journey to advanced automation as fast and easy as can be, yet without losing sight of your business objectives or making costly mistakes.
If you’re the sort of person that’s responsible for business systems or processes at your organisation, then this article is for you. You might also be interested if you’re about to make a decision over how best to approach process automation. Why? Because you’re about to discover why CORTEX is simply better, by design, than other systems when it comes to implementing automation.
Because CORTEX doesn’t just help you hit the ground running – it insists on it. You can start your automation at any part of any process, and then spread out from there, in any way you like, until everything is automated. And yet you can also choose to not automate certain parts if you want to keep a human in the loop.
Just do it!
There’s a whole host of intuitive tools that make CORTEX software easy to use and collaborative and also prevent human error. These are targeted at all levels of technical ability. So business users can create automation flows that achieves their process objectives, while your technical users can sense check and enhance what their colleagues have done. To prevent mistakes, nothing actually gets deployed until your in-house CORTEX specialists have approved it.
That’s all possible thanks to CORTEX’s meticulous role-based access controls. These give the right people permission to access only what they are responsible for. So the team that’s in charge of maintaining your ERP platform, for example, will be able to access the CORTEX flows that handle ERP automation. Indeed, the people that handle the finance part of your ERP, specifically, or even just the billing part, can likewise be kept within those areas of CORTEX, alone. And your in-house CORTEX specialists can easily control who gets access to what.
Intuitive user interface for business users
If you understand business processes, and have some basic IT skills, you can use CORTEX. Indeed, we find that some of the best users are the people that are already responsible for specific departmental systems. They know the technology, understand the business process and so can make sure it works for their teams.
CORTEX features a highly intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop user interface with standard process-mapping symbols. Business users can therefore map their processes – just as they might do with other software, like Visio, for example – but, when they do it in CORTEX, it creates automation flows.
Giving your business users a strong hand in specifying your automation will help ensure that your automation projects stay on track – and don’t suffer from all-too-common technical project creep.
Collaborative automation repository
The automation flows that are created then get stored in the CORTEX repository, where other relevant people can access them. So, after a business user has created an automation flow, their colleagues can take a look at it and see if they think it’s right. More technical users can also access it, and enhance or test it.
Automation modules can be duplicated, edited, deleted. All actions are logged, so there’s full traceability of who made what changes and when. And similar modules can be compared very easily, with a graphical difference viewer, for easy and complete version control.
Ultimately, when everyone involved has approved an automation, your in-house CORTEX specialists can sign it off as a Solution Package, and – only then – it can go live.
Powerful developer tools
On its journey to being approved as a Solution Package, your automation flow might be shaped by a wide array of advanced technical tools in the CORTEX interactive development environment.
For instance, when working on a flow that’s been stored in the repository, every user gets their own private sandbox. That means you can build, test and validate any automation you’re working on in an environment where it simply doesn’t matter if you make a mistake.
Simulation of many common systems
Indeed, CORTEX includes simulation capabilities for many of the systems you’re likely to be automating. That means that you can run advanced tests and see how your automation modules will actually interact with the systems they’re designed for.
Debugging capabilities
There’s also an integrated debugger, so you can run your process flows in test mode, and see where they’re working and spot errors. That enables trial-and-error experimentation, which is hugely powerful for building user confidence and also for putting process innovation into the hands of business users.
Intelligent process authentication
Moreover, CORTEX can automatically identify dependencies between flows that you’ve built, and is also able to warn you when your process flows are not quite right. The software can validate the logic that you build, identify possible oversights, and so help you work as efficiently as possible.
Full information held with each automation flow
Throughout all development activities on automation modules – and whether they’ve been signed off as Solution Packages yet – every action can be logged, so it’s easy to see the modules’ exact properties. That makes them easy to identify and use, and also to duplicate, edit and re-apply in other ways.
And much more…
Thanks to these features, and many more, CORTEX ensures that you get the automation snowball rolling, and so can add to and adjust it over time. That means successful automation building on successful automation, leading to effective deployment as quickly as possible.
Please get in touch to find out more about the technical benefits of choosing CORTEX over other automation software.
