All over the world, businesses are embracing automation technology in a bid to become more efficient. But ‘efficiency’ is a broad concept. And, when you’re assessing new technology to make your business work better, you need to know exactly how that technology can help your business succeed.
Let’s start with the basics. Business process automation solutions are technological tools designed to automate the parts of your business that operate on rules or logic-based processes. These are usually highly repetitive tasks and include actions like approvals, purchase orders, or data flows.
Handing tasks like this over to technology rather than relying on people in your business has all sorts of benefits.
The kind of processes best suited to BPA are manual, repetitive, and time-consuming. It’s not that your employees can’t do them – it’s that they act as a time-sponge on their day, taking them away from value-adding activities that require real thought and human intelligence.
By automating all those day-to-day tasks, it means your people have more time and energy to spend on things that matter – making their work more interesting while boosting your productivity.
Once your automation platform is up and running, it functions smoothly and unlike employees, never needs to take a break or go on holiday. By automating tasks like an approval process, you never need to wait for someone to get back to their desk or clearing time in their schedule to complete the necessary paperwork. BPA means you get rid of such bottlenecks and delays so your business can keep moving.
One of the great advantages of BPA is that it removes any idiosyncrasies from your business processes. There’s no two ways of doing something and instructions are followed to the T. So there’s no need to worry about someone’s unreadable handwriting or another’s ‘interpretation’ of what the process is. There’s one set of rules that are exactly obeyed every single time.
Everyone makes mistakes. We’ve all written down the wrong number, misheard a zip code, or misplaced a crucial piece of paper at one point or another. But, in your business, each of those errors has a knock-on effect: a delay in production, a mis-sent delivery, or, in the worst-case scenario, a mistake that means you fall foul of industry regulations or legal compliance.
A business process automation solution minimizes the opportunity for such errors to happen by digitizing processes and cutting human involvement in processing data or handling paperwork. Additionally, it increases visibility of compliance across your systems so you can rest assured you’re always meeting regulations.
Silos are the enemy of efficiency – and nowhere is that truer than when it comes to data. BPA connects all your data sources, from your legacy systems to the latest digital apps, so you eliminate the gaps between systems and get closer to a single source of truth for data across your organization.
Once you’ve connected all your data, you’ll have all sorts of opportunities to get deeper analytics into how your business is working to make smarter decisions.
Using BPA, you can build a reporting platform that gives you visibility into bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your process so you can address them and continually improve the way you work. You can also use predictive analytics based on past performance to create self-optimizing processes.
These benefits of BPA can be seen across nearly all businesses, no matter the size or industry. But we know that the easiest way to see the benefits is to get a perspective from a company that’s already been through the process.
We worked with NRF, a Dutch manufacturing organization, to completely digitize their product workflow. This meant the company were able to cut the lead time it took to complete an order in half, contributing to more business. Learn more about NRF's process automation strategy.
Want to find out more about getting started with business process automation? Find out how Bizagi can help you implement BPA successfully.
