Business process automation (BPA) is the use of technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks. It accelerates how work gets done by routing information to the right person at the right time through user-defined rules and actions. BPA helps organizations streamline processes such as employee onboarding, accounts payable, contract management and more.
Key elements to identify a process for automation:
The process requires consistency across the organization
The process is repeatable
The process needs to be free from error, every time
It isn’t just about replacing paper with PDFs—business process automation aims to make processes more cost-efficient, streamlined, error-proof and transparent. With automated processes in place, organizations save time and ensure best practices are implemented to improve overall operational efficiency.
Every business wants to get the most out of its resources. Apart from making more profit, companies constantly strive towards reducing overall operational costs.
Technology has helped us in solving some of the most difficult problems where human power is just not enough, and for every big problem that is solved using technology, a number of other small problems are also solved.
Surviving in today’s competitive world requires businesses to efficiently utilize available resources and take appropriate strategic decisions. In order to prevent wastage of resources, many organizations are turning towards process automation solutions.
Business process automation has emerged as a way to carry out a number of tasks without the need for any manual input. IT departments in companies extensively use automation to efficiently provision technology resources, cut operational costs and optimize overall utilization. In business process automation, you automate processes and workflows.
Fundamental principles of business process automation
Every organization has its own way of implementing business process automation but there are some fundamental principles that each of them follows.
Understand, Simplify and Automate (USA)
Before introducing automation, it is essential for you to first completely understand the existing system and analyze it. Once that is done, you must try to simplify it to the greatest extent possible and only after that you must introduce automation and that too only if it is really required.
Integration with existing processes
All the processes running in business are different from one another. So, the process that is automated should seamlessly integrate with the existing processes. The integration can happen at various levels of the automation process but it is essential for all the automation processes to work smoothly with the environment.
Consistency
The automated processes should be consistent with other processes and their corresponding inputs and outputs.
Step by step approach
It is not necessary to perform the automation of all the necessary tasks at once. Depending on funds, resources and overall logic of the business processes, you can divide the job into several stages.
Process flexibility
Over a period of time, business processes tend to change. The automation solutions should be flexible enough to incorporate and reflect these changes.
Simplicity
The aim of automation is to make the business processes simpler and not more complicated. If after automation, the process requires a lot of human intervention, you must understand that something is wrong.
Training the staff
For efficient functioning of business processes, it is important for the staff to have a complete understanding of the workflow. The better they know a process, the better it will function.
Automation is not just replacing papers with digital documents. It is about making processes efficient, simple, error-free, streamlined and transparent.