About Automation
Business process automation
Explore how to take productivity and efficiency to new heights by automating the multi-step, multi-system processes that cross departmental and organizational borders.
- What is business process automation?
- Is BPA different from robotic process automation?
- What are the core components of business process automation?
- Why should you automate business processes?
- Benefits of business process automation tools
- Use cases for business process automation
- How to automate business processes
- How does BPA relate to BPM?
- Business process automation software
If you’ve ever been involved in a process that involves a lot of manual work to perform data extraction or data entry across different systems, review and check information, or create and distribute documents, entries, and reports from data, you know how dispiriting and tedious it can be. Complex, multisystem, multi-data processes like invoicing, contract review and management, HR recruitment, IT provisioning and security, and more may be critical to a company’s functioning—but they also can be the bane of your worklife. It’s not particularly interesting or rewarding work—but it still requires concerted attention and focus. It’s not the highest-value work you could be doing—but it still has got to be done, and done well. And it’s unrelenting—there’s always the next month’s close, a new employee IT ticket, the latest contract to redline and enter into your systems.
But what if those complex business processes could be redesigned to allow intelligent automation to take on the vast majority of these tasks? That’s exactly what business process automation (BPA) can do. Imagine a workplace where work flows unencumbered across the organization and no one is bogged down with tedious tasks. That’s what BPA can deliver. And the more widely it’s used across an organization, the more benefits it can deliver.
What is business process automation?
BPA involves using a range of automation and AI-powered technology to automate repetitive tasks and repetitive processes within a business. Its goals include improving the speed and capacity of a business to streamline workflows, drive up operational efficiency, effectively leverage data and manage data flows, and connect processes seamlessly across different systems and parts of an organization. It is “workflow-centric,” in that it typically starts by rethinking and streamlining complex, multi-stage business processes—leveraging modern technology such as automation and artificial intelligence to do so. It’s customizable to address the specific needs of companies who use it. As such, it’s not limited to any one industry, a particular company size, or a single kind of workflow or business process. From healthcare to financial services to manufacturing to the public sector and beyond, business process automation can help companies enjoy higher operational efficiencies, improved employee and customer experiences, and much more.
Is BPA different from robotic process automation?
The short answer is, robotic process automation (RPA) is one of the core technologies used in BPA, but it’s not the only technology. But let’s dig a little deeper.
At its essence, RPA is advanced technology that enables software bots, instead of people, to interact with screens and systems and take action based on what they “see” there. RPA is a core, well-established, and proven approach for automating routine, rules-based, and repetitive processes with expected inputs and outputs.
RPA tools and, more recently, complete end-to-end RPA platforms feature low-code user-friendly interfaces and other automation capabilities. The drag-and-drop, intuitive capabilities make it easier for automation beginners to get up the learning curve and build simple automations. For more sophisticated RPA developers, the best RPA tools and RPA platforms also offer a range of tools and capabilities to help them rapidly build and launch more complex automation solutions, including templates, selectors, pre-built automations, and faster ways to debug automations and put them into production. The ease of use and scalability of these platforms have contributed to their rapid growth.
That said, there some things that RPA alone can’t accomplish; it needs more “brainpower” to be able to understand, parse through, and take action on more complex and nuanced information, efficiently process fully digitized information, and work effectively with less predictable and structured processes. So, business process automation that relies solely on RPA will undoubtedly hit roadblocks in fully automating processes end-to-end.
Happily, new technologies and major advances in both foundational AI and generative AI have radically expanded both what workflows and activities can be automated within a business process and the speed at which those automations can be operationalized. For example, foundational and generative-AI-enabled breakthroughs that allow robots to quickly understand complex forms, documents, and emails, accurately recognize optical characters (OCR), and identify and interpret images have transformed intelligent document processing—which is something that virtually every end-to-end process requires, at some point. enabling high-scale email processing and triage, automated claims review and settlement offer development, real-time data entry and data extraction, and much more.
So, in a nutshell, the most effective BPA approaches will draw on both RPA and a range of new and emerging capabilities—including intelligent AI-powered automation, API integration,
GenAI, and specialized AI models—to successfully and seamlessly automate multi-step, multi-system processes that span different departments, systems, and third-party apps. Moreover, BPA requires data integration, process orchestration, In the section below, we discuss some of the core capabilities that BPA requires.
What are the core components of business process automation?
To fully implement business process automation, you’d need to ensure you have capabilities in a wide range of areas:
Workflow Automation: Automating sequential tasks and processes to ensure the smooth flow of operations.
Data Integration: Integrating data from various sources and systems to enable seamless communication and information exchange between different parts of the organization.
Rule-based Decision Making: Implementing predefined rules and criteria to automate decision-making processes, such as approving requests or routing tasks.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Using software robots or "bots" to mimic human interactions with digital systems, such as filling forms, extracting data, or performing calculations.
Business Process Management (BPM) Systems: Implementing software platforms to design, execute, monitor, and optimize business processes. Includes orchestration.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Leveraging AI and ML algorithms to handle more complex tasks, make predictions, and continuously improve automation processes.
What is a business process?
Automating business processes sounds great, doesn’t it? But what exactly is a business process? A business process is any set of linked tasks that are performed in a specific sequence to achieve a set goal. Examples of business processes include:
Order fulfillment
Hiring and onboarding new staff
Invoicing
Quality control checks
Inventory management
Email triage
Claims management
Contract management
Compliance monitoring
Why should you automate business processes?
Without automation, complex business processes rely on people to dedicate their time and effort to complete time-consuming, monotonous tasks. Such tasks are prone to human error, bottlenecks, and other inefficiencies. Moreover, making people perform these lower-value tasks means they can’t focus on higher-impact activities. If they’re inputting customer data, they can’t interact directly with customers. If they’re trying to manually close out the quarter, they don’t have time to analyze what’s been happening during that quarter. There’s a real toll—in terms of both organizational efficiency and effectiveness—when processes that can and should be automated, aren’t.
BPA aims to remove these inefficiencies by limiting human effort and input into processes solely to the areas where they’re essential. Letting fast, accurate, and always-on robots handle the “automatable” parts of a complex business process ultimately speeds up work flow, cuts down bottlenecks, creates capacity for people’s higher-value work, and reduces error and rework.
Benefits of business process automation tools
The positive impact of business process automation across an entire organization has been well established across hundreds of thousands of use cases. Large organizations might free up hundreds of thousands or even millions of hours per year, while also driving substantive cost savings, significantly improved compliance, reduced errors and rework, and higher customer satisfaction.
But let’s leave this big picture and take it down to a human level—your level. How might BPA change your daily work life?
To start, let’s suppose you audit your daily processes and determine that a third of your work could be automated (which is not an unusual finding for many types of jobs). If your company applied BPA to your situation, here are the benefits you might enjoy:
Doing more in less time
It’s a truism: manual processes are completed at human speed. But robots work at digital speed—which can be up to 10X faster for detail-oriented tasks requiring high accuracy. Moreover, manual processes are also subject to human timetables. That means if you stop to take a break or are pulled away for a meeting, the task remains paused until you pick it up again. BPA ensures processes are performed continuously, regardless of human work schedules. Robots don’t need breaks and can work around the clock, meaning processes are carried out faster than ever before.
Limiting mistakes
Software robots, when trained correctly, are far less prone to committing mistakes than we are. That means less time lost fixing mistakes. Moreover, processes can be designed with “people in the loop” to review anomalous output or confirm important decisions or actions. That further limits both errors and the potential impact any errors.
Getting more fulfillment from your work
Let’s look back at the one-third of daily tasks you’ve turned over to software robots. They’re being completed faster and more efficiently than ever before. You don’t have a backlog or face the constant pressure of working under ever-renewing deadlines. You’re no longer chasing people on email or waiting for a supply order to be approved to move on. With a third of your day now freed up, you can focus on higher-level objectives that add more value to your business and are more rewarding for your personal growth.
Raising the bar and the bottom line
At the end of the day, businesses need to worry about the bottom line. With BPA implemented throughout an organization, more is being done with less. Therefore, decision-makers can adjust their strategy and deploy their resources more effectively, adding value from the boardroom to the breakroom.
Use cases for business process automation
As previously mentioned, BPA is adaptable to meet the specific needs of those who use it. With that in mind, here are two HR-focused use cases for BPA.
- Hiring
- Employee onboarding
Hiring
The hiring process can be long and arduous. Hiring managers need to sort through hundreds, if not more, resumes in search of suitable candidates. With BPA, much of the process can be automated, giving the hiring manager more time to focus on more involved aspects of the process.
For example, an AI-powered software robot could use document understanding to screen every single resume that’s submitted. The robot could then filter out those candidates that don’t meet a certain threshold.
Once a selection of suitable candidates has been gathered, Generative AI could draft specific interview questions for each candidate based on their individual experience. This enables the hiring manager to focus on strong candidates rather than searching for a needle in a haystack.
Employee onboarding
The paperwork and documentation associated with bringing a new employee on board can be daunting for both the employee and the HR professional. And first impressions matter—a new employee wants the process to be seamless, quick, responsive, and intuitive. By employing BPA, the new redesigned process could allow a software robot to automatically send the required documents to the new hire’s email address on file. Then, when the signed documents are returned, another software robot could enter the information from the documents into internal systems, such as accounts payable, HR records, and more. If the employee is required to attend training sessions or orientations, another robot could automatically schedule those meetings and track and record participation.
How to automate business processes
Below, we lay out a step-by-step approach for implementing BPA for a complex process.
Step 1: Discovery
If you want to automate your business processes, you first need to figure out which processes are best suited for automation. In the past, this would have required you to perform a thorough manual audit of your processes to discover those that met certain criteria. However, now you can use AI-powered technology like process mining and task mining to identify your processes and sub-processes that are best suited for automation—giving you the detailed information you need to kickstart your efforts and focus on your most valuable and feasible opportunities.
Step 2: Generation
Once suitable business processes have been identified, you can begin to create the automations. Those with some coding knowledge can create automations. However, GenAI can also help write code, and in some instances, create entire automations. You can also train the software robots to follow steps by performing the steps yourself.
Step 3: Implementation
Once the automations have been created, implementing them into your business processes is the next step. At this juncture, you should test the automations to ensure they’re working properly.
Step 4: Expansion
As previously mentioned, the more widely you deploy BPA throughout your organization, the more value you can derive from it. This step is all about continuing to identify new opportunities for automation.
How does BPA relate to BPM?
Another similar term to BPA is business process management (BPM). BPM is the strategic planning and mapping of business processes throughout an organization. In simple terms, BPM refers to removing any unnecessary steps to ensure that all internal processes are running as smoothly as possible.
BPA and BPM have a similar end goal—improve process efficiency while reducing errors. However, they each play a different role in achieving that goal.
BPM takes a holistic view of improving process efficiency. It’s an ongoing effort throughout an organization to determine best practices for improved process efficiency and achieving strategic goals.
One way to think of BPM is that it represents the overall strategy for improving process efficiency, while BPA is a tool implemented in that strategy. Ultimately, BPA and BPM are best employed together, with BPM determining the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ and BPA representing the ‘how.’
Business process automation software
If you’re considering a BPA solution, you need to consider how it will fit into your existing systems. The UiPath Business Automation Platform seamlessly integrates with your legacy systems, APIs, and third-party apps.
See how BPA is employed across industries and departments to help both businesses and employees reach their optimal potential. Discover more about the UiPath Platform and take the first step on your automation journey today.
