BPA - Business Process Automation

What is business process automation (BPA)?

BPA software is designed to automate activities and processes in a daily company routine via technology. These processes can be as simple as creating an automated e-mail response to a client or more complex services as filling heavy data spreadsheets about competitors’ pricing monitoring.

The real potential of process automation lies in taking all the time and human-effort used in repetitive and intensive data filling tasks, that take place in everyday offices, and replace it with more agile and accurate robotic execution, while adding a valuable time for employees to get more creative and productive.

What helps define what type of process would benefit the most from BPA is the nature of the activity:

For example, when an employee fills an expense report, that action may trigger a pre-established succession of steps, that start with the filling, passes through approval and end when the employee receives the reimbursement check.

All these steps are what compose a business process. In a BPM system, steps and events are organized and streamlined in a digital workflow and automated via BPA.

The technology behind the automation of these processes is called Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

We talked more about it here

Advantages of Business Process Automation

Would you choose to manually do the same thing, every day, the exact same way, or to have a system that does it for you, but faster and without any mistakes? That’s generally what BPA has to offer for companies, no matter the size or type of business.

Business Process Automation can be implemented across departments because its mechanics applies to almost every repetitive task related to business, such as file transfers, onboarding, report generation, ordering, claims, data entry, and event log monitoring.

As a matter of fact, Mckinsey’s latest study shows that a third of the tasks in 60% of jobs could be automated. That means huge productivity improvements for enterprises, especially in areas like Onboarding, Inventory, Sales, Product development and more.

But that is just the agility gain side of automation!

BPA also offers efficiency to cut costs through robotic process automation, because it eliminates almost 100% of the errors that used to be generated from human employees doing repetitive and complex tasks.

Let’s take the HR department, for example.

90% of invoicing procedures are still done manually and 12.5% of these invoices need reworking.

That is a lot of time and money wasting.

Perhaps that’s why according to Forrester, BPA software implementation has the potential to reduce operating costs by up to 90% and Statista forecasts an increase in BPA’s market value from $9.7 billion in 2019 to $12.7 billion in 2021.the market for.

Examples of BPA across departments and sectors