Business Process Automation
This article will cover Business process automation (BPA), which is also known as business automation or digital transformation. BPA can streamline a business for simplicity, achieve digital transformation, increase service quality, improve service delivery or contain costs.
What are Business Processes
Processes are high-level sets of tasks towards an organizational goal, while workflows aim at completing these tasks in the most efficient way possible.
Processes are about strategic planning and providing structure to your operations. A process is a set of repeatable activities or tasks towards an organizational output or goal.
Simply put, processes will detail the steps needed to accomplish a business goal.
Picture this: You’re sitting down with HR, listing out all the steps involved when on-boarding new employees at your company to create a smooth, consistent experience for new hires.
This is an example of mapping out a process.
What is Business Process Automation
With BPA, you’re looking to improve entire areas of your company and make them more efficient. This means working on automating large projects featuring multiple people: sales, fulfillment, accounting, human resources, and so on.
BPA entails the automation of multiple tasks and workflows to fulfill an organizational goal. For example, collecting data from a form, sending it to a spreadsheet, creating a to-do and a deadline for the employee who needs to act upon that information.
Your business should consider using business process automation for processes that:
- Require consistency across the organization
- Are repeatable
- Need to be free from error, every time
Document Before Automation
When asked how to automate businesses, we recommend starting with clear documentation of your business process. Having clear documented steps of your process are critical before taking on a business process automation project.