What is Business Process Automation?
Think about all the steps involved in common procedures like paying a bill, preparing an expense report, or requesting a set of vacation days from your boss. Doing these things manually and step by step can take hours . Including follow-ups, many can take days or weeks .
Business process automation (BPA) uses technology to automate manual tasks, dramatically accelerating their speed.
How? Automated systems can fill out forms, send emails, coordinate between people, validate data, and more. All in the background, without human intervention.
With APB, every task becomes an automated life insurance email list version of a checkpoint on a hiking trail. The trail itself is a major process—a customer opening an account, for example. Systems guide tasks in the right direction, track what hasn’t been done yet, and send a search party for anything that’s overdue. Some of the best business automation ideas include:
Route approvals or capture signatures
Coordinate the behaviors of different applications using APIs
Automatically check for unfinished tasks
Routine data entry
Feeding spreadsheets or databases
Complex workflows, such as opening new bank accounts
Report Generation
Submit and track customer and employee requests
Notify clients when processes complete certain tasks
Dealing with paperwork
File important documents in a safe place
Process automation can involve people, documents, applications, technology tools, and more. You can create automated or semi-automated workflows: systems perform tasks while team members handle the rest. The manual work incorporated into an automated process can include approvals, analysis, decision-making, or reviewing outlier data.