Business Process Automation Strategies: A Guide to Choosing the Right Approach

One of the most crucial tasks for every company is to find a way to ensure the highest business productivity at the lowest costs. In some cases, such a combination may seem impossible or not feasible. To achieve a bigger quantity of the produced items or performed tasks, a lot of businesses have to sacrifice the provided quality. This is definitely not the best solution. But what if we say that you do not need to make any concessions, to achieve your business goals? This sounds rather interesting, right? And that’s exactly what you can get with the correctly chosen business process automation strategies.

What is business process automation?

The concept of business process automation (BPA) presupposes the use of technology to perform recurring tasks and reach better efficiency. In other words, technologies are applied to replace manual effort to improve productivity, reduce operational costs, streamline processes, minimize errors, and enable employees to focus on more strategic activities. Moreover, with automation, business process execution becomes more regulatory-compliant as it allows companies to enforce standard procedures to meet the existing requirements.

Examples of business process automation

In the modern business world, there are dozens of examples where automation can make sense. While some use cases can be domain- or even company-specific, some others are quite common. Here are a couple of examples for your consideration.

• Human resources (HR). It is possible to automate the process of collecting employee information, document verification, and setting up accounts. Moreover, with automation, recruiters can efficiently streamline job postings, candidate screening, and interview scheduling.
• Sales and marketing. Automated systems can capture, qualify, and assign leads to sales representatives. They can be also used to facilitate email scheduling, CRM updates, and work with sales quotes and proposals. An example—is the project of our team, an app for a travel agency that we built to track client information.
• Finance and accounting. In this sphere, it is worth automating invoice generation, validation, payment tracking, salary calculations, and approval workflows for employee reimbursements.
• Customer service. Digital solutions can analyze, assign, and prioritize customer inquiries to appropriate teams, as well as automate surveys and feedback collection.
• Healthcare. Business process automation can be of great help for patient record management, appointment scheduling, reporting, and billing. A good example from our practice is the development of a mobile app that was expected to connect vet clinics and pet owners. Among all the available features, it’s worth mentioning scheduling and management of appointments.

Key features of business process automation

Before considering business process automation strategies, you need to get a good understanding of the core BPA features and elements.

• Workflow automation and management. It helps to automate sequential tasks and approvals within a process, as well as implements predefined rules to ensure consistent execution.
• Task scheduling and triggering. It is able to schedule tasks to run at specific times or trigger them based on certain events.
• Real-time monitoring and reporting. It provides dashboards for tracking the progress and performance. Moreover, with its help, users can see bottlenecks and inefficiencies to continuously improve their business processes.
• Integration. Automation solutions allow businesses to connect different systems, like CRM and ERP, to enable seamless data flow.
• Notifications and alerts. Automation tools can send notifications and alerts to users about task updates, approvals, or deadlines.
• Scalability and customization. A good modern business process automation platform should allow users to customize workflows to meet specific needs. Moreover, it should support scaling up. This is important to accommodate increased workloads or expanded operations.

How to choose the right business process automation strategy

Business process automation strategies can vary based on the needs and peculiarities of your activities. That’s why their development and implementation require a complex approach. At Akveo, we have rich experience in process automation, which allowed us to prepare a universal plan for building a business process automation strategy.

Step 1. Identify processes suitable for automation.

You need to analyze existing workflows to define repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks. We always recommend our customers focus on processes that will provide the highest ROI after automation. For example, this could be HR or customer support tasks.

Step 2. Set clear goals.

You should define specific outcomes that you want to get:

• To reduce process completion time;
• To cut operational costs;
• To improve accuracy, etc.

It will be helpful to apply the principles of SMART goals. It means that your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For example, if we are talking about cost reduction, you need to add more details, like: We should reduce our expenses related to hiring by 20%. This should be achieved in 4 months after the implementation of automation tools for candidate screening and interview scheduling. These tools will allow recruiters to reduce the time typically allocated for such tasks.

Always establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.

Step 3. Use the right tools and technologies

Today the tech market offers a wide range of solutions of different types and complexity for automating business processes. Though it is impossible to name all the available options, we’d like to share at least the most commonly applied types of such tools.

• Robotic process automation (RPA). These solutions rely on so-called bots that are designed to mimic human actions. They are able to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks like data entry and report generation. You can find more information about RPA here.
• AI and ML. The role of AI in business automation shouldn’t be underestimated. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are widely applied today to implement intelligent decision-making and predictive analytics. Moreover, AI is often used now to power chatbots for customer support.
• Low-code and no-code tools. A low-code business process automation platform can become an excellent solution for businesses that are looking for simple and efficient ways to build and manage their workflows. These platforms allow companies across various industries to avoid expensive and time-consuming custom app development processes. Modern tools of this type provide broad possibilities for customization and integration with external systems and services. It means that even rather complex enterprise-level processes can be successfully automated.

Step 4. Simplify processes.

You need to streamline workflows by removing unnecessary steps. That’s why to make automation implementation easier, you should eliminate all redundancies. Nevertheless, you need to leave space for scaling up. Your processes should be able to deal with increased workloads as your business grows.

Step 5. Develop a phased implementation plan.

It’s very challenging and sometimes even impossible to automate all your existing processes just at once. That’s why well-thought-out business process automation strategies always start with small, manageable pilot programs. They are simple to introduce. And at the same time, they help to validate the benefits of automation.

After the initial success of smaller projects, you can proceed to more complex workflows.

Implementation of business process automation: Practical tips

When you have a good business process automation strategy, you need to introduce it in the right way. And here’s what you can do, to make all the changes as smooth as possible.

Tip 1. Train and support employees.

When introducing automation, your main idea should be not to replace your employees but to facilitate processes by giving them powerful digital tools. Every user of automation solutions should know all their benefits and functionality.

Given this, you need to provide training to help employees understand and use automation tools effectively. You should be ready to address resistance to change by highlighting how automation benefits people’s roles. Let’s be honest, automation greatly helps to deal with those tasks that employees typically do not like at all. Instead of handling monotonous boring processes, people will have time to focus on more creative and strategically important processes.

Tip 2. Support cross-departmental collaboration.

You should try to involve in your automation projects all stakeholders, including IT specialists, business teams, and managers. With efficient communication, you can ensure that automation meets all organizational needs. Working together and discussing the existing processes, all team members will help you find the best approaches to automation.

Moreover, if you choose a relevant no-code or low-code business automation process platform, non-tech experts will be able to participate in building apps and workflows.

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Tip 3. Monitor and optimize your automation efforts.

It is not enough just to implement automation once and leave it as it is. It is obligatory to regularly evaluate automated processes against predefined KPIs and identify areas for improvement. To facilitate this task, you can use analytics tools.

To ensure long-term benefits, you need to continuously update automation workflows. This is explained by the fact that your business requirements continuously evolve and something that worked well a year ago, won’t be the most appropriate idea now.

Should you hire business automation consultants?

If you have enough knowledge and information, you can create your business process automation strategy on your own. However, to be sure that you will be able to reach the desired results, it can be a good idea to consider establishing cooperation with professional business automation consultants.

That’s not a rare case when businesses invest quite impressive amounts of money into automation solutions but can’t ensure the expected productivity. And many tasks still have to be performed manually. As a result, such projects lead to extra expenses, instead of reducing operating costs. That’s why to avoid time and money losses, it’s vital not to make a mistake and not to go in the wrong direction.

To be on the safe side and succeed on the first try, it’s worth investing in business process automation consulting. If you want to get more information about such services, we recommend you read one of the recently published articles on our blog. To do it, just follow the link.

Already looking for professionals who will support you in finding the right approach to automating your business processes? At Akveo, we are always open to cooperation. For more than 9 years, we have been successfully working with companies from different domains. This helped us accumulate exclusive expertise. We can understand various business needs and offer the most efficient solutions to address them. Do not hesitate to contact us to learn more about our services.

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