6 benefits to business process automation
With business process automation (BPA), your company can reap many immediate and long-term benefits through the automation of daily operations, boosting its overall competitiveness.
What is business process automation?
As your business continues to process large amounts of data and tackle many tasks every day, it can become harder for team members to reduce margins of error and delays and improve inefficient systems. Business process automation enables you to build, manage, and optimize workflows that increase organizational effectiveness and productivity.
Business process automation is the automation of daily, repeatable business processes that are normally completed in manual settings. Ranging from multilevel workflows to simple customer responses, BPA offers you the ability to complete repetitive work and convert to paperless processes quickly and efficiently. This means automating jobs that deal with an excessive amount of raw data and documentation like product development, sales, human resources, and more. Adding business process management software (BPMS) helps you manage all of the new workflows created using business process automation.
The benefits of implementing a BPA solution
Once you understand which processes can and cannot be automated, as well as how to build a dynamic workflow for your team, you can take advantage of what business process automation software offers. Here are the top six benefits your organization can receive for automating your business processes:
- Improved efficiency and productivity. When adding a new automation solution that eliminates the possibilities of mistakes, your business is instantly more streamlined and incurs fewer errors. By removing the clunky and pain-staking manual processes your team does daily, you eliminate bottleneck tasks and accelerate more high-level business processes between business units, team members, and everyone within your organization.
- Reduced time and costs. Automation helps your business reduce costs and increase profitability, especially among teams that carry out their responsibilities using manual paper processes. Since automating processes accelerates your internal operations, it’s easy to save time and money on the resources needed to complete those processes, and you can retask those employees previously assigned on manual efforts to more important matters.
- Simple data and document management. When using manual processes, employees can lose track of written communications, spreadsheets, and other documents, whether printed or passed between emails. Plus, having to move information or calculate from one data source to the next means more chance for human errors, as well as more time spent. Process automation means that all your documents and data are housed in a single location, streamlining document management so that its organization and retrieval is simple.
- Visibility and transparency. You won’t have to provide additional support to your team since automation solutions help ensure that best practices are followed and governance is enforced. Through data gathering, reporting, and analytics capabilities, you can view data dashboards that provide visibility and transparency into what everyone is currently working on, enabling more informed decisions.
- Process standardization and compliance. Automation processes have strict guidelines on who’s able to make changes or update documents, but your team members might not always follow them. With BPA in place, you don’t have to worry about missed steps because the process is already built into the system. You can build an efficient digital workflow automation that ensures the right information is routed to the right person at the right time. This also means businesses will be able to keep track of who’s using what data—through logging names, dates, and assignment details without hassle. Documenting that information also helps you create audit trails and demonstrate compliancy.
- Improved employee and customer satisfaction. Adding an automated solution to your process will enable employees to get a lot of their day-to-day responsibilities completed easily without error, making your team much happier. Automation provides a friction-free environment in which employees can thrive. Manager approvals are faster, meaning your employees can focus on more important projects that motivate and innovate business decisions. And as a bonus, you’ll have happier customers. Because your customers will receive more accurate and consistent data, they’ll be more satisfied with the end product or results.
Start streamlining with Microsoft Power Automate
By adopting a new process automation, you’ll be able to make your work cost-efficient, streamlined, and less susceptible to errors. While BPA serves as a holistic approach to optimizing your business processes, adding software like a robotic process automation tool helps automate rule-driven tasks usually necessary at the beginning of a process.
The key to balancing BPA with RPA is to find one solution that you, your team, and organization can easily adapt to while not interrupting current business strategies. Power Automate builds scalable, time-saving workflow automations that can tackle all your individual jobs, enabling you to complete many tedious tasks in a short amount of time.