Business Process Automation (BPA) refers to the strategic automation of business processes in order to save time, money, and resources. This typically consists of integrating applications and applying software to routine business tasks.
Not sure if your business needs automation? Here is a list of commonly automated processes to help you identify opportunities for automation in your business processes:
Accounting: Many tasks associated with accounting and bookkeeping can be effectively automated:
- Generating invoices
- Scheduling payments
- Payroll processes
- Budget Approval
- Cheque requests
Employee Processes: There are many common tasks associated with managing employees that follow a general a pattern and can easily be automated in part or in full such as:
- Time logging and time tracking
- Vacation, Leave, and Paid Time Off request and approval
- Hiring and recruiting
- Travel request and expense claim approval
Sales and Marketing Processes: While marketing initiatives shouldn’t be automated in full, many of the tasks associated with an effective marketing strategy can be automated:
- Responding to inquiries
- Quote and proposal generation
- Social media campaigns
Job Scheduling: By automating job scheduling you can eliminate errors and delays associated with manual interventions. Automation can be applied to task scheduling, event-based activities, and orchestrated execution across multiple machine networks:
- Increase workload without the need for additional labour or hardware
- Track data associated with each task
- Synchronize file transfers with workflows
- Automate alerts and error management
Batch Processing: Over fifty percent of current application processing is comprised of batch processing. Automating batch processes enable you to:
- Increase consistency and repeatability
- Simplify the creation of batches
- Handle errors more easily due to increases error data
- Centralize workload automation and control
Report Generation and Distribution: Don’t waste time creating reports, manually entering data, and distributing them via email. Automation enables you to:
- Automatically gather data from applications, the web, or internal databases
- Schedule and generate custom reports
- Organize reports
- Share and collaborate on reports
Data Transformation: Having data access across platforms is crucial to streamlining business processes. Through automation you can access, transform, and transport it to other applications and databases.
Problem Resolution: Many common errors can be resolved without the intervention of an IT professional. Rather than waiting for IT personnel to note and correct errors, utilize automation software to recognize and rectify problems quickly.
Software Testing: Product testing can be time consuming and costly. If quality assurance consumes a lot of your staff resources you should seriously consider automation. By using automated software testing you can easily execute pre-scripted tests on an application before going into production.
Application Integration: If you are using multiple applications such as Salesforce, Basecamp, and High-rise those programs should be integrated to eliminate redundant data entry and share files and other information.
These are just some examples of commonly automated business processes, virtually any standardized business process can be automated either in part or in full. Do contact us for the automation projects that you have in mind.