What Is Business Process Automation (BPA)?
In its simplest terms, business process management can be thought of in terms of operations.
Operations consist of the back-room business processes that allow a company to function and deliver products and services to their clients. Historically, this includes a wide variety of functions including things like workflow, inventory, human resources, deal flow, administration, and the list goes on.
Business process management involves the oversight of these activities while business processing automation leverages technology solutions that result in streamlined processes through automation. Ideally, these efforts result in greater efficiencies and cost savings.
6 Benefits of Business Process Automation
There are numerous benefits to BPA. When done correctly, it can be a lifesaver. BPA initiatives can increase productivity, decrease costs, and provide deeper insights into a business, all of which are helpful when a business wants to scale.
Decrease operational costs
Almost anything that is a paper task can be considered for automation. This will save time and free up resources to focus on other things.
Increase productivity
Historically manual processes like payment processing and backing up data can be automated, which improves productivity as these tasks are completed accurately and efficiently.
Improve customer service
Chatbots can interact with customers 24 hours a day and artificial intelligence can understand customer activity on your website.
Greater depth of reporting
Pulling data can be a time-consuming process. By using tools that track the right information and communicate with one another, you can have greater access to numbers that drive your business and generate automatic reports.
Better collaboration
Project management can be a time-consuming, manual task. Automation helps establish workflows, assign tasks, communicate progress, and provides insight across teams.
Reallocate employee efforts
By automating manual and recurring tasks, you can free up your team to focus on creativity and innovation.
Which automation process will work best for you?
Many recurring, time-consuming tasks are candidates for Business Process Automation. BPA features many benefits including greater efficiency and productivity.
Digital Transformation
A sudden and complete move to digital transformation may seem daunting to the organization that has never taken any steps to get there. A good first step is to identify business processes that have recurring functions or manual workflow efforts and begin there. Modern application development has resulted in technology solutions that address everything from payment processing to customer relationship management to cloud storage.
In fact, many of these offerings allow for a scalable cloud infrastructure, which allows your business to grow unimpeded. Many Saas solutions offer packages that are tailored to fit the different sizes and needs of companies so that you can grow without the additional staffing and infrastructure that may otherwise be necessary.
Containerizing Business Automation Solutions
Containerizing is when one or multiple processes are isolated from the rest of the system. The benefit of containers is that they are portable and consistent as they move environments. Configurability, portability, and isolation are needed from development to testing to production. The purpose of containers is be agile, which is necessary to develop faster and meet business needs as they arise.
Containers provide scalability and they are important for this reason. Another benefit of containerizing is that it can be leveraged no matter the infrastructure—on-premise, cloud, or a hybrid.
Additional methods can assist in the path to business process automation. Two more examples are microservices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). The CI/CD model allows your development team to drop code changes more reliably and frequently than the traditional waterfall method. They're also able to do so without disrupting other developers working in parallel. Microservices break elements of an application down into smaller components that can work independently of one another.
Agility and Reliability
Business process automation is emerging as the go-to method in business technology and IT infrastructure. Automation allows companies to be agile, secure, and scale quickly. Whether a company is going full bore on digital transformation or beginning a smaller effort, most companies would benefit from exploring what BPA could do for them.
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