What is business process automation?
Business process automation (BPA) involves the use of technology to execute established business processes with minimum human intervention. To understand a business process, it is defined as a singular activity or a collection of activities, which are used to achieve a specific goal in a company or organization.
Activities in this context are wide-ranging across the company and can include such things as producing a product, onboarding employees, and dispatching mailshots to customers.
Each business process generally includes four components:
- Repeatable
The process can be executed any number of times without the inputs or outputs changing.
- Finite
The process has a clear number of defined steps. The process has a clear beginning and end.
- Flexible
Business processes need to be adaptable. Any marketplace is uncertain, and businesses need to be able to constantly adapt. Business processes need to adapt to these changes as they occur.
- Value-driven
Each of the business process steps should contain intention or imply added value.
BPA is an umbrella term for several technological tools, which can be deployed for a number of different specific tasks. These include automation tools, such as robotic process automation (RPA), cloud platforms to support the automation software, as well as ERP software and other tools that ensure compliance with industry best practices.
A business process typically spans multiple business departments and often begins with an action. For example, most businesses need a dedicated account on social media platforms to create a presence, as well as inform and grow a loyal base of customers. Regular posts are vital to maintain interest and encourage customer awareness.
Employing social media management automated software companies can more easily schedule posts and generate useful data about followers.
Business Process Automation Benefits
Improved operational efficiency
High on the list of any company’s aspirations is improving efficiency. The concomitant cost savings and improved productivity are a no-brainer. Fortunately, a natural by-product of implementing business process automation is that the company’s internal processes become streamlined and consequently more efficient.
With automated workflows, the end results are much more predictable and transparent, resulting in improved efficiency and productivity, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of reduced costs.
Increases productivity
BPA substantially reduces the requirement for completing manual tasks. This means the saved time and resources can be devoted to tasks that require more human input.
Staff enjoy their new role of more meaningful and creative work, where they can concentrate on innovating other aspects of their department, to enable the company to run more smoothly and thereby substantially improve productivity.
In addition, staff will themselves be more productive, as they have been given more responsibility in how the departmental tasks are undertaken. With the subservience of menial tasks eradicated, staff can feel proud of their positions in the organization.
Increases profits
The costs associated with inefficient processes in a company can run at up to 30% of income a year. With manually handled tasks and processes, the inherent human error, slowness, and poor data combine to create considerable wastage of resources.
Business process workflow automation makes the most efficient and cost-effective use of your key resources, automatically reducing costs in the process. This cost reduction is vital in improving the bottom line.
Make better projections
BPA ensures that each task or process is conducted in the same way and it’s this consistency that promotes high-quality, replicable output. It is much easier to rely on such consistent output to make better and more reliable projections.
This all-round improvement in quality empowers the creation of feature-rich products, which are of a much higher quality and with no or little increase in manufacturing time and costs.
Improves visibility and transparency
With the clear-cut coding of BPA, tasks, and processes associated with compliance and regulatory requirements take on a new-found visibility and transparency. With human error eradicated tracking and managing output becomes easier, faster, and more reliable.
The advantages of BPA with compliance and regulation rapidly became apparent in most industries but most appropriately in the financial sector, with its heavy compliance responsibility.
Improves customer service
Automated customer service tools, such as chatbots, can now reliably handle the bulk of straightforward customer service inquiries. More complex calls are directed to call center staff for more personal attention. As they are less burdened by routine calls, they can offer a more professional level of customer service.
Customer service automated processes are dealt with more quickly and with less error. So, customers experience a more responsive service, which they have more confidence in as it is almost entirely error-free.
Improves staff morale
It is difficult for any employee to feel any genuine sense of job satisfaction when asked to enter data volumes online from manual documents. The work is demeaning and repetitive, which as a consequence results in frequent errors, further undermining the employee’s confidence.
Business automation helps to break this vicious cycle, where employees have more free time with which they can put the most value into action. Natural human interaction with customers and colleagues, working on problem-solving and judgment calls will reap benefits far beyond any quantity of data input. Staff feel their work is more meaningful and valuable and their own personal input reflects that.
Document management
The aspiration of a paperless workplace has been a goal for several decades. Although huge strides have been made toward the elimination of paper, most companies now understand the optimum compromise lies in a combination of documents and data.
Document automation is the design of logic-based systems and workflows that capture data and sort it automatically as it comes into the business, creating electronic documents.
Time-saving is one of the main benefits of document automation, where efficient organization staff can much more easily find emails, office documents, and files. The cost savings simply on paper resources are also a significant driver to switch to document documentation.
Daniel Cooper
