What is business process automation?
Business process automation is the process of using AI technology to automate repetitive manual tasks and processes while maintaining efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. The goal of BPA is to streamline daily operations and allow businesses to operate smoothly. Automation of business processes can help companies in almost every field to achieve higher effectiveness and improve customer satisfaction and experience.
Why is BPA important for the companies?
Business process automation is not just the next trending topic. It is the new reality – adaptation to technology that will exist in the world, changing the old manual labor into new digital processes. Automation workflow helps in every step of the BPA by making it more transparent and accountable, reducing errors, improving turnaround times, and cutting costs.
The 5 Types of Business Process Automation
Task Automation
This is the most basic type of business process automation tool. It automates repetitive, straight forward tasks that are time consuming and require no decision making in the process
What is task automation?
Task automation uses no-code platforms or software like scripts to perform repetitive rule-based tasks.
Task automation fields and examples
- Email management – You can use it to manage your emails by filtering. tagging and organizing them into specific folders
- Finance – automatic reporting, invoicing and overdue reminders
- Data management – moving information from a document to a database, or comparing information in different databases and flagging inconsistencies
- Customer service – instant replay to common questions or assign task based on certain criteria
Task automation advantages
- Reduced errors – tasks are performed following strictly the process removing the manual labor and copy/pasting
- Increased productivity – tasks are processed 24/7, no coffee breaks or distractions
- Cost savings – improved performance and less errors mean lower corporate operational costs
- Improved job satisfaction – employees can finally focus on meaningful tasks and move away from repetitive work
Workflow Automation
Unlike task automation where individual tasks are executed, workflow automation deals with a chain of tasks to complete a business process based on predefined set of rules.
What is workflow automation?
The workflow automation makes sure the a set of tasks are completed between human and software with minimal or no human interaction. Each task following the next logical one in the process and only stopping when external approval, consent or additional information is required.
Workflow automation fields and examples
- Sales – user fills out “Contact us” form, the workflow instantly checks for some additional information that is needed (ex. : company size, location) and assigns to “lead” to the correct sales personal and updates the follow-up tasks in the CRM
- Customer service – a task comes in, it’s assigned to the right customer support representative but it’s not completed in expected timeframe, a reminder is triggers and send to senior support specialist to ensure no complain is left unsolved
- IT Help desk – a ticket comes in, based on the category (ex. “Hardware problem”, “Software Issue”) it is assigned to the right specialist and returning email to the sender with expected time when the issue will be fixed
- Finance – invoice is scanned, the system extracts the data from it and places the relative information in the system (ex. vendor, due date, amount), then it matches the information with the internal purchasing system and sends it for approval to the relative manager before executing or scheduling the payment
Workflow automation advantages
- Improved efficiency and transparency – automated workflows provide clear picture of task progress, what are the next steps, who is responsible, and where the bottlenecks and blockers are. This ensures smoother process and improved efficiency.
- Compliance – in highly regulated industries workflow automations create a log of every approval by time and personal creating clear and auditable trail
- Customer support – once a ticket is resolved the system takes the final score of the interaction and it it meets certain criteria it sets up the customer to receive bonus, discount, promotional materials or even asked to write a review
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic Process Automation uses robots to mimic human actions in digital environment. Think of it as putting a digital “human” on a computer to process high volume of tasks quick and with great precision,
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that allows robots or bots to do tasks in digital environment thorough graphical user interface (GUI) mimicking a real person. The bots can perform complex task such as logging into systems and applications, moving and editing with data into these systems, etc. Using robotic process automation frees up time for users to focus on more complex, out-of-the box work.
Robotic Process Automation fields and examples
- Know Your Customer (KYC) – robots can automatically verify customers identify by checking them across multiple data bases or asking them to perform a set of actions
- Order processing – organizing post-purchase process by getting the shipping information, printing out the labels, and sending back to the customer a tracking information email
- Policy management – managing policy renewals, information update across multiple policy pages and sending reminders to the right people for verification once the process is done
Robotic Process Automation advantages
- Cost reduction, Productivity and Speed – robots can perform these simple operations at the fraction of the cost 24/7, and faster than humans do
- Legacy system integration – allow RPA to work with your legacy systems without the need to rework it with modern interface or APIs to still use it
- Compliance – robots follow stickily formatted paths and rules making sure 100% compliance while creating auditable process for everyone
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is business approach combining multiple automation technologies. Unlike traditional automation when one of the tasks is automated, in hyperautomation he goal is to automate the entire process.
What is Hyperautomation?
Hyperautomation is the strategy of combining different technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning and AI, to automate as many of the business processes as possible. Integrating these tools allows businesses to identify the tasks, design the needed workflow, deploy the bot that will do it, add AI layer for decision making phase and monitor the entire operation.
Hyperautomation fields and examples
- Loan evaluation processing – end-to-end workflow that collects user data, runs all necessary checks, does KYC (Know Your Customer) validation to measure the risk and later make a decision to approve or deny the loan in minutes
- Fraud detection – using established AI models and scanning millions of transactions at the same time to identify odd behavior and patterns to flag or block these transactions for further review
Hyperautomation advantages
- Data-driven insights – ML and AI allow for faster and more accurate decisions to be made while backing up everything with solid data
- Cost reduction – automating larger portion of the work allows reduce operational cost
- Coverage – automates both simple and complex tasks across the entire organization
- Adaptability – adapts the the ever-changing company needs and external factors
Agentic Automation
Agentic automation combines AI and machine learning (ML) with simpler automation tools like RPA or workflow automation to achieve a goal
What is Agentic Automation?
Agentic automation is the most complex form of intelligent automation, it uses AI to achieve goals rather than following rules. It understands the environment using large language models (LLMs), adapts to it, reasons to breaks complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps, and starts moving towards the goal. It can make independent decisions to overcome unexpected problems and continue the process until it’s finished
Agentic Automation fields and examples
- Finance – processing various invoice formats and processing data to ensure all entries are valid
- Customer service – intelligent chatbot that not only provides information but also gives solutions to the customer providing better customer satisfaction
- IT operations – monitor entire systems and instead of only sending alters, attempts to reboot the system, runs diagnostics or re-route traffic to keep systems stability
- Retail – monitor competitor prices, dynamically adjust prices, monitor inventory and send alerts for restock or do it automatically based on predefined plan
Agentic Automation advantages
- Autonomy – learns and adapts to achieve the goal without human intervention
- Problem solving – complex problems and broken down into smaller tasks so they can be better understood and processed
- Personalized approach – adapt the communication to match the tone or vibe of the customer and achieve better customer interaction
- Proactive actions – detecting solving issues at one stage often cause problems at others so AI agents proactively take measures to prevent it
Risk of implementing BPA in your organization
There are some risks in business process automation (BPA) process which need to considered. Depending on the industry and the nature of the company they vary and all need to be carefully estimated before blindly diving into BPA before planning everything ahead.
Technical Risks
- Integration – connecting multiple systems together is often a challenge the brings unexpected issues. Sometimes the integrations are too complex or difficult to maintain making the whole system fragile and unstable
- Data security – processing sensitive data in the automation process being health, financial or personal in its nature is another great risk if the system security is not golden bringing both legal and financial liability
- Data quality – feeding your BPA system bad or poorly formatted data can result in bad outcome and move errors further down the digital automated process
- Updates
Financial Risks
- Cost – BPA integration come become costly requiring time, people, software and post launch maintenance
- Unclear ROI – it can be really difficult to measure “better quality data” and justify the need of automating the process or parts of it
Operational Risks
- Lack of flexibility – automated systems are create to follow certain logical steps, rules and workflows which make it very difficult for them to solve corner cases and untypical events. And if the process is complex and with a lot of variations this can turn into a bigger problem requiring constant human intervention
- New problems – solving a problem at one stage can often simply move it to another place. Imaging having a problem processing high amount of data at very early stage, once this is solved the problem moves to the next department or system that can’t handle the new volume any more
- Downtime – creating fully automated process is great but if the automation fails due to server outage, update problem or misconfiguration the entire process may stop
People Risks
- Internal resistance – employees may resist the change thinking they may loose their jobs or avoid adopting the process and sticking to the manual process. Employees will try to find ways to bypass the process or even prevent it from integration in first place
- Knowledge gap – a fully automated process used for a long time and expanding in the organization can lead to employees not knowing why and how certain things are done leading to knowledge getting lost over not so long periods of time. And if the automation happens to fail the manual labor can’t keep the workflow going even at slower speed
BPA Advantages
Short term
- Cost reduction – reduce operational cost by removing manual labor from repetitive, time-consuming tasks
- Speed and efficiency – automated systems work 24/7 which reduces processing time
- Accuracy – removing humans from boring tasks in fact removed the error where slight distraction can lead to bad data entry or bad information transfer
- Visibility – automating the process makes it entirely transparent and visible to the management where the problems are and what can be improved
Long term
- Further cost reduction – implementing the process initially will safe some money but optimizing it over time will gradually add more savings to the overall cost
- Scalability – allow the company to deal with higher work load without the need to hire more people
- Decision making – gathering large volume of data and analyzing it can highlight missed opportunities or performance potential invisible if the process is manual helping management make more informed decisions
BPA fundamentals
Business process automation (BPA) contains several basic building blocks to create fully automated workflow.
- Process mapping – knowing your processes the first step in automating them, listing currently existing and used process is the cornerstone of BPA
- Process Orchestration – understanding the processes and making a decision how to what process automation tools
- Robotic process automation (RPA) – the digital worker that get things done working exactly like real human in digital environment
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) – the brain behind the hands, making all decisions and adapting to the situation
- Monitoring – allowing humans to understand what happens behind the scenes, giving visibility and data of the process in real time
What is the difference between Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
This is questions is often confusing people.
Business process automation is much larger at scale in contains in itself the robotic process automation. While BPA is focused on the entire process RPA is focused on specific task.
This of it as BPA being the coach in a team, arranging players, deciding strategy and assigning each individual player a specific goal, while RPA being the player itself doing what the coach says.
