Business Process Automation: Moving Digital

Business Process Automation (BPA) is the alignment of various business processes management with modern application development to meet changing market demands. It increases efficiency and control costs across the organisation. BPA goes beyond just data management and records to advanced software systems and programs that integrate all your processes. Automation can help your company in maintaining control over various issues, such as customer relationships, planning, sales, standardisation, and development. It can target not just complicated information technology tasks, but also programs like email marketing services.

Why should you have Business Process Automation?

· Streamlines communication

· Enforces accountability

· Minimises costs

· Reduces paperwork

· Decreases defects and manual errors

· Keeps a tab on business processes

· Establishes a clear approval hierarchy

· Improves workflows

· Saves time

· Maintains a consistent process speed

· Eases and speeds up auditing and analysis

· Creates more flexibility

· Fosters a happier and more stable workforce

· Satisfies customers

· Allows more efficient allocation of resources

· Offers a digital labor model

Tasks that can be automated

· Sensor-based tracking and alerts

· Employee self-service portals

· Back office processes

· Research

· Management of documents

· Moving documents between programs or folders

· Adding events to calendars

· Customer or lead follow-up

· Invoicing

· Customer feedback and complaint collection, and processing

Things to Remember Before Automating Your Business

1. Understand, Simplify and Automate - Prior to introducing automation, it is important for you to completely understand the existing system and analyze it. Once done, you must try to simplify it to the maximum extent possible and only after that you must introduce automation and that too only if it is imperative.

2. Integration - Every process in a business is different from one another. Hence, the process that is being automated should effortlessly integrate with the existing processes. This can happen during different levels of the automation process but it is important for all the automation processes to work smoothly with the environment.

3. Consistency - The automated processes should be consistent with other existing processes and their related inputs and outputs.

4. Methodical - It isn’t necessary to do the automation of all the tasks at once. Considering the availability of funds, resources and overall posture of the business processes, one can divide the automation process into several stages.

5. Be Flexible - Over time, the business processes tend to evolve and differ. The automation initiated should be flexible enough to imbibe and reflect all these required changes.

6. Train the employees - For the efficient working of all the business processes, it is important for the employees or those handling the automated processed to have a complete understanding of the workflow. The better they know a process, the better it will function. Automation is not the mere replacement of papers with a digital system; it is about making processes efficient, simple, error-free, streamlined and transparent.