Business process automation (BPA) is the use of advanced technology to complete business processes with minimal human intervention. A business process is an activity, or set of activities, used to accomplish a specific organizational goal, such as producing a product, assimilating new employees and bringing on new customers.
A business process typically spans multiple business departments, often beginning with an action. For example, in employee onboarding, the HR system could trigger a set of predefined workflow steps to send out a welcome email, configure security credentials and set up financial details in the compensation system. Automating the workflow steps in the business process typically improves the efficiency and accuracy of each step.
BPA takes advantage of a variety of advanced technology, including automation tools, process intelligence capabilities and cloud platforms. Moreover, BPA capabilities are often incorporated in popular enterprise apps such as enterprise resource planning software, human capital management systems and other tools that enforce industry best practices.
Business processes that can be automated show up in many areas of a business, including management, operations, supply chains, HR processes and marketing. In general, good candidates for automation are high-volume tasks that are recurring, time-sensitive, involving multiple people and in need of compliance and audit trails.
Business process automation use cases include the following:
BPA drives efficiencies and standardization that, in turn, bring many business benefits, including the following:
Replacing humans with machines to handle repetitive tasks saves time and reduces errors. To do this, businesses must carefully define the steps in their processes and subject them to limited interpretation. In addition, the process automation system must communicate any exceptions where human intervention is allowed. Workflow automation of menial tasks frees employees to do higher value work.
By centralizing a business process through automation, organizations also gain transparency into their workflows. There is BPA software that gives companies the ability to see all the process steps on one dashboard, providing visibility into the status of process activities, from task reviews to the approval process. Automation can also ensure that compliance regulations are followed.
BPA has become increasingly important as enterprises seek to become digital businesses. Digital transformation depends on process automation, which often begins with converting information into computer-readable formats that then become part of enterprise-wide automation.
Despite all the benefits of BPA, not every process is a good candidate for automation. BPA is best-suited to tasks that are high volume, recurring, time-sensitive and involve multiple people. Also, since automation isn't a one-and-done effort, enterprises should periodically review how automated processes are affected by changes in governance requirements, regulations, security and other factors.
Challenges businesses are likely to face with BPA include the following:
The term BPA is used to characterize a collection of automation capabilities for streamlining and improving business processes. Robotic process automation (RPA) is a subset of BPA that focuses on automating how humans use software applications at work. It's attractive to businesses because it provides a quick way to automate data entry and copy data between applications.
Using RPA software, workers and developers alike can record the rough draft for a simple automation by clicking and scrolling their way through a business process. These drafts are turned into final apps by the development team. The various RPA platforms then harden these basic programs so they can't be changed in the application layouts and workflows.
Intelligent process automation and digital process automation (DPA) combine basic RPA capabilities with AI tools to create more sophisticated automations. For example, optical character recognition can read printed text, and natural language processing can map numbers from invoices to fields in business systems. Machine vision algorithms could perform tasks like estimating insurance damages. AI and machine learning algorithms can automate other types of decisions a bot might have to make.
Low-code development platforms are another type of BPA automation tool. These tools take advantage of application programming interface (API) access rather than emulating human progress through the user interface. This lets them provide better performance than traditional RPA programs. Some of the low-code platforms, such as Microsoft's Power Automate, are starting to combine the ease of RPA programming with the speed of cloud API execution.
BPA can be a standalone initiative or part of a larger, overarching business process management (BPM) strategy. The terms BPA and BPM are sometimes used interchangeably, but they aren't the same.
Both BPA and BPM aim to help businesses improve business processes to meet their organizational goals. However, their purviews are different. BPA focuses on how automation can simplify and streamline a business process. BPM might include automation but doesn't have to, and it employs a variety of methods to discover, model, analyze, change and optimize end-to-end business processes.
In BPM, business processes are managed collectively to reduce error rates and improve workflow efficiency. It also handles other tasks, such as clarifying job roles and responsibilities, thereby increasing the organization's capacity to adapt to changing business goals.
BPM projects often use diagramming tools such as business process modeling notation to diagram complex business processes. These diagrams are used to improve understanding of existing business processes. They may also serve as templates for implementing automation through various BPA technologies.
Business process automation and business process analysis are complementary technologies, which confusingly use the same acronym. Business process analysis is a subset of business process automation. As its name denotes, it's concerned with analyzing business processes. It uses various manual processes and automated approaches to map and understand existing processes.
In the manual approach, process experts typically interview subject matter experts and business users to construct a process map. The automated approach uses various technologies that include process mining, process capture and process intelligence to do the same.
Process mining analyzes enterprise system logs to map out business processes and variations in how they are executed. Process capture -- sometimes called task mining -- uses machine vision to watch over an employee's screen to generate a map of processes that span multiple applications. Process intelligence is a newer term to describe the use of both technologies combined with business intelligence and analytics capabilities for greater automation and insight.
Recently, Gartner has begun to use the term enterprise business process analysis to characterize these more automated approaches for automatically mapping and analyzing processes.
Before beginning a BPA project, it's critical to understand how the existing process works, why it's a good candidate for automation and how it should be changed. Here are some necessary first steps:
BPA includes a broad set of established, as well as rapidly evolving business automation technologies, including the following:
In addition, business process management software is evolving, as leading BPM vendors in this space -- such as Appian and Pega -- add RPA, AI and low-code/no-code capabilities. These types of advanced technologies facilitate BPA strategies in various ways.
For example, giving no-code automation platforms to nondevelopers lets them automate workflows and customize apps quickly, without forcing developers or programmers to do so. This saves a company time and expense. Also, AI and machine learning systems can analyze data and look for new approaches that optimize existing workflows.
Forrester Research has replaced the term BPM with DPA-deep and DPA-wide to reflect the evolution of BPM software. The upshot of this fast-moving technology space is that companies need to establish what Forrester calls an automation framework that delineates between the various automation tools, filters out the market hype and understands how they can be used separately and in tandem to achieve business process automation.
While business process automation isn't a new idea, hyperautomation is a nascent concept associated with digital transformation. Business leaders are looking to automate as many tasks as possible so human workers can focus on innovative and forward-looking tasks.
14 Dec 2023