Understanding Business Process Automation (BPA)

Ever since businesses started embracing digital transformation, automating business operations has been touted as one of their maiden goals. That being said, Business Process Automation (BPA) has been a proven digitalisation practice in minimising manual human interference, eliminating operational inefficiencies, boosting productivity and, ultimately, more cost-saving possibilities.

78% of business leaders believe that work automation
can boost their organisational productivity.

In this blog, let’s delve deeper and learn more about What BPA is, it’s ideal purpose and the constructive outcomes it could bring to overall business operations.

What is BPA?

BPA is a high-level automation approach that leverages software technologies to automate critical business process workflows and minimise manual intervention & errors to the greatest extent possible. The BPA focuses on bringing process excellence to every business function across the organisation and adding more value to the overall business outcomes.

According to Gartner, 69% of all management tasks will be automated by 2024.

BPA has a broad scope for rejuvenating operations from simple and repetitive tasks like reporting and documentation to complex tasks like logistics and vendor management. As businesses deploy numerous digital applications in their ecosystem, BPA solutions are built and customised to streamline and merge those digital workflows to achieve specific goals.

What is the difference between BPA and RPA?

Being digitalisation practices, both RPA and BPA share a common goal of achieving efficiency through task and process automation. Still, the depth of their vision shows how they differ from each other. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is all about automating small and mundane daily operational tasks through rule-based software bots. On the other hand, BPA has a broader vision of end-to-end automation and optimisation of complex business operations and workflows.

Why BPA is important?

While businesses are eyeing improving their productivity to stay competitive, they also should note the manual workload for their employees to meet the requirements and potential employee disengagements. As per Cornerstone on-demand report, 68% of employees have too much workload on a daily basis. Similarly, other notable critical reasons like productivity slump, efficiency gaps, fostering innovations, and rich customer experience are pushing organisations globally to pick the much-needed pace with BPA.

Some key BPA Use-cases

Recruitment:

The employee onboarding process is usually time-consuming, demanding repetitive tasks and loads of paperwork. 36% of HR leaders say that missing automation practices hinder them from providing a better onboarding experience. With BPA, recruitment teams can streamline their onboarding process by automating significant steps like employment form submissions, payroll creation, asset allocation, etc. Thus, by leveraging BPA, Recruitment teams can deliver a remarkable onboarding experience, significantly improving productivity retention and employer branding.

Procurement:

Managing purchase orders has always been a big headache for procurement teams, involving many repetitive tasks, invoice processing, credit approval hiccups, etc. BPA solutions can integrate and automate process workflows across procurement and finance applications, resulting in a more efficient purchase order management cycle encompassing seamless vendor onboarding, quicker turnaround times and credit approvals with improved due diligence.

Sales & Marketing:

Businesses can best leverage customised BPA solutions to make the sales and marketing teams work in tandem to strengthen their revenue operations. Through implementing BPA, Online marketing campaign leads can be automatically updated in the sales CRM database and assigned to sales executives for further follow-up and conversion. Furthermore, it also helps the overall sales process with an efficient sales pipeline aggregation and accurate sales reporting.

Service & Support:

Service and support teams can develop efficient SLAs with BPA solutions to provide a rich customer experience. Automated ticket routing and mapping can be implemented with BPA so that appropriate agents can be quickly identified and assigned to resolve the customer clients much faster. BPA can also help build self-service portals and chatbots to address and resolve common queries without direct agent involvement.

Supply Chain:

BPA has the potential to streamline majority of supply chain process gaps, resulting in businesses experiencing extensive visibility and control over their supply chain operations. With BPA solutions, SCM systems can be integrated with other ERPs to achieve multiple goals like automated order processing, real-time stock notifications, transportation requests and much more.

Key BPA Trends

Approaching BPA paired with complementing technologies extends its horizon to drive more productivity, efficiency, and innovation into business operations. Here are a few BPA trends that garner businesses to implement BPA and realise better outcomes.

No-code/ Low-Code Automation:

The arrival of LCNC automation tools radically increases BPA adoption as it enables anyone with business logic to automate the workflow without coding.

Hyperautomation:

Coupling advanced AI/ML techniques with BPA solutions erodes many limitations and creates opportunities to develop highly customised automation solutions for specific business needs.

Intelligent BPA:

AI-powered BPA solutions offer remarkable predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities, analysing workflows and providing rich insights for process improvement.

Embracing automation is the way forward to achieve business process excellence, create better customer experience and make strides in the competitive market. But to realise all such advantages, it demands a well-thought-out automation strategy comprising more robust technological expertise and vivid business acumen. Being a global digitalisation partner, that’s precisely what SRM Tech offers, and assists international brands in their digital automation journey to experience process excellence and competitive advantage.

Want to set a winning automation strategy in motion for your business? Let’s talk.