Every enterprise wants to maximize revenues and minimize costs, but today’s competitive environment makes it difficult to simultaneously achieve both those goals.
To thrive and scale, you need to use available resources efficiently with smart, data-driven strategic decisions. Adoption of business process automation is one of them.
In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about business process automation, focusing on the terminology, key concepts, and automation best practices that help you keep processes running smoothly.
BPA or business process automation refers to the use of technology and software to automate and streamline repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks and processes within an organization.
The primary goal of BPA is to improve efficiency, reduce human error, enhance productivity, and ultimately cut costs. You can use automation to optimize any process, for example, customer support, budgeting, financial analysis, regular deals, compliance, or reporting.
The biggest advantage of BPA is that it enhances efficiency by reducing manual labor and human error, leading to significant cost savings.
Moreover, BPA ensures consistency, standardization, and faster processing, ultimately improving customer satisfaction. It supports data accuracy, enhances decision-making, and provides a competitive advantage.
BPA also helps with scalability, regulatory compliance, and employee satisfaction. Industries from manufacturing to healthcare to logistics and transportation use BPA to enhance reporting, reduce administrative burdens on their teams, reduce risks, and scale their operations.
With enterprise automation software, you can construct a system that mirrors every task in your workflow. Then, you identify specific guidelines or rules for the program to follow at each step in the process cycle.
Implementing an automation system can drive these important competitive and operational advantages for your business:
Automation of business processes lets your company deliver the fast, friction-free experience customers expect.
BPM software delivers the right data to the right person at the right time, driving quick, precise decisions and actions. You can monitor operations and identify potential issues at a glance to immediately address inefficiencies.
Productivity gains are the most common goal of automation initiatives. In one survey by Automation Anywhere, 78% of respondents said they engaged in BPA to improve in this area.
With this technology, your company can remain as competitive as possible by boosting production and eliminating waste. For example, Chief Healthcare Executive reported the healthcare industry could collectively save $25 billion every year through BPA.
BPA guarantees the smooth flow of information among your teams, enhancing clarity and transparency.
Employees gain a stronger understanding of their own contributions and how they interface with the responsibilities of others and the larger organizational goals. For example, automatic project updates can reduce friction between team members without adding extra tasks to anyone’s plate.
Talent is one of your business’s most valuable assets. Releasing professional personnel from tedious admin responsibilities improves their morale and allows them to focus on their core competencies.
This in turn creates space for innovation and fuels progress toward key business objectives. The journal Open Access Government reports that the average company could save 25,000 hours of employee time annually by automating tedious repetitive tasks.
Remarkable consumer care is the norm across industries, not a competitive differentiator. Your audience is always online and they expect immediate responses when they ask questions or request information.
Business operations automation brings your customers closer to the process so they can access the information they need when they need it.
If it’s easy to work with your company, they’re more likely to become repeat clients.
Computerized information flows save time and reduce potential mistakes. Automation software ensures that everyone follows the proper procedure and requires approval for team members to break protocol.
Your entire team can access the same documents and tasks around the clock whether they’re at the office, out in the field, or in a home-based workspace. Having standard operating procedures in place also makes it easy to scale your business and enter new service lines.
The most common types of BPA include:
Many companies incorporate more than one type of BPA as they engage in digital transformation.
These are just a few of the possible ways you can incorporate BPA into your business model.
Record management is ripe for renovation with BPA.
You can use this software to organize all your business documents in a core database, coordinate collaboration across departments, and maintain the data you need for government regulation and legal compliance.
If you run a medium-sized or enterprise business, you may want to consider BPA for record management in the HR and operations departments as well.
Many companies rely on BPA during the renovation and inspection process. Automated tools can diagnose problems early when they’re less expensive to fix and manage the routine maintenance workflow.
Consider adopting BPA for renovation and inspection if your project and site managers in construction and administrative roles need a better way to track costs and materials, schedule equipment, assure quality control, and deliver training programs and safety information.
With a BPA-based audit system, you can provide comprehensive documents with detailed change annotations to auditors at a moment’s notice.
Specific team permissions allow you to control access and ensure security, reducing the risk of financial loss associated with an audit.
McKinsey & Co estimates that companies can potentially automate 60% to 70% of business tasks across all industries and internal departments, particularly with the widespread adoption of generative AI.
But successful BPA requires strategic selection of the appropriate tasks and workflows.
To choose those, start by auditing your operational processes. Automation software works especially well for workflows that:
Look for recurring and repetitive tasks that translate well into the step-based flow.
Establishing clear goals for automation can also inform this process. Determine what you want to achieve, whether it’s reducing processing time, minimizing errors, improving customer satisfaction, or saving costs.
Once you’ve identified the process you want to automate, analyze the entire workflow, looking for bottlenecks, redundant steps, and error-prone areas.
According to CMSWIRE, the global BPA market will be worth more than $51 billion by 2032 — so if you aren’t adopting these solutions now, you’ll fall behind your competitors quickly.
While automating business processes provides countless benefits, it also takes time and money to get started. You can reduce the learning curve and shorten the time to BPA adoption by partnering with Fluix.
Fluix is a workflow automation platform that enables organizations to streamline their operations by digitizing and automating paper-based and manual processes. Using Fluix, you can create, distribute, and track digital forms and documents, reducing the need for manual data entry and paperwork.
Fluix also facilitates workflow management, allowing teams to collaborate on tasks and projects in real-time. Its integration with various business systems and cloud storage services ensures data exchange and accessibility, helping you make more informed decisions.