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Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) has reportedly inked a partnership agreement with RWD Technologies to help customers implement its upcoming business process automation solution, Interaction Process Automation (IPA), scheduled for release in North America in 4Q this year.

 

Under the terms of the agreement, RWD, which has more than 20 years of experience in implementing human and operational performance improvement solutions, will offer IPA customers pre-implementation consulting services to help them maximize return on investment. This will include, but is not limited to, process discovery and performance-based analysis; return on investment projections; methodologies for identifying process flaws; project management; and change management.

RWD, which employs more than 900 people worldwide, assists clients and partners in enhancing organizational productivity through its broad range of integrated products and services including human capital management and IT consulting services, business transformation and lean process improvement, end-user training, change management, knowledge management and operator effectiveness management. Its serves a broad range of industries including manufacturing, energy, automotive, aerospace, healthcare, life sciences, consumer products, financial, telecommunications, services, higher education and the public sector.

 

“Supplementing our own professional services group, RWD will give IPA customers invaluable assistance by providing worldwide consulting to help identify what processes they should target for automation, mapping those processes to workflow tasks, and performing a cost-benefit analysis to measure their return on investment,” said Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown, in a press release.

Interactive Intelligence announced its new Interaction Process Automation (IPA) solution in June. The new offering -- a module that plugs into Interactive Intelligence's CIC platform -- facilitates what is being called “communications-based process automation” (CBPA). Basically it enables organizations to use the multimedia routing and presence capabilities of the CIC platform as a framework for carrying out routine business processes. The new offering will include support for documents in a wide range of formats -- in addition to the multimedia contacts (phone, email, IM, conferencing, etc.) the platform supports currently.

 

Facilitating the document management piece is the software Interactive Intelligence acquired when it bought Columbia, SC-based software company AcroSoft in May. According to company officials, AcroSoft's document management software, which was created for the insurance industry, will be integrated into the IPA product, and this is what will enable document sharing.

The new solution will give Interactive Intelligence customers “everything they need to capture, prioritize, route, escalate and track each step of a business process,” only for a lot less compared to stand-alone or “best-of-breed” solutions, since the underlying architecture will have (presumably) already been deployed. As such, IPA is being developed as an affordable alternative to the more complex, and more expensive, stand-alone solutions that are already on the market. Most of these solutions require extensive up front investment, including considerable integration work, as well as the high cost of ongoing maintenance.

“We’ve worked with many technology products and IPA is really unique in that it offers a straight-forward, cost-effective, yet comprehensive alternative to existing business process automation systems,” said RWD vice president, Brian Lapthorn. “We look forward to working with Interactive Intelligence customers to ensure the proper groundwork is laid to maximize the success of their IPA deployments.”