Business Process Automation (BPA)

Every enterprise wants to maximize revenues and minimize costs. In a modern environment, it is hard to achieve these goals at the same time. Surviving in today’s competitive environment means to efficiently use available resources and make appropriate strategic decisions. To prevent wastage of resources, many organizations are turning towards business process automation.

What is Business Process Automation?

Business process automation (BPA) is a technique where businesses use technology to replace their people and frameworks with software. Forrester predicts that computerization can reduce operation costs by 90% with BPA. Automation permits us to keep and control various tasks, including customer support, budgeting, financial analysis, regular deals, compliance, and reporting. 

Automation can address a number of activities in the organization. It includes dealing with your clients and investigating network issues. It also optimizes customer support. 

BPA permits you to:

• Control the workflow, 
• Bring down operational cost, 
• Free up the workforce,
• Perform more qualified tasks,
• Raise customer satisfaction

With such software, you can address clients’ questions better and deal with repeatable tasks in seconds. In an organization with well-established communication between departments, BPA can significantly reduce human interactions. It streamlines decision making, reducing time spent on repeating operations. 

Implementing BPA can be the number one task within the company. But as many IT environments are digital or cloud-based, their complexity can be tough. Furthermore, in business process management (BPM), automation requires strategic planning. 

BPA concentrates on first automating the processes, then analyzing and optimizing them. Business process automation practitioners realize that often companies have no time for big data modeling and mapping, preceding software program choice. In these cases, they have to choose the business automation software that is easy to install and work with. 

Why does your business should automate business processes?

Have you ever spent half an hour filling out a form just to be informed that it is out of date? Or perhaps you made an error and have to fill it again? Or you had to begin the work from the start as there wasn’t sufficient space to feature the records?

BPA reduces document turnaround  time and eliminates paper usage by applying prefilled forms and automated workflows instead of sending PDFs by email or in the worst case scenario conducting paper-based reviews. 

With enterprise automation, you can construct a system that manuals out your workflows into unique portions. You can apply guidelines or conditions to be met at each step of the document cycle. 

Examples: 

You can make a rule that particular fields within the form need to be filled before the submission. 

When an expense reimbursement request exceeds an average price, it can be automatically routed to a senior manager for approval before sending it to the finance department.

Check out what are the benefits of automating business processes:

1. Streamlines your business

Automation speeds up processes. Information is delivered to the right person at the right time. Any constraint to the workflow becomes known and all business processes are under control. Management can react to any inefficiency right in time. The company’s productivity is increasing. Automation  guarantees that your business maintains competitiveness and is up-to-date as wasteful activities can be eliminated

2. Improves relations within the company

BPA improves connections within the organization. It guarantees that communication between employees works smoothly. As visibility increases, so does team members’ understanding of contributions and responsibilities of each other. 

For example, with automatic updates, the friction in communication among the teams and customers is reduced.  

3. Offers stellar customer service

Remarkable consumer care is not, at this point, a differentiator from other organizations. It becomes the usual norm in the organization. The existing customers, specifically the latest college grads, expect immediate online reactions. They are dissatisfied when they need to wait. 

Business process automation helps you to bring your tasks closer to the customer. They obtain the required information exactly when they need it.

4. Assures superior collaboration

Contribution’s encouragement additionally makes it easy for people or departments to work together. For instance, BPA can smooth out employees’ contributions to the final product. Management receives their recommendations earlier than updating and submitting them for endorsement to the senior management.

5. Normalizes procedures and decreases errors

Utilizing BPA to computerize information flow not simply saves time, but also reduces the potential mistakes. It makes it easy to assure those typical procedures are followed. In this case, endorsement orders are commonly authorized.

6. Lifts employee satisfaction

Talent is your most valuable asset. Releasing professional personnel from dreaded, time-losing admin responsibilities permits them to realize their best competences. You’re boosting productivity and improving process efficiency. 

7. Empowers mobility and scalability

With modern enterprise system automation software, your operations and strategies will routinely work on mobile devices. The employees will have access to documentation on a 24/7 basis. 

As a result, managers can dedicate more time to the scalability of the business processes and have mobility in business decisions.

What business processes can be automated? How to automate business processes?

McKinsey & Co estimates that about half of all business processes — together with yours — may be automated. Business process automation should spare all your business activities across all departments. 

Start with the audit of the strategic and operational processes. Repetition and recurring assignments are one clear spot for enterprise automation.

You need to remember that a business process that can be automated has numerous common characteristics:

• Are inherently repetitive
• Involve many employees and recurring assignments
• Are time touchy
• Require compliance and audit trails
• Have an excessive impact on other systems and processes

To provide you a clearer picture, here are a few commonly automated areas in organizations.

• Record management – in this case, business process automation will help to organize all of the data in a single area. With its help, you’ll coordinate the collaboration on diverse documentation throughout departments. You’ll follow government regulation, and share documents with outside parties all around the world. Record management is particularly important for Operational and HR departments in medium-sized and enterprise companies.
  
  
• Renovation and inspection – with the automation of these techniques your business will diagnose any problems in time when they’re simple and inexpensive to fix.  It means that any inspection process lives on its own once set up. An employee finishes a task, and the workflow automatically notifies a supervisor that a task was completed. This makes BPA especially irreplaceable for site and project managers, who support both administrative and construction activities (reviewing drawings, preparing work plans, assuring quality control, managing and tracking costs and materials, scheduling equipment, and administering safety programs).

• Audit – you can without difficulty automate any audit system. All documents might be easily accessible to auditors with all the changes being made at any given moment. Any procedure can be effortlessly analyzed and corrected in case of necessity. Besides, you can guarantee the security of your documentation applying for specific team permissions. BPA can provide peace of mind and minimize the risk associated with the auditing process, which for them occurs every 3 years in the Oil & Gas sector, for example.
  
  
• Data analysis and reporting – with commercial enterprise automation of these processes your employer could easily collaborate on any task documentation. Management could have access to any report in real-time. Further, you get insights about any inefficiency inside the organization and reduce the operation costs.

Start your automated process management with Fluix

As you can see it is very important to understand how to automate business processes and it is not such an easy task. Consequently, you require special software to perform enterprise automation. We at Fluix developed a lightweight document management software solution for any business, helping to boost your productivity and automate the current business processes. 

If you care about control over company documentation, would like to eliminate manual paperwork, streamline team collaboration, and use the time business-wise to reduce human errors – Fluix business process automation software should become your choice.