Put simply, Business Process Automation (BPA) is using software to automate your day-to-day business processes. In one company where we implemented a BPA system, the weekly administration effort required by office staff to service a national workforce reduced from 3 days to 3 hours. In this example, the owner chose to reduce the size of his office team and moved into smaller premises, thereby realising a major benefit in his bottom line. Benefit 1. BPA can help you reduce the size of your workforce. Benefit 2. BPA can help you significantly increase the capacity of your business without increasing the size of your workforce. The basis for BPA is very simple: As you conduct your business, you record your information in a central database, instead of a collection of separate spreadsheets, word documents, email messages, bits of paper and phone calls. The information you record is entirely driven by your needs, but could include: customer names and contact details; product specifications and pricing; company addresses; order details and delivery terms; invoices and payment terms; phone conversations; minimum and actual stock levels; and so on – anything you need to carry out your business and keep things running smoothly. As part of setting up the system, 'Business Rules' that are specific to how your business operates, are set up within the software that make things happen automatically under certain conditions. Imagine you are a company that receives a large volume of requests to send out brochures or product literature. A system could be configured to: acknowledge the enquiry by email; add the person's details to list of prospects; notify the local sales person and/or area sales manager by email and/or SMS; and instruct a member of the marketing team (or an outsourced supplier) to post out the requested brochures. All of these steps have occurred without anyone having to pick up a phone, send emails, update spreadsheets and/or customer lists. Taken across hundreds or thousands of such enquiries this would equate to a major saving in the manual effort required to operate your business. Whilst these types of system have been around for several years, until recently they were priced out of the range of all but the largest of organisations. With the advent of open source software and cloud services, companies of any size can now access this type of system. To find out more about how Business Process Automation could improve your bottom line, contact us for a no-obligation initial consultation.
I am an IT Project Manager, Business Analyst and Consultant with 23 years’ experience in private and public sector organisations on 4 continents.
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