What is Business Process Automation? All You Need to Know About BPA

While once all you had to do to start a successful business was to establish product production or service provisions, nowadays production efficiency, employee productivity, and short task completion time are becoming increasingly important.

Business process automation (BPA) is one of the main ways to optimize and accelerate your company’s internal processes, increase productivity, and reduce costs. This method is relevant for a system of any level — from a separate small department in a company to a large business enterprise.

This article will explain to you what BPA is, what business processes you can automate, what benefits you may gain for your business through BPA implementation, and how you can define your capabilities for automation.

What is Business Process Automation and How it Works

There is no precise and generally accepted definition for this term, but if we try to put it simply, we can come up with the following wording:

Business process automation is the transit of typical tasks, repetitive operations, and routine work from manual execution to the control of dedicated software.

Consequently, that is the question of software implemented to help businesses perform routine tasks faster, more productively, and efficiently.

Please check an example of how it works in the illustration below:

Any ERP system can be an example of a tool for business process comprehensive automation for the entire company. Using it, you can set up analytics, manage any of your company’s departments, and run the company as a whole. Read more about ERP systems and their benefits for your business in our article: “What is an ERP and How it Benefits the Business?”

Automation helps businesses transform monotonous manual tasks into more technological and advanced work.

What Processes can be Automated? BPA Examples

You can hardly automate all possible things. Some of them are too complex to describe clearly or evaluate precisely. Some involve live communications or depend solely on people’s decisions, etc. However, a significant part of operational, management, and support processes are subject to complete automation.

Here are some real examples of business process automation you can use as ideas:

• receiving and processing data from completed forms
• chatbot answers frequently asked customer questions
• new company employees’ onboarding
• weekends, vacations, and days off calculation
• wages calculation and payment
• stock balances in warehouses
• employee shifts planning
• various reports generation
• marketing data acquisition, etc.

Actually, we can provide even more examples, and they may vary depending on the niche the company operates in. To select business processes to automate, first, you have to pay attention to the ones that meet the following criteria:

• Repetitive manually-performed tasks
• Inefficient or clearly outdated tasks
• Duplicated processes in different tasks
• Routine processes that require few intellectual actions but take much time
• Complex processes requiring various people’s involvement
• Tasks requiring excessive communication
• Processes that comprise data transfer to other processes or systems.

You can experiment and automate just specific actions or processes, but BPA provides its best effect when scaled for an entire department or enterprise.

Business Process Automation Benefits for a Business

If you are willing to be competitive, improve your systems internally and externally. Simply put, business automation is one step towards higher-quality, systematic, and flexible company operation.

Implemented dedicated software intended for the company’s crucial processes automatic execution ensures several advantages:

• Accelerated  data processing and exchanging it among employees and departments
• A possibility for the management to control large volumes of data and make quick decisions
• Reduced conflicts and increased customer loyalty
• No need to expand staff for routine tasks
• Minimum human factor errors
• Streamlined and sped up business-critical processes
• Saved time, money, and other resources
• Increased overall business stability.

By automating business processes, Carlsberg Danmark was able to reduce order processing time by more than 90 percent while virtually eliminating errors.

Conclusion

Routine tasks will hardly vanish, but business process automation can help you transfer their execution to dedicated software. Your employees will have the opportunity to redirect their time to some crucial and creative work.

We are ready to become your reliable technology partner and assist you in implementing automation to meet your business needs. Contact us, and let us discuss the details!