A complete guide to Business Process Automation
The market of Business Process Automation (BPA) is skyrocketing at a rate of 10% year after year. And frankly, this is not even a surprise with this being the top most priority of most organizations and the C-suite thrusting to automate business processes in order to gain efficiencies and productivity.
Organizations, with the growing competitive economy, have realized that business processes are the lifeblood for them to sustain in this modern-business world and hence the 2019 survey depicted that 90% of the 502 active executives agreed that their companies employ automation technologies, such as business process automation and robotic process automation, on a moderate or extensive level.
The survey also broke the corporate stereotype that made people believe the BPA software/tools or similar tools aren’t just for the large enterprises. The huge costs of manual processes, human errors, inefficient business process systems can only be cut across by BPA.
Now, the question that overshadows your mind would be; how does Business process automation address all these issues?
Digitizing ad standardizing business processes with software/tools, companies can automate repetitive tasks which have the potential to reduce operating costs up to 80%.
It does not only save direct money but also helps you bail out your employees from menial, manual tasks which save a lot of your indirect operational cost.
Understanding Business Process Automation
Business process automation is the use of technology to automate business processes and get them completed with minimum human efforts and inclusion.
Understand it simply as creating an automated response to an email, a follow-up email or it could include automating more complex processes such as multi-level approval workflows. Most probably, the organizations have been witnessed automating the most frequently repeated, recurring tasks to enhance the speed, accuracy, and consistency eventually improving overall operational efficiency.
A Quick Fact: Studies depict a third of the tasks in 60% of jobs could be automated.
While applying automation is feasible for pretty much any process in the company, prime areas that organizations consider applying automation to is:
- Sales
- Procurement
- Education and Training
- Product Development
- Inventory Tracking, etc.
Benefits
Business process automation drives efficiencies and standardization that magnetize many benefits including productivity, reduced costs, finer customer service, and higher revenues.
Bailing humans out of the repetitive tasks that can be easily handled by machines saves time and reduce error rates.
For example, consider the manual invoicing procedures. 90% of invoicing is still done manually, out of which 12.5% of invoices need reworking and only 17.5% are paid on time.
Hiring HR for yearly manual administration cost can rack up to over $1,800 for a year where sick leave, training, and review processes are not even factored in.
BPA solutions can be a ready-to-use remedy for these pitfalls.
You can also gain transparency into your workflows by centralizing the business processes through automation. The BPA software enables firms to see all the processes on one dashboard, offering them the visibility to check the status of process activities, check process reviews, and it can also help you stick to the compliance regulations.
Business process automation is a valued effort if companies want to become digital businesses. Only this can help you transform your business into a successful Digital Transformation, which kicks off the transformation process by converting information into computer-readable formats that can finally become the part of enterprise-wide automation.
BPA Vs. BPM: BPA, a Subset of BPM
BPA can be a stand-alone initiative or part of a broader, more comprehensive business process management (BPM) strategy.
While organizations being confused between the terms BPA and BPM is justified, organizations are witnessed using the terms interchangeably because both aim to help businesses better realize their organizational goals by improving business processes.
But just by reading the names you can understand that their purviews are different. BPA focuses on how automation can untangle and streamline a business process, BPM, which may or may not include automation, employs a variety of methods to analyze, change and optimize business processes.
In BPM, business processes are handled altogether to not only lower down the error rates and improve workflow efficiency but also, for instance, to clarify job roles and responsibilities and increase the organization’s capacity to adapt to changing business economy and corresponding goals. BPM is itself a subset of infrastructure management, which maintains and optimizes the core operational components of an organization, such as processes, equipment, and data.
BPA Implementation
With a number of ways being presented to the organizations for implementing BPA technology, we’ll be listing down the top solutions to employ BPA for your business processes.
Custom Solution: This is the solution tailored perfectly for the organizations with complex legacy systems that are not capable enough of interfacing with other systems through APIs.
Robot process automation (RPA) can be a help to such companies, but as a short-term solution. RPA can help increase the shelf-life of legacy systems, custom-built solutions will fit better to your expectations. The downside of the custom solution is that it comes with an expensive built and maintenance.
The second method is evidently cheaper but a little more ramshackle. Scripting and point-to-point integrations permit you to automate pieces of your business processes.
For example, using Zapier to generate a Salesforce record from a spreadsheet, reducing data entry. This works only if you require automation in a few places.
The downside is that your workflows can quickly become a disorganized mess of integrations that are difficult to understand and maintain. This specifically gets true if the responsible person leaves and you don’t have an alternative to handover processes.
Wrapping Up
Business Process Automation can be employed for your business model in multiple ways throughout your business.
From sales to inventory management, to staff onboarding and more, you will realize that automated systems can potentially cut out manual processing in favor of slick, error-free, quick operations.
If you, as an organization, are looking to cut back the costs of menial manual processing and streamline your business processes, you can turn to a comprehensive solution that suits your pocket and is easy to use.