Business Process Automation (BPA) if you haven’t heard of it, is a way to save costs, reduce downtime and streamline a range of mundane tasks in your business to free up skilled staff and dedicate them to more strategic work.
Gone are the days where you need employees to complete repetitive tasks. Instead, with the implementation of BPA, you can automate complete business processes using technology, and minimal human involvement.
We define a business process as an activity or group of activities that are in place to achieve an explicit organisational objective.
How BPA Improves Every Aspect of Your Business
BPA is a broad subject, and in case you don’t know why you would use it in your business, here are some reasons why you shouldn’t delay. Using BPA is a sound business decision and designed to make your life easier, so let’s dive into how that can happen:
Efficiency increases with reduced human involvement
The idea of automation is not to put people out of work but to automate mundane and repetitive tasks and give human workers more interesting work to focus on. Technology doesn’t get bored, distracted, or overtired and works at a consistent speed, and is ideal for tasks like customer support ticketing or an automatic marketing channel.
Save money by reducing operational costs
Being able to decrease expenditure is a bonus for every business owner. When you automate tasks, you are eliminating steps that are time-intensive, saving on wages and resources especially when you look at your technology as a long-term investment.
Consistent quality is easy with BPA
Technology performs an action the same every time. It doesn’t forget steps in a process and replicates the required quality each and every time without cutting corners. Processes can be easily tracked, audit trails are available, and essential data analytics are generated by the software.
Productivity increases
Automated processes are consistent and quicker, and more efficient than if the same activities are performed manually. Paperwork is decreased as more functions are handled electronically, and your employees can do more complex tasks instead in the time available.
Greater process accuracy
Accuracy is important to every business, and preventing errors is way easier than fixing them after they have been made.
Data analytics becomes more accessible
With the right settings, data can be collected every time a process is run. This gives you invaluable data to track metrics in real-time that, when analysed, can help you make important decisions to create a growth strategy for your business.
Examples of How You Can Use BPA
You will be amazed by the enormous range of processes that can be automated. There really is no limit as solutions can be specifically tailored to fit your business leads.
Here are a few examples to get you started:
- Managing staff records: make employee onboarding paperless by automating collating personal information, required forms, setting up payroll details, and allocating workplace resources.
- Streamlining your purchase order system: purchase orders are a big element in most companies, automating the process negates the need to be forever shuffling through piles of paperwork.
- Customer/supplier invoicing: simply keep all of your invoices in one place with an attached approval process that makes sure the process flows easily and on time.
- Generating reports: automatically generate and distribute reports that are needed to support your everyday operation.
- Simple accounting: not all accounting tasks can be automated, however simple tasks that are time consuming can be automated to free up staff for more complex tasks.
- Manage meeting calendars: set it up so that you can organise meetings automatically, including invites, to make it easier to ensure that they are managed efficiently. Meeting automation platforms (MAPs) provide features to not only support your meeting but enhance communication and post meeting follow-ups.
- Management of facilities: decentralizing processes enables a quicker response time, more accurate maintenance monitoring and an audit trail to track the entire process.
- Communicate across your business: update staff, customers and other shareholders easily with automated communications.
- Marketing channels: you can automate the email blasts to qualified leads, that have automatically been tracked, monitored and nurtured.
A Few Last Words
BPA is a big subject that enables BIG results for your company. Cost savings increased productivity and accessible data analytics are just a few of the many areas you can benefit from when you implement BPA in your business.
