Every business has to provide a product or service to its customers — whatever that service or product is, though, defines what you do with your operations as a whole. Business process automation, or BPA, refers to the automation of these operations, or your business process. In BPA, it’s common to organize your business processes into a workflow, or an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of your operation’s activity. A process automation software, in short, is a way to organize the resources necessary for a business process to automate it as one large suite of active microservices — an orchestrated collective.
What Is Process Automation Software For?
When you automate your business processes, you’re doing it because you need to be able to combine several processes into a single system — as hands-off as you can make it, a working machine with substeps all its own. Each process in place then becomes a micro-process, or a microservice, that when added together in the eventual throughput of your business, creates a service or product of its own. BPA software is used to bring all these services under one roof, to automate and visualize a pattern that identifies all the essential microservices of your business process — and it’s for that reason that many business owners and business process managers all over the world prefer to implement a workflow this way.
Why Does My Business Need One?
Not every business needs a BPA program to process their orders and to create a quality product for their customers. But chances are, you will have to decide if it’s right for you at one point or another. The following factors can be great indicators of whether a process automation software makes sense for your business.
1.Size of the Business Process
You have to consider first whether your business has a lot of microservices in play when you provide your products to customers. While a business with a single, uncomplicated service may not necessarily require this type of workflow to keep track of the business process, an entity whose process includes many steps would find such organization helpful. The size of the business process, including its complexity, is a chief determining factor in whether your business would need and benefit from a process automation software — but keep this in mind: Business processes often grow over time, and depending on what you offer, there may come a time when the relatively uncomplicated offerings you once delivered are requiring much more attention and even orchestration and automation.
2.Task Repetition & Automation
You might see that your business process is built around various tasks that are handled manually at the expense of your time, and the worst of these are often repetitive. If this is the case, it may be time to consider a process automation software that organizes these tasks to avoid need for repetition, and automates them within the workflow to create the same outcome at a faster rate and with a smaller margin of error. Whether it’s the volume of tasks, or the simplicity of them, there’s always the chance that your time is better spent elsewhere. So why not let a BPA program design the process to fit your needs and your resources?
3.Limited Visibility & Optimizability
If you find yourself unable to identify performance according to certain goals, or to have an ideal holistic view of your business process, a process automation software might be the best way to fix this. With these programs, there’s a way to understand and view all of your process at once, and to even identify its various levels of performance thanks to the reporting that comes with a process automation platform. Thanks to the organization of your applications and microservices, there’s an added bonus to the visibility of your performance metrics: in many cases, you can make changes and improvements to optimize your process more easily than ever. Automation tools like Camunda can even pinpoint the location of bottlenecks and technical issues, and if it’s used to store your business rules, your workflow can even simplify many essential fixes to the process. Rather than having to edit specific programming to each node of a process, there is an added ability to fix essential business logic within the process automation software itself to correct issues that are affecting the whole process.
4.Quality Inconsistency
If you’re providing a product or service, chances are, not every outcome is the same. If that sounds about right, then you might have to consider what parts of your process require consistency in order to create a quality product. Is it something that can be automated? Is it something that can be monitored? Whatever it is, a process automation program can aid in providing that consistency, whether it be by monitoring performance, or by letting a machine take over a manual human task in order to decrease the chance of error. Quality is important, and the only way in certain business processes to ensure consistent quality is to make sure certain conditions are met every time. Whether it’s by organizing your workflow, automating it, or optimizing it, a tool that helps you accomplish this is definitely worthwhile.
Conclusion
What process automation software does for a business depends on the type of business process, and in many cases, there are several benefits to consider. What you need today may even constitute a closer look at how BPA can help your business in the future — so keep these factors in the back of your mind as your business grows!
