Most enterprises, if not all, are supercharging their digital transformation efforts by injecting a heavy dose of BPA (Business Process Automation) use cases into their enterprise environment.
They are turning to BPA to streamline operations, eliminate manual errors, optimize cost, attain agility and augment the overall digital capabilities.There are many sound reasons why BPA is steadily making its way into the enterprise environment.
BPA capabilities enable you to identify problems and opportunities much earlier because you have complete visibility within your workflow mechanism.
Then there are also hard to quantify yet handsome payoffs. BPA lays the foundation of a robust customer experience and relation strategy.
The potential benefits of BPA are compelling in the digital age and that explains why it is now poised for wider use within enterprises.
Table of Contents
Why automate business processes?
If you’re still unsure of the countless benefits of business process automation, below are a few examples that you may find interesting and beneficial.
1. A digital transformation journey
Only 44% of enterprises are ready for digital disruption. Most companies find the digital transformation goal unapproachable and overwhelming to handle at once. BPA helps you start small. By automating a few processes, your organization will gradually adopt a culture of continuous transformation, innovative technology and better organization standards on a large scale.
2. Transparency of business processes
You will have to perform process mapping before you proceed with business process automation and it has several important benefits. First, it enables you to get more clarity on how your business processes actually take place. This gives your staff guidelines on how each process should be executed, helps set quality criteria and finally raises performance standards.
3. Streamlined operations
Once you have the workflows for each process carefully mapped out, it is easy to eliminate redundant and ineffective steps. Further, business process automation helps accelerate operations and increases time-to-value.
4. Higher quality standards
Setting higher business standards and adhering to them is one of the advantages of business process automation. BPA provides a record for the steps of each process and helps you prove compliance should any disputes arise during audits.
5. Meeting customer expectations
Adhering to high standards helps you ensure customer satisfaction. By demonstrating dedication to creating a better customer experience, you will ultimately increase customer loyalty. This is one of the key benefits of BPA.
Which business processes to automate?
When to apply business process automation? Which business processes should you streamline and which should you leave intact? Let us discuss how businesses estimate if a particular process is fit for automation.
1. High-risk manual tasks
If the task in question requires manual operations that can potentially put humans at risk, then it is fit for automation. In mining industry, for instance, the use of robots and unmanned vehicles is becoming omnipresent.
2. Research
Businesses can use automated tools to research their databases and to derive insights from different types of data. You can use business process automation to search for healthcare, legal and criminal records as well as for marketing, customer support and scientific research.
3. Back-office operations
Business process automation optimizes some of the core processes that happen beyond the customer desk, such as synchronizing sales and warehouse databases, keeping billing and financial records, logistics, delivery and product dispatch. In IT, BPA is routinely applied to automate nighttime data center operations and the human staff receives alerts only in case of an emergency.
4. HR portals
Employee self-service portals help HR managers from the need to answer recurring employee questions and automatically offer employees a wealth of info on company rules, protocols and core procedures. An employee can enroll in a training class, get independent performance evaluations, manage their insurance, pension plans and so on.
5. Documentation and data handling
Most of the time, these processes may seem too trivial, but they consume sufficient time and effort. Refer to the examples below that call for automation.
- Data transfer from one database into another
- Product check-out and check-in
- Basic operations with documents
- Scheduling events
- Invoicing
- Sending follow-up emails
6. Receiving and analyzing customer feedback
BPA can leverage chatbots to automatically collect customer feedback and submit it to a data analytics app for processing and analysis. Likewise, BPA can also help deal with recurring customer complaints so personnel can focus on more pressing tasks.
7. Making business-critical decisions
Business process automation can improve decision-making processes. For instance, loan assignment, which normally requires precise evaluation of information about a person’s credibility, can take place faster and more objectively, since automation eliminates human bias and error.
10 BPA use cases to start with
Manual processes are proving expensive to businesses. They are also making your employees more frustrated and disengaged at work.
There are ten business process automation use cases you can start with today.
1. Employee onboarding
A strong employee onboarding process is key to engaging new hires early on and making a positive first impression. All too often, employees are left with stacks of forms on their first day. 58% of organizations say that their onboarding program focuses on paperwork, leading to unhappy new hires and a longer time to proficiency.
Business process automation can be applied to several onboarding tasks.
- Collecting personal information
- Filling out official W4 and I9 forms
- Setting up payroll and benefits
- Assigning office equipment
2. Purchase orders
Purchase orders play a key role in the procurement process. They allow organizations to procure the goods and services they need to operate.
This process is mired by manual data entry. Employees spend hours each week on repetitive tasks like filling out the same purchase orders.
Business process automation can streamline this entire process. You can digitize your purchase order forms and even connect them to a SQL database to pull in customer information.
3. Travel authorizations
Employees typically need to fill out authorization forms to get their business trips pre-approved. These are similar to expense reports but for travel.
As with any manual process, a lot of time gets wasted chasing incomplete information and emailing documents back and forth.
BPA can automate this process end-to-end. Employees can submit forms online and even add their signatures from any device. Once the form is completed, the BPA software can automatically route to their manager for review and then to the finance department for final approval. This helps employees not only quickly submit travel authorizations, but also receive reimbursement in a timely manner.
4. Time-off requests
Employees may submit time-off requests due to an illness or personal emergency. Handling these requests can be challenging with physical forms or emails. With BPA, you can streamline this process and make it easier for employees to submit time-off requests. This brings visibility into the process, thereby speeding up approvals.
Having a process in place for leave requests is important for managers to compensate employees appropriately.
5. Expense claims
Managing expense reporting manually not only results in longer processing times but also leaves organizations vulnerable to expense fraud. BPA can streamline the process end-to-end. Expense claims can automatically be routed to a manager for review. Throughout this process, employees can monitor the progress of their expense claims. An automated process for expense claims ensures that employees can receive reimbursement in a timely manner. It can also reduce expense fraud as there is a clear trail.
6. Invoice processing
Businesses today cannot afford to have subpar invoice approvals. Instead of sending attachments by email, Accounts Payable can send a link to an invoice for suppliers or consultants to fill out. BPA software then automatically scans invoices, routes them to appropriate authorities for review to approve a payment.
7. Price quotes
When a prospect asks for a quote, it means they’re close to doing business with you. They need pricing information to help them arrive at a decision. Any delays in this process can potentially cost you a customer. BPA software can help your sales team quickly put together price quotes and automatically route them to a manager for review.
8. Budget approvals
Managing budget approvals manually can quickly become cumbersome, especially for the finance team who must review and approve them. Business process automation software can create automated workflows that route all forms to the right approvers, making it easier to make timely decisions on pressing matters.
9. Sales
If sales reps and BPA solutions work in conjunction they can improve sales forecast, resource allocation, pipeline management, administrative tasks, contracting and sharpening the channel strategy. Sales reps can become more customer-focused by increasing customer-face time, customer satisfaction and customer experience.
10. Marketing
Business process automation applied to the marketing departments has a huge potential in email marketing and lead management. It offers cost-effectiveness and delivers the desired business results. It also helps with lead nurturing, lead capture, lead qualification and lead scoring. It also helps with automated responses/customer support.
How to launch a business process automation project?
How do you begin to implement BPA in your company? Below are the important guidelines you should follow.
1. Analyze your processes and goals
Every BPA project implementation starts with an analysis. What are the core processes in your company? What is the cause of most customer complaints and issues? Which process has the highest impact on customer experience and revenues? Finally, and most importantly – what are the current goals of your organization?
Before you start implementing BPA, build workflow charts for each of the processes that you want to optimize. This will help revise the workflow for your business-critical tasks, detect the shortcomings of every process and eliminate redundant steps., if any.
2. Select the business process automation solutions provider
Depending on the process you choose to automate, select a BPA solution provider that will help you meet your objectives. Choose a vendor that will offer you 24/7 customer support. At times, though, you will need to build a custom solution that will satisfy your unique business needs. Choose a vendor that is reliable and has expertise in building state-of-the-art solutions.
3. Start implementing BPA solutions
The key is to implement only one BPA project at a time. Perform user acceptance testing after each BPA implementation phase to reveal any issues your employees may have with process automation. Offer the possibility to switch positions to workers, whose jobs will be eliminated by automation.
4. Integrate BPA solutions with your organization’s software
Make sure your BPA solutions integrate with the other business tools and applications. Use plug-ins and extensions if you must. It is also critical that you integrate data from multiple sources into a unified data pool so all applications can use it.
5. Ensure maintenance and support
Continuous support and updates are important to ensure optimal performance and to keep BPA software relevant. Each of your employees using the business process automation solutions should have access to 24/7 tech support.
6. Adopt a long-term outlook
Be ready to go through a phase of adaptation and adjustment. You will not see the value from BPA implementation overnight, yet gradually processes will improve as well as outcomes.
Best practices for your business process automation strategy
Any workflow or process automation strategy should aim at striking the right balance between three dimensions.
- Ensure efficient and reliable operations. Leverage packaged enterprise applications to deliver a proven framework for adopting best-practice core processes and enabling economies of scale.
- Drive agility and responsiveness. Add additional automation capabilities to quickly meet new business requirements not currently covered by core processes and enable competitive advantages through differentiating process innovations.
- Manage costs and complexities. Avoid the challenges created by a patchwork of different capabilities from various vendors and prepare for the convergence of automation technologies.
Small projects that leverage one or two automation technologies offer the opportunity for quick wins. Supporting multiple processes with varying automation requirements can quickly shoot up complexity.
A patchwork of different automation technologies from various vendors creates compatibility challenges that slow down projects and increase costs.
Hence, a strategic approach to process automation requires the capability to deploy multiple automation technologies to support different tasks and varying requirements along an end-to-end process, that is, leveraging a technology platform that delivers both multiple process automation technologies and a first-class integration.
What is more, pre-built RPA bots and pre-defined process automation content packages are another approach to addressing common business challenges – and are designed specifically to work with your packaged enterprise applications, can accelerate time-to-value, and help enhance the ROI of your applications.
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