Business Process Automation (BPA): Objectives and use cases for next-generation enterprises
Many, if not most, enterprises are supercharging their digital transformation efforts by injecting a heavy dose of Business Process Automation (BPA) capabilities into their enterprise environment.
Nothing helps you improve your organization’s operational maturity quite like the capability to do things a little better, a little faster, and a little more cost-effectively. IT leaders in the digital era are acutely conscious and, to varying degrees, steadfast about achieving precise levels of operational maturity and efficiency. Their best bet: Business Process Automation (BPA).
Many, if not most enterprises are supercharging their digital transformation efforts by injecting a heavy dose of BPA capabilities 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 of their enterprise. So let’s decode what exactly business process automation is and how can enterprises make the most of this emerging business practice in alignment with their business objectives to bolster operational maturity.
Business Process Automation is the application of technology to execute manual and recurring tasks or processes in a business. The key criterion to identify the right business processes to be automated? These processes should be governed by business logic. Once employed to the best-suited business processes, BPA can make the existing processes more cost-effective, streamlined, error-proof, and transparent.
The Objectives of Business Process Automation (BPA)
At the very crux of business activity are the functions, processes, and workflows that are used to achieve daily operations and production. Any delay, error, or inefficiency in this can derail or slow down the business activity. Besides, running the daily production smoothly and seamlessly, several organizations yearn to fast track their growth. In pursuit of growth, they make significant expenditures to achieve scale through technology tools or increased headcount. BPA helps address these issues head-on. Not only does it speed up business activity but also helps you achieve scale without busting your budget. In the long run, it can help you multiply efficiency and maximize performance – capabilities that can help organizations deliver on their growth ambitions.
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 and transparency within your workflow mechanism.
BPA can help shave off operating costs reducing manual errors, increasing process accuracy and efficiency, shortening the process cycle, and rationalizing the resource required to complete the recurring task. In short, it can bring in efficiency at various levels of the task performance cycle by weeding out inefficiency, redundancy, delays, and recurring errors. All of this goes a long way in realizing savings on cost and overheads.
By improving process visibility and transparency, Business Process Automation makes it easier to spot errors, flaws, and inefficiencies early on, thereby fostering better accountability and regular monitoring, tracking, and reporting on the progress of workflows. BPA prepares the ground for better compliance by standardizing processes.
And then there are some hard to quantify yet handsome payoffs. BPA lays the foundation of a robust customer experience and relation strategy. By augmenting productivity and amplifying process efficiency, it helps customer support and service staff drive better business outcomes and a positive customer experience. Not only does it chisel the organization’s UX and CX strategy but also improves the overall service delivery.
The potential benefits of BPA are compelling and that explains why it is now poised for wider use within enterprises.
The relevance of BPA in specific functional areas
Enterprises across the spectrum are striving to implement BPA to limber up for the digital age and gain a competitive edge. BPA scenarios range from basic automation, process automation, integration automation, and intelligent automation. Armed with BPA tools, enterprises can focus on process evolution as they stay in lockstep with the latest technology trends.
So, let’s train our sights on the breadth of BPA usage across industries.
BPA in Sales and Marketing
When BPA is tailored to sales operations, it helps realize cost savings by freeing up the time of sales executives for value-enhancing tasks. It helps them tap into additional revenue by automating customer outreach in the sales funnel. 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 execs can become more customer focussed by increasing customer-face time, customer satisfaction, and customer experience.
Business process automation applied to the marketing departments has a huge potential in the area of email marketing and lead management. It provides 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.
BPA in Logistics
BPA in logistics is all about the usage of control systems, machinery, or software solution to improve operational efficiency. BPA is implemented in the warehouse or distribution center to minimize manual intervention.
The BPA scenarios in the logistics and transportation sector range from supply chain to procurement, distribution, customer service, and reverse logistics. BPA facilitates better decision-making by providing access to real-time load data and the ability to run reports along with data analysis on them. With reduced manual intervention in data entry, there are slim chances of error. The reduced errors and mistakes keep a rein on shipping costs. All of this increases organizational control both internal and external, this, in turn, ensures more efficient and profitable shipping.
BPA in IT Services
BPA, when applied to IT, can deliver multiplied business benefits. It can notch up productivity by integrating and streamlining IT processes. Existing APIs and software overlap can be used to make all of your systems more interconnected. BPA in IT paves the way for AI and ML adoption. It can improve the time taken in incident management, application development, and ensuring better security and compliance.
BPA in Administrative Functions
Once automated, administrative tasks can see a huge uptick in efficiency levels. There are certain time-consuming and bandwidth-choking tasks that can be automated to get optimized results, chief among them are sorting and responding to emails, scheduling appointments with multiple people, paying bills, handling purchase orders, creating proposals, and responding to customer queries.
When it comes to attaining operational efficiency, the bottom line is to equip your processes, functions, and systems with tools that do trim with the unnecessary frills and help your organization shape up for the digital age. BPA does just that, and how!
