Business Process Automation

As recession hits businesses with its full force and organizations are looking for ways to become more productive, business process automation has become the buzzword. So what exactly is this concept which is destined to become the next big thing in the coming years? The process of streamlining, optimizing and automating the key processes that drive the business, is referred to as business process automation. It also denotes the process the business uses to cut costs, by integrating applications, cutting labor and substituting software applications for manual processes.

The role of any organization is to maximize the shareholder's return of investment, for which it need to identify any unnecessary amount of work and inefficiency of labor. Custom BPA software seems to be a solution for this which allows the organization to pro-actively detect and respond to events making the business processes robust, faster and better.

The Process of Business Process Automation

The process of BPA rests on three critical pillars referred to as orchestration, integration and dynamic process automation. Orchestration relies on easy-to-use and visually compelling interfaces, to transform the data and events into actionable information for enabling decision making. The process of integration on the other hand, allows critical data existing along disparate platforms to be read, modified and exchanged. The third and the most important pillar of business automation is automated execution which allows the organization to streamline manual repetitive tasks and manage the development process to remove the hassles in the long term.

Business Process Automation Tools

Business process automation has been around for a long time and is used by customers to automate a plethora of business processes like data gathering, invoice processing and account provisioning. However, while the traditional BPA tools were costly and difficult to use, the newer approach has seen the introduction of sophisticated tools for queuing up work, assigning it to sources, meeting service levels and tracking the results. The standard business process automation softwares such as ERP, SCM and CRM have a fixed integration of the process definition and software technology. If the organization did not want the project logic of an ERP system, it usually resulted in major developmental investments and problems with their integration and maintenance. This resulted in the increase of business costs.

The next generation business process automation are supported by software architectures and consists of three main components: process definition, integration and application. While the application softwares provide the functionality needed to support business softwares, integration systems which are referred to as business process automation engines, enforce the necessary process logic through their work flow component. The enterprise integration component (EAI) ensures the availability of the data. These softwares combine the flexibility necessary for supporting next generation business at acceptable costs.

There are specialist companies who are marketing the tool sets built for BPA which tend to focus on the industry sectors. With the implementation of these tools, organizations can visually lay out processes, create graphical forms for the employees to use and put the automated systems into production. Along with superior speed, these softwares have integrated concepts like quality monitoring, real time supervision and workforce optimization. This has made business process automation, a compelling option for organizations looking for a quantifiable return of their investment.