The Benefits of Business Process Automation
The rapid advancement of technology has catapulted automation across industries and businesses alike. Today, more and more organisations are deciding to automate their business and its processes. Likewise, the market itself is occupying increasingly modern and comprehensive business process automation solutions.
A 2020 global survey of business leaders from a wide cross-section of industries conducted by McKinsey & Co. found that 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one function, whereas 66% were steering solutions to automate at least one business process, up from 57% two years earlier.
Before we explore the ways in which automation is an effective tool to expand your business, let’s first define what it is.
What is Business Process Automation?
Business Process Automation (BPA) involves the use of technology to automate repeatable tasks and processes. Business process automation tools allow businesses to streamline critical processes to reduce the complexity of managing multiple tasks for one process. It routes information to the right person at the right time through user-defined rules and actions, accelerating how work gets done.
Here are some key elements to identify a task for automation:
- The process requires consistency
- The process is repeatable
- The process needs to be correct and error-free
The benefits of Business Process Automation
Automation enables you to increase flexibility while maintaining economic efficiency. Here are some notable benefits of BPA:
- Expands your service offering
- Improves efficiency and reduces error
- Increases cost savings
- Improves data collection
- Refines customer databases
- Saves and reallocates employee time
Business Automation examples
Here are 10 different examples of how companies are using BPA to their advantage.
1. Email automation
By automating your inbox, you can automatically process information from your email quickly and efficiently. With email marketing automation, you can respond immediately to an email contact request, send an abandoned cart email reminder, or send offers and deals to specific, segmented clients.
2. Automated file transfers
BPA enables you to incorporate file transfers into larger workflows that include tasks like encrypting and decrypting the files or entering the information they contain into an ERP system.
3. Automated order entry
You can utilise business process automation to automate your database interaction processes without composing a line of code.
4. Modernised sales-pipeline framework
Automation software organises the existing process that sales reps follow to close a deal. When the process is clearly defined, sales reps can move leads from one stage to another quickly and with transparency.
5. Targeted and ranked leads
Automation software enables you to rank each lead based on his or her engagement with your marketing efforts, helping set your priorities. Thanks to lead scoring, you can focus on the potential clients who are ready to buy over those who need more time.
6. Automated business application integration
Since businesses are using more and more applications, a lot of business processes can involve multiple business applications. BPA can easily bring them all together and consolidate your system.
7. Spreadsheet automation
Maintaining spreadsheets involves a lot of manual work and time. With BPA you can easily automate your spreadsheet process without macros or code. This saves you from entering data into multiple reports, copying and pasting numbers into a spreadsheet, or reformatting and manipulating Excel data.
8. Automated report generation and distribution
BPA eliminates the need for manually generating and distributing reports, reducing the possibility of errors and freeing up your analysts to do what they do best: analyse the data.
9. Cloud automation
With BPA, businesses can streamline and automate their entire environment, no matter where they are in their cloud migration process.
10. Automated HR processes
Various applications need to be provisioned when a new hire joins. Business process automation software can automate these redundant HR processes while keeping all relevant parties notified at each step.
