Everyone wants their business to make huge profits. To do so, either you can make more sales of your product or service or you can reduce the overall operational cost of business. While increasing sales is not exactly in your hands, reducing costs seems to be a great option. This will lead to less expenditure and more amount can be added to profit. But how to reduce the operational cost? This is not as complicated as it sounds.
With technology to your rescue, you can easily achieve your target profit. More and more businesses are opting for Business Process Automation Solutions to make the most out of their available resources. This article will tell you everything about BPA and why you should be using it in your business.
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Business Process Automation (BPA)
BPA is basically using technological tools to automate key processes of your business. This helps in replacing manual efforts, increasing productivity and ultimately gaining better profits. It should not be confused with Industrial Automation (IA). Because, BPA is used to automate workflows and processes, while IA is used to automate tasks to reduce physical labor.
BPA cuts on different costs and resources to gain profit. But it itself requires some investment. While this investment can be a considerable amount, Its long term benefits make it profitable. Not every process can be automated. For automation, a process must be:
- Consistent across the organization.
- Repetitive in nature.
- Error-Free.
- Not requiring human interference or logic for completion.
BPA is often also confused with Business Process Management. But these two are not similar, as BPM looks over all the ongoing processes in the business and BPA looks over just a few of them, which are automated. So, it can be said that BPA is a subset of BPM, but they are not similar.
Implementation of Business Process Automation
Different organizations carry out BPA in different ways. But they all follow some basic principles. Those are:
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Simplification
A complete understanding and analysis of processes have to be done before jumping to automation. You should simplify the process to its greatest extent and then look if it even needs automation or not.
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Keep it Simple
Make sure the automated processes are simple and are not complicating the work even more.
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Flexible
The automated process should be enough flexible to change according to the needs of the business.
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Seamless Integration
The automated process should integrate with all the other processes, without any problem.
Remember, the main aim of BPA is to make things work seamlessly while making it simple. So, make sure that you don’t make things tough with BPA.
Benefits of Business Process Automation
BPA is not just used to gain better profit, but it provides many benefits to a business. Here are some of them:
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Saves Time and Increases Productivity
A human mind can work on a certain speed and cannot concentrate on more than one task at a time. If pushed more than that, it tends to make mistakes. While business process automation, work can be done faster. It helps in freeing up time to be invested in better productive work. This will increase productivity and help in growing the business.
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Better Visibility
The tasks can be monitored at any given point of time and the status can be checked. This helps in managing any deadlines and making sure that work is done seamlessly.
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Maintain Quality
Again, humans tend to make mistakes, especially in routine work. By automating the work, it can be done properly every time. This also makes sure that if a good service is provided, it is provided consistently and there are no ups and downs in the quality.
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Excellent Customer Service Can Be Delivered
With automation, the quality of customer services can be increased. You can simply compare telling your problem to a customer service agent and filing a complaint online. The latter requires very few efforts and is more efficient. So, by automating customer service processes, better service can be provided to the customer.
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Error-Free Communication
While transferring important information, from one person to another, there can be a loss of data. This can result in creating blunders. With automated processes, a centralized view can be provided to all the people working on the process. This will make sure no information gets lost and no error is made in transferring it.
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Cost-Saving
Costs can be reduced in two ways. One, by saving the costs that are spent on errors, as automated processes do not make errors like humans. Two, by saving time. As automation saves plenty of time, it can be used to do more productive work to achieve better targets and producing better profits.
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Makes Processes Reliable
As the process gets automated, the chances of missing out on any information or step are not possible. And as every process is properly documented, and with automation, no documents can be misplaced. This makes automated processes more reliable than manual processes.
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Easy Management of Tasks
There can be processes that might involve more than one department of the organization. And if they rely on each other for particular tasks, then communication must be required between them to check the status of that task. This is again prone to errors and delays in work. With automation, all departments can see the status of the process at any point in time. And this is easier than calling and emailing as this can be done is a few clicks.
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Boost to Employee Morale
To get the best out of resources, organizations usually make their employees work for longer shifts. And most of the employees end up doing routine repetitive work. This ends up making the employees mentally frustrated. With the automation of processes, repetitive work is done is very conveniently in less amount of time. Which gives the employees enough time to engage themselves in other high-value work.
Conclusion
You can see that, with Business Process Automation, the overall work of the business can be done in an efficient way. Which means it requires less time, fewer efforts and fewer costs. The overall quality of work can be increased with automation if done properly. So, imposing this in your business will help in growing your business and making better profits.
