Business Process Automation: 8 Status Quo Busting Benefits
The top benefits of business process automation go well beyond time and cost savings.
Highlights
- Increase process efficiency. Automation makes your processes better and faster, which pays off exponentially.
- Gain agility. As the world changes, so can your processes.
- Free employees to innovate. Business process automation empowers the team to focus on higher-value work.
- Reduce costs. You’ll continually eliminate inefficiencies and increase your speed with automation.
- Grow revenue. Deliver products faster, accelerate cycle time, and improve customer service.
- Improve accuracy. Automation technologies help reduce or eliminate human error.
- Streamline customer service. Automation makes your company easier to do business with.
- Increase compliance. Stay compliant with your target processes and any regulations you need to adhere to.
If you’re making the case for business process automation (BPA) at your organization, or evaluating expanding your use of it, understanding the full range of benefits is crucial. Perhaps you want to know how BPA could improve your interactions with customers or partners or help you meet specific goals. Let’s explore some of the potential benefits of BPA.
8 business process automation benefits: Making the case.
You may think BPA benefits are all about speed. And while you’ll certainly increase your operational speed, IT and business leaders who successfully automate business processes realize benefits ranging from simplified compliance tasks to improved talent retention.
1. Increase process efficiency.
Automation makes your processes better and faster, which pays off exponentially. Like we said, it tops the list for a reason: every business and IT leader wants to speed up their organization’s operations. Identifying inefficiencies in business processes saves staff time, whereas manual processes and repetitive tasks drain time and energy from your team.
2. Gain agility.
As the world changes, so can your processes. With a low-code business process automation solution that takes advantage of low-code and AI, you can map out complex processes in a visual way with reusable components that can be dragged and dropped. Some platforms even allow you to use natural language queries to build new workflows, which can then be shared, reused, and iterated on across teams and between business functions. This makes it much easier to adjust quickly instead of waiting for long development cycles. With these capabilities, you’re able to switch gears and rapidly respond to the changing business environment.
3. Free employees to innovate.
Rather than having employees focus on repetitive tasks, BPA empowers the team to focus on higher-value work. Once people can pass off the rote tasks, they have more time to work on strategic challenges, cross-functional projects, and collaborations that spur real innovation. Think about the ideas that went on the whiteboards at your last offsite meeting but did not progress toward completion—was that because your team’s bandwidth is maxed out? BPA can help you free up team time to innovate on strategic priorities.
Bonus benefit: Talent retention. BPA improves employees’ experience by getting rid of those manual tasks that negatively impact their engagement and satisfaction.
4. Reduce costs.
Although you do have to spend to adopt new automation technologies, you’ll continually eliminate inefficiencies and increase your speed by using them, ultimately resulting in long-term savings. Seeing everything related to one process in a single interface helps improve decision-making, while process reports and continuous process improvement lead to finely tuned workflows that cut costs. AI-powered content processing saves time on manual tasks while redirecting employees to higher value work. Business rules ensure processes can’t be worked around.
5. Grow revenue.
BPA software will help your organization deliver products faster, accelerate every automated process, and improve customer satisfaction. The enhancements from a process automation platform create faster time to market and improved customer experience—and give you more time to focus on business development and other innovations—which overall leads to more sales and revenue.
6. Improve accuracy.
We have all interacted with business processes involving manual steps that can introduce errors. Particularly when an organization has many data silos, people will gradually create their own hacks and workarounds to save time. Machines don’t make copy-and-paste errors from spreadsheets and dashboards, and the data management capabilities present in BPA software, like data fabric, make it easy to surface data in one place. This helps teams realize additional time savings, because they’re not spending hours chasing down the sources of data mistakes or dealing with the results of those mistakes.
7. Streamline customer service.
It’s essential to maintain a top-notch digital experience for both your customers and your employees if you want them to stick around. Optimizing business processes to improve customer experience—whether you’re working with customers, constituents, partners, or other external parties—can provide true competitive differentiation.
Think about the factors that automation can influence, such as reducing wait times, delivering and gathering information quickly, and providing immediate status updates on inquiries. These can all significantly improve customer service and increase customer loyalty.
8. Improve governance and compliance efforts.
When it comes to compliance processes, organizations cannot afford human error. Automating compliance tasks not only reduces room for mistakes but also creates a digital, fully auditable record of activity logs.
Adding automation to compliance processes can help organizations meet stringent regulatory requirements and industry standards and avoid fines. Automation also allows for continuous monitoring, which supports fraud prevention efforts.
5 helpful questions to help you realize the benefits of BPA.
To actually see these benefits at your organization, you have to invest in the right technology.
Consider these questions when you evaluate business process automation software to help you realize value later on.
Will the BPA tool help you bridge the gaps between your existing technology? Rather than doing an expensive rip-and-replace project, look for a platform that can integrate with your existing technology.
Will the vendor guide you on your digital transformation journey? A BPA vendor should be a partner and a leader in the space.
Will you be able to unify your enterprise data and govern it through the tool? Improving the ways you access and synthesize your organization’s data helps you surface insights that focus your innovation efforts where they matter the most.
Can the software help you augment the delivery experience of digital solutions with AI you can trust? Not all AI is created equal when it comes to data privacy. Look for solutions that offer private AI.
Can you orchestrate, automate, and optimize the full scope of your operations? Think beyond the first deployment to ensure you can support your entire BPA approach.
Keep in mind that BPA involves not only tools but also changes to the way teams work. This enables them to reap the benefits of BPA, which range from time and cost savings to increased employee engagement and team agility—a top goal of digital transformation efforts.
