Business Process Automation (BPA) can be a game-changer for many organisations. You only need to take a quick scroll though LinkedIn to see articles about the changing landscape of business, new working models, employee retention concerns, etc. As we continue to adapt to this world of constant change, embracing a continual improvement mindset that encourages process automation and enhancement is a key element to remaining agile and adaptable.

Automating processes can free up you or your team’s time to focus on work that requires more attention or strategy, which in turn can help set your organisation up for success.  

While it can often deliver measurable cost savings, it is important to understand that the goal of Process Automation is rarely about getting rid of people. It’s about creating opportunities to be more productive and efficient. When you take basic repetitive tasks and automate them you can gain the productivity of extra staff without actually having to hire new team members.

The potential benefits of automation can be incredibly powerful and valuable, however it’s important to be clear about what exactly you are trying to achieve. Several years ago I wrote another article on this topic and concluded with the advice “Don’t start an automation project by trying to fit a product into your business”.  I still stand by that advice but would now go a step further and add “Always begin by first understanding the processes you want to automate”.  

“The road to automation begins with understanding your processes.”

The first step in any Process Automation project should be to start by understanding your processes. Very rarely does choosing a product and then shoehorning it into your organisation lead to a successful outcome. You need to understand not just the individual tasks that make up a process, but also consider why those tasks are the way that they are. You need to consider the flow of the process and all the people that need to be involved in it. You need to understand the consequences of what happens should there be an exception or error in the process. And, of course, you need to understand the cost and risks associated with a process. Understanding the process is key to the success of the whole project, and that understanding does not come from starting with a technology or product and trying to see how it fits. It comes from understanding your business processes intimately. Not just as a sequence of events in a workflow, but from a deeper recognition of WHY your processes are structured the way they are and what they are designed to achieve.

Although the benefits of automation are powerful, you shouldn’t necessarily try to automate everything. Just because you can, that doesn’t mean you should. The goal of a BPA project isn’t (or at least it shouldn’t be) automation simply for the sake of automation. The project itself should have specific and measurable goals. For example, those goals could be around accuracy, security, efficiency, speed, or delivering a better customer experience.  

BPA vs RPA

These days it's difficult to have a conversation about automation without someone dropping the acronym “RPA” into the mix.  I often find myself in conversations with people that share their desire to do an RPA (Robotic Process Automation) project and my first question is usually “Why?”.  This can often reveal that RPA is being used synonymously with BPA. While there absolutely are projects that will legitimately benefit from RPA, and also projects where RPA may indeed be the best solution to achieve the desired outcomes, RPA isn’t a silver bullet that fixes everything.

At the risk of oversimplifying, Business Process Automation (BPA) is a general term that relates to the automation of business tasks or workflows. On the other hand, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a specific type of tool / solution that can be used in the delivery of some BPA projects.  

RPA uses Robots (‘Bots’) to mimic repetitive tasks that a person would normally do. The bots are programmed to quickly perform a series of tasks based on a pre-mapped sequence of events. They are designed to mimic human behaviour by replicating how a person would do the same tasks, albeit with increased speed and accuracy.  

Bots typically come in two main flavours:  

• Attended Bots – These are usually workstation based and require a user to initiate them.  They could be as simple as scraping data from an open application and migrating to another, or it could take to form of new buttons on overlayed tool bars to perform time consuming manual processes.
• Unattended Bots – These are usually server based or hosted. Often their triggers to begin are based on a timer or another event such as watching a folder for new files. These are often also used for batch processing regular batches of documents or data, especially if that information is usually keyed into a system manually.  

RPA is in many ways an ideal tool for backward compatibility. If you have a legacy system that has a cumbersome, expensive, or functionally limited API (or perhaps even no API at all), RPA is an ideal tool for creating automation around data integration. Its screen-scraping and click-mapping abilities lend themselves perfectly to emulating the manual repetitive tasks that users tend to loathe doing.

However, one of the challenges around the "P" in RPA is that the word "Process" implies a sense of completeness and suggests a workflow will be improved.  Very rarely is RPA a forward-thinking platform as RPA projects often neglect the transformational need to redesign a process. Instead, they take an existing sequence of tasks and automate them to plug a gap in the user experience. When we strip it down to its basic elements, most deployed bots are automating user tasks, not business processes.

It's essential to remember that RPA won't fix a bad process, it will just speed it up.

If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be this: Don’t start a BPA project by trying to fit a product into your business. Invest time into understanding the reasons behind your processes and challenge the assumptions around why things are done that particular way. If you don’t have the time to in invest in that kind of review, then perhaps that in  itself is a symptom of a larger issue…?

Once you understand the details behind both the WHAT and WHY find a trusted advisor that shares your vision, understands your challenges, and can offer fresh innovative ways to achieve your goals. 

Get in touch if you'd like to discuss your business process automation project.

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