Business Process Automation: the force multiplier in today’s digital age.
With process automation, your processes can be more agile, adaptive, intelligent, and more responsive in a business environment in flux.
The right and optimally built processes should do more than just enable. They should empower. This is precisely the value business process automation (BPA) imparts to your organization. With process automation, your processes can be more agile, adaptive, intelligent, and more responsive in a business environment in flux.
Why BPA is essential for any businesses
In these uncertain times, when enterprises are struggling to protect their bottom line while also scrambling to grow their top line, they need tools and techniques that can help them achieve more business results with less or the same number of resources. BPA does that marvellously. It helps cost-conscious and value-seeking enterprises crack the do-more-with-less code.
Business Process Automation refers to the implementation of workflow automation tools to carry out manual intensive, repetitive, tedious, and routine processes in a business environment. Having said that, not all business processes and tasks are ripe for automation. Some lend themselves well to a process automation approach, while others may not meet the deciding factors behind the approach.
For more on what is business process automation, also read Reimagine business efficiency with Business Process Automation
Organizations need to assess their entire workflow system and then pinpoint the workflows, tasks, and processes that are apt for automation. In an ideal scenario, the processes best suited for BPA are the ones that are governed by business logic and structured inputs. Such processes once automated become standardized, economical, streamlined, accurate, and transparent.
In today’s day and age, BPA can act as the linchpin to success for enterprises. It can go a long way in streamlining business processes, simplifying workflows, and optimizing tasks. In the long term, process automation can be made more mature and intuitive with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to derive insights from complex yet comprehensive data sets. BPA helps enterprises wrest the maximum value out of their business processes. It optimizes business workflows and makes the business more efficient.
In the post-Covid era, BPA is fast becoming a critical weapon in the CIO’s technology arsenal. It is a great way to simplify complex and critical business processes. Operationally greedy processes, which are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and often marred with human error, should be automated. Organizations also need to focus on automating processes that can make them competitive in the marketplace. They can apply BPA to processes that can directly improve the time to market or help them lower the price point of their products as a direct impact of the cost optimization resulting from BPA.
Business Process Automation in the Healthcare industry
The healthcare sector covering hospitals, biotech firms, pharmaceutical companies, and medical research or diagnostic laboratories combat challenges of process quality and consistency, resource allocation, and risk management. BPA can help them solve problems relating to maintaining and efficiently managing medical records, electronic signatures, and project management in drug discovery and testing. Combined with RPA technologies, processes such as patient scheduling, claims management and accounts settlement, discharging operations, can be automated to gain operational efficiencies. It also leads to cost savings, increases patient turnout, and improves patient experience and employee satisfaction.
Business Process Automation in the BFSI industry
The BFSI vertical requires adaptive processes that provide reliable services across any platform, catering to the digital requirements of the varied customer base. BPA helps them handle eKYC, loan processing, fund transfers, integrating with another automated bank system ABS and card systems, portfolio management, wealth management, and front- and back-office systems development. Besides these, customer service being one of the top priority of banks and financial institutions these days, can benefit from process automation. Automation makes processes agile and empowers service and support staff with the necessary data and customer information required to improve service delivery. This translates into a higher quality of customer experience. If the staffers are freed up from routine mundane tasks, they can focus on areas that provide a high customer touchpoint which improves customer loyalty and retention.
Best Practices for business process automation
Now let’s take a quick look at some of the best practices that you should consider while implementing BPA
1. Start with the processes best suited to BPA – Instead of attempting a big bang automation endeavor, start with lightweight processes that will not invite too much resistance from end-users. Tasks like travel expense approval, reimbursement approval, and employee onboarding can be the first choice for starters. For business-critical tasks, enterprises should first assess the situation, identify potential pitfalls, and failure-proof their strategy before plunging headlong into BPA. Alternately, you can also seek the help of BPA experts who will perform an in-depth analysis of your existing business processes and then select the relevant workflow and process automation software to be implemented.
2. Picking the right automation tool – The business impact of BPA depends directly on the type of automation tool you select. One of the major pitfalls in BPA projects is to adapt the process to a tool available in the market, instead of picking the right tool that is suited to the organization’s automation priorities, scalability requirements, digital capabilities, budget, and end-user profile. It may also make sense to consider a custom BPA tool development if you find the existing tools in the market lacking to your specific requirements.
3. Goal setting at an early stage of the project – Set the specific automation goals right at the start of your BPA project. This helps create the success metrics more effectively and realistically. The performance should be measured at every step, and there should be scope for course correction along the way.
4. All the stakeholders should be involved in the process and trained for the transition – To ensure that there is no user resistance or change management issue, the process stakeholders should be involved and trained right through the process. Not only does it make adoption easier, but also increases accountability and chance of success.
5. BPA is a continuous process – BPA improvements are like a race without a finish line. There is a need for constant improvement. Enterprises should tweak their systems to leave ample scope for continual improvement.
Our team’s robust development practices and cross-technology knowledge across BPA, RPA, and data science, ensures that you get the most optimized custom-made solution for your business processes. Click here to learn how you can digitalize your business with our end-to-end BPA offerings that supports your automation journey, every step of the way.
