Is Business Process Automation (BPA) Right for Us?

How to determine if it is the right thing for your company.

It’s pretty simple.
Every company generally has two primary groups of processes they could automate.

The first group consists of activities common to all companies. This group includes standard business actions such as help desk support, customer service, human resources hiring and termination, filing expense reports, or making sales calls.

The second group of activities is industry specific. Insurance companies process claims, hospitals access healthcare records, banks process credit applications, and the government processes all kinds of forms daily.

In both cases, such activities are often manual, repetitive and costly by way of time and employee resources. This is the biggest clue for your company’s need for business process automation.

Here is a checklist of other common business scenarios that indicate a need for business process automation. The more of these you have, the greater your potential benefit in automating key business processes.

• Do your employees manually process routine procedures? (Or perhaps more appropriately, how many?) If “yes,” this represents an ideal place to see the benefits of business process automation.
• Do your employees spend more than 35% of their time doing repetitive or administrative tasks? If you’re inclined to answer "no,” check again. As business precautions and notification steps get added to such tasks, it’s not uncommon for processes that previously were lean and focused to grow into a bloated series of steps. . Many of these repetitive actions can be automated, and many administrative tasks can be systematized to eliminate the manual steps involved.
• Would losing knowledge experts (employees or managers) who are key to specific processes negatively affect the company or reduce performance in their department or business unit? Organizations often overlook this personnel factor because they believe “What that person does can’t be automated.” Not true. Look more closely and you’ll see that most people-driven manual processes can indeed be automated, and that once such processes are systematized, your company’s risk of personnel loss is much lower. Are you struggling to reduce labor costs, increase output, and speed up handling and processing— or all three? Individually and collectively, these are common benefits of business process automation, and frequently make an immediate and positive ROI impact after deployment.
• Does your industry strongly require regulatory compliance, IT governance and security? Industries such as health care, insurance and financial services find that business process automation automatically documents the Who, What, When, Why and Where in their processes for compliance reporting and associated governance and security.
• Is your workforce spread across multiple locations? Business process automation unifies a workforce and increases their effectiveness by distributing work and using skilled, available employees in all locations.
• Do executives, managers and supervisors have little or no visibility into work status, relying instead on occasional “status reports” to make important management decisions? Business process automation provides live, concrete, up-to-the-second status information to improve business decisions. As importantly, detailed historical reporting provides a complete review of past performance to reveal areas for improvement as well as future trends.
• Do your current processes require employees to “pull” work to be completed? With business process automation, work is “pushed” to an employee, eliminating the delays that stem from a worker having to track down the next piece of work.
• Must employees navigate between communications systems, business systems and business applications to complete their work? Business process automation acts as an umbrella over other systems and apps, giving employees a single environment in which to manage the entire workflow.

So then the question becomes, if all companies have a need to automate their business processes, where do I start?

Begin by carefully evaluating BPA solutions. Not all BPA systems provide the capability to perform each automation task your business requires. The unique integrations to applications and communications at the core of Interaction Process Automation™ (IPA) from Interactive Intelligence mean deeper connections to your business applications — along with the ability to automate a wider variety of work throughout your organization.

Learn more about Interaction Process Automation™ and what it can do for your business.