<strong>What’s Driving The BPA Boom In India Inc</strong>

Automation has become the de facto standard in enterprises, freeing employees from repetitive work and utilizing their competencies in core roles that have a higher value. This, in turn, increases employee satisfaction and boosts productivity, while companies can benefit from the long tail of efficiently allocating human capital effectively. 

Business process automation (BPA) has become imperative for companies to navigate the ongoing socio-economic headwinds. A global slowdown coupled with rising labor costs has compelled business leaders to find better ways to leverage their human capital and automate repetitive processes that do not require manual intervention. 

Most organizations had dived into BPA much before the pandemic, be it sending automated onboarding emails to recruits or marketing messages to potential customers. However, COVID-19 saw an increasing number of enterprises embrace it as workplaces become more distributed and turnaround times narrower. At the same time, the scramble to retain existing customers and gain new ones became more harrowing.  

Soon, almost every department—be it HR, marketing, operations or supply chain—took the BPA plunge. These divisions often dealt with a high volume of time-sensitive information and tickets of a recurrent nature. They also would involve the participation of multiple people in addition to adhering to compliance and audit guidelines, which can be a trifle challenging when people are working remotely across geographies. 

Myriad Benefits Of BPA 

By leveraging innovative technology, including automation tools, process intelligence capabilities and cloud platforms, companies ensured that their employees could stick to industry best practices in their respective job roles without sacrificing the quality of work.  

BPA offers many business benefits, with key amongst them being increased productivity and lowered costs. Moreover, allowing workers to focus on more intrinsic roles instead of repetitive tasks can also result in employee satisfaction. By defining BPA, errors can be reduced, which often seep in due to human intervention, and save time. 

With workflow automation of menial tasks, companies can also be assured of better customer service because of reduced error rates, which can result in higher revenues. Moreover, the tech team can view all workflows on a single dashboard, which gives them better insight into its progress, including its success and failures. This transparency can help them further fine tune the processes and ensure all compliance regulations are adhered to. 

Dealing With the Hiccups Along The Way

While BPA becomes increasingly crucial in the digital transformation journey of most companies, it begs the question of whether every process is worthy of being automated. While identifying the processes best suited for BPA, it is best to look for repetitive ones involving large amounts of data, like manpower onboarding. Automating these tasks can reduce manual effort, mitigate errors and, most importantly, decrease costs.  

While talking about cost savings, several processes, like automating invoice dispensation or inventory management, can help bring down processing costs and inventory-holding expenses. Thus, BPA can ensure a higher return on investment when the right processes are automated. 

Moreover, companies can opt for automating processes that require a high degree of accuracy to lessen miscalculations and lower the risk of non-compliance. Similarly, they can pick and choose processes that are likelier to significantly impact customer experience and satisfaction since automation can reduce processing time and enable faster responses to customer inquiries.

BPA is an evolving exercise and enterprises should continually evaluate how automated processes are impacted by changes in governance regulations and economic and competitive factors. This can be done by identifying bottlenecks as well as opportunities for improvement by asking for input from all stakeholders, be it employees, customers and management.

RPA: The New Era of BPA 

While BPA stands for automation of business processes that streamlines and improves them, the world is now pivoting towards robotic process automation (RPA). This subcategory concentrates on automating how people use software applications in the workplace. 

Businesses are increasingly leaning towards it because it offers a rapid gateway for their employees to interact with data across enterprise applications, which are now becoming a mainstay in many companies. 

Moreover, with the growing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, they can use bots, which usually are low-cost and easy to implement across many mundane processes. Since these do now need custom software or deep systems integration, they can be up and ready to work quickly, allowing companies to organizations to focus on harnessing their human capital judiciously without making significant expenditures. 

In the new economy, employees are the biggest asset for companies, and unless they are well-harnessed, organizations will end up with the short end of the stick. Leveraging BPA effectively helps enterprises keep their workforce well engaged, which results in a positive work environment and ultimately benefits their bottom line.

Authored By: Nilesh Satpute, Founder & CEO of Applied Cloud Computing