What is BPA?

Business process automation (BPA) is the use of smart technology to automate business processes that otherwise require a considerable amount of manual effort, time, and resources.

Every business has a number of recurring tasks or processes that are integral cogs for the smooth functioning of the business. At the same time, many of these tasks – by themselves – may not be of great value in terms of generating revenue. Such processes can be easily automated with the help of rule-driven workflows and guidelines. And that’s exactly what BPA does!

What processes can be applied to BPA?

BPA can have multiple use cases, depending on the nature of your business and the kind of processes you follow. In effect, automation can be applied to any task that includes collection/compilation of data, has a well-defined set of steps, and includes action/approval from multiple stakeholders. Employee onboarding, purchase order processing, resource management, and operational management are some common use cases.

Here’s a simple example: The exercise of collecting important personal data from all your employees often begins with the HR personnel sending out a company-wide email. This is then followed by employees’ responses, which trickle in one by one. Every response involves the HR personnel manually capturing the details from the email responses onto a spreadsheet/document – a cumbersome process prone to human errors. With zero visibility on whether an employee actually read the email or not, the HR personnel then conducts follow-ups and reminders. 

Now, if this whole exercise were to be automated, the HR personnel would simply send the communication through a software, triggering notifications to all employees via a mobile application with timely reminders. Responses will get automatically compiled into a readily usable and the HR personnel will also get insights into who responded to what, when, and so on. Therefore, a task which would have otherwise taken a few days or maybe even a week is completed in a few minutes saving one’s time, efforts, and resources!

What are the benefits of BPA?

Improved Productivity

By streamlining the existing workflow and improving the efficiency of each process, automation ensures that more work is done in less time by fewer employees and with lesser interruptions. This not only improves the speed of these processes but also ensures that employees have more time to spend on high-value tasks.

Reduced Operational Costs

Automation helps cut down/reallocate your employee resources from low-value jobs to core business operations that are crucial for bringing in revenue. Therefore, it not only reduces operational costs (that you can now invest back into your business) but also increases the chances of generating greater revenue.

Better Visibility

BPA systems come with intuitive dashboards that make viewing, tracking, and monitoring a process possible in real-time. These dashboards are customized depending on each employee’s specific roles and can help them gain an overview of tasks that need their attention, in order of their priority. It can also help managers keep track of employee activity and process progression, even if they are working remotely.

Enhanced Reliability

From ensuring the accuracy of the data being compiled to guaranteeing that no steps in a process are missed out/delayed, BPA eliminates the many possibilities of human error. This enhances the reliability of the entire system, minimizing the need for follow-up and preventing costly mistakes.

Greater customer satisfaction

BPA automatically triggers approval requests, moves a process forward (from one stakeholder to the next) without manual intervention, and provides greater visibility at every stage, making it easy to maintain SLAs. Moreover, as it speeds up the entire operational lifecycle, even turnaround times can be significantly reduced. These, in turn, guarantee better customer satisfaction.

Why do you need BPA now more than ever?

As the world tackles a pandemic and an exceptional financial crisis, cash flow is at an all-time low in most businesses. At a time like this, being able to save valuable resources and get back money that can be reinvested into core areas is like getting a new lease of life for your business.

In the “new normal”, additional risk-mitigation protocols and processes have become necessary to ensure employee well-being and compliance with new government regulations. With business 

process automation, all of these processes can be handled with maximum efficiency.

BPA and Beyond – Akku from CloudNow

Akku is a highly customizable enterprise Business Continuity & Operational Resilience (BCOR) solution that combines business process automation (BPA) with integration, real-time monitoring, and a versatile set of features that create greater value across the operational lifecycle. It can also make your business COVID-proof in the process! Get in touch with us for more information.