Business process automation - Top use cases and benefits

Employees waste a lot of time doing repetitive tasks like routing documents to approvals and entering data into spreadsheets. Even though a process should take only a few days, it can end up taking weeks. It's time for your business to automate if you are still doing things manually.

Use technology for the automation of processes within your company.

This article will explain business process automation and how it can improve operational efficiency. We will also examine ten real-world applications of BPA.

What is Business Process Automation?

BPA (Business Process Automation) is a method of automating business processes and other business functions to increase efficiency and smooth operation. Business process automation focuses on automating repetitive tasks that would otherwise need manual intervention, such as employee onboarding and file transfers, generating reports and distributing them, approval processes, and so forth.

When businesses started to automate repetitive tasks and computerize their processes in the 1980s and 1990s, BPM was born. This trend toward standardizing and optimizing business processes led to the rise of business process management (BPM) in the 1990s. BPM refers to the process of standardizing, optimizing, and evaluating business processes to achieve company-wide goals. These processes have multiplied over the past 20 years, creating high-volume, complex environments that are difficult to manage without automation.

What business process automation is not?

Robotic process automation is a type of automation often compared with BPA. Both emphasize process improvement by removing humans from repetitive tasks. RPA automates predefined rules-based tasks through user interfaces (UIs), while BPA integrates programmatically, which can provide more resilient, dynamic automation, particularly for complex, end-to-end processes.

What is the importance of business process automation?

Digital systems are increasingly used by businesses to access real-time data and manage data. However, as IT becomes more complex and workloads increase, manual management of mission-critical processes is no longer an option if businesses wish to stay competitive.

BPA allows organizations to move their focus away from manual, repetitive tasks and instead create better, more orchestrated workflows that add value to the business. This is achieved by creating adaptive business processes that can be used across multiple environments and provide real-time visibility for enterprise-wide control and visibility.

BPA software is a tool that helps businesses improve their efficiency by managing data and dependencies across many tools and technologies. This software often does not require scripting. IT can respond quickly to changing business needs and provide updates or services without interruptions. This results in customer satisfaction. Finance and healthcare, for example, rely on real-time data to make decisions and give customers transparency. BPA facilitates this by facilitating end-to-end processes that link IT and data warehouses with critical business processes.

BPA solutions are easily compatible with different technologies and tools, allowing IT the ability to control and monitor end-to-end business processes. BPA solutions allow for organization-wide transparency and provide auditing and monitoring of all processes and systems. BPA also provides transparency and assurance to key stakeholders by allowing them to track and monitor critical processes with detailed audit trails, real-time information, and automated remediation workflows.

Common Benefits of Business Process Automation

Onboarding: Employee onboarding involves tedious administrative tasks. This can leave room for errors and compliance risks. This adds additional workload to the human resource team as well as IT staff. By automating the business process, employees are onboarded faster by avoiding the need to make manual adjustments. This saves time and money. Organizations can automate, for example, the promotion of user accounts using directory services like Active Directory. This includes adding users to the appropriate groups, changing security settings, and updating information in a database, such as SQL Server.

Document Management: Moving documents from one folder to another can be tedious and error-prone. Most organizations automate file transfers with batch scripts and file transfer management tools to streamline the process. This makes it more difficult to manage MFT operations and MFT software in a larger automation environment. This is because business process automation software consolidates MFT operations into one solution. BPA supports file sharing and secure data movement between end-to-end workflows. It also supports secure file transfer protocols (including SFTP span)

Data Integration: BPA allows end-to-end workflows among automation software and ERP programs such as Informatica PeopleSoft, Oracle PeopleSoft, and SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. This is possible without spending a lot of time, money, and resources manually scripting integrations between infrastructure and applications. The seamless integration of applications, databases, as well as compute resources reduces slack time so that key data and insights are easily accessible.

Back-Office Functions: Support from IT staff, help desk teams, and administration is often required for back-office functions. BPA facilitates the integration of common back-office applications with cloud-based infrastructures. This allows business users and helps desk staff to access real-time data to support their day-to-day operations, such as invoicing and purchase orders, expense reports, and approval processes.

How BPA fits into an Overall Automation Strategy

Let's face facts, businesses are becoming more digital transformation and dealing with higher volumes of data than ever. They must be able to adapt quickly to new demands and do so cost-effectively to sustain their success. As is the case with most organizations, IT departments are expected to rise to the occasion. What is the impact? IT departments operate in complex environments with a variety of heterogeneous platforms, applications, and databases. IT departments need not be afraid. It is possible to fight complexity with a holistic and unified approach toward automation.

Gartner concurs, noting that "intelligent BPM Suites (iBPMS), have a solid foundation for orchestrating and automating tasks within these processes." iBPMS consolidates integrated services, decision management, and process orchestration into a single platform.

Combining IT and business processes in a single platform allows IT to move beyond siloed automation programs and limited-capability schedulers. This allows IT to develop an orchestrated automation strategy for the business that facilitates end-to-end processes throughout the enterprise. This will provide greater insight, visibility, and innovation.

Five common uses that organizations automate with BPA--plus two closer looks at how they do it

Quick customer questions answered: Customer service reps can clear their support queue by handing softball queries like order tracking and password resets over to chatbots.

Invoice processing: Globally 70% of all invoice processing remains paper-based. This revenue center is easy to error and businesses spend 4x longer paying paper invoices. The software can validate and extract invoice information using automation tools such as robotic process automation (RPA). The average full-time employee can process 6 000 paper invoices annually, but they can now check 90,000 digital invoices each year with automation.

Sales contracting: Admin tasks flood the final stages of closing a sale deal. Sales reps often need to copy and paste data from different systems to fill out the contract and set things up with accounting. Automating tools allow you to quickly pull data from multiple sources, fill out forms and profile CRM fields quickly.

Hiring top talent: When you find the perfect candidate, it is important to act quickly. 57% of hiring managers lost potential hires to other opportunities because their internal processes took too long to approve offers. Organizations are more likely to hire the best candidates if they automate interview scheduling, background checks, and applicant tracking.

Verifying information against other resources: Industries like banking need to verify identities against anti-money laundering databases. An automated process can verify identity for you, instead of a bank executive manually logging in and typing in the applicant's name.

Automation can be a powerful tool for any department in your company. Let's look at how automation is helping two departments that are often burdened with paperwork, HR and sales.

Chatbots are being used by sales teams

Recent research revealed that sales reps spend a significant amount of their time dealing with administrative tasks. They spend two-thirds of their day doing administrative tasks, such as updating spreadsheets or gathering sales intelligence.

McKinsey discovered that sales teams can save time by automating up to one-third of their tasks. This includes repetitive tasks like pricing and contacting. McKinsey estimates that companies can increase sales by up to 10% by using automation.

Some sales jobs can't be automated completely. Many still need the Je says quoins human touch to close the deal. Top sales teams are now turning to chatbots and other automation tools to move potential customers through the buying funnel.

Chatbots can automatically reach out to large numbers of potential customers in a way that is more efficient than any salesperson. Chatbots can contact prospects once they reach a certain point on the funnel. They use a pre-determined script and send them text messages or emails. The bot uses natural language processing (NLP), tools to understand the context and intent of customer replies to determine the next course. McKinsey estimates an automation strategy such as this can free up 10-15% of the day so that sales teams can focus their efforts on higher-priority prospects or projects.

Check out how HR professionals automate time-off requests

An international team of time management specialists from the United States and Britain found that employees spend up to 40,000,000 hours each month dealing with complex HR systems. This amounts to almost 20,000 employees who spend 8 hours a day on administrative tasks such as expense reports and time-off requests. Even small businesses don't have it all. According to 45% of small-business owners, they spend around one day per week looking through HR issues.

It can be difficult to keep a record of vacation days for employees, especially when there are many people on the team. HR managers must deal with time-off requests.

• Examining the time-off balance of an employee
• Approval by one or more managers
• Once they have been approved, they will need to subtract the time from their leave balance
• Keep track of all leave taken for payroll

This process is complex and requires a lot of documentation exchanges, record-keeping, and follow-ups. To streamline the time-off process, HR departments are turning to automation. Automation tools allow them to send and track approval requests. Managers can approve or deny the request within the email body. Software systems can track earned and used time, and even send the information to accounting teams.

Automation can also be used to speed up the paper-intensive process. To view their vacation time, employees can log into a company dashboard before they contact HR.

Gartner predicts that 50% will have automation in their HR departments by 2022. This allows human resource staff to concentrate on more valuable projects.

"Busywork" is more than just a drain on morale. According to a key study from the UK, departments that are overwhelmed with repetitive and never-ending administrative tasks can drain your bottom line. This could lead to losses of nearly $534 million per year. Business process automation in these areas can reduce processing costs, decrease human error, and increase productivity within your organization.