Key Points

• Business process automation (BPA) reduces manual errors, standardizes workflows, and frees up staff for higher-value tasks, improving overall efficiency and consistency.
• Automation lowers operational costs and enhances customer satisfaction through faster resolution times, 24/7 support, and more personalized service.
• From RPA to workflow and process automation, businesses can choose automation types that best fit their needs, with measurable outcomes like reduced handling time and increased agility.

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Every business is looking for a faster, smarter, better way to do things. Automating time- and labor-intensive manual tasks is the most impactful place to start.

Think of processes like invoice handling or inventory management. These business-critical operations directly impact profitability. Yet they require significant manual effort, often involving hours of repetitive work that can lead to errors and pull employees away from more strategic, high-value tasks.

Intelligent business process automation addresses these challenges. By using advanced technologies including AI and machine learning, businesses can streamline complex, repetitive day-to-day business processes and operations.

Why Automate Business Processes?

The benefits of automating functions that keep a business running smoothly are clear. Fewer errors and improved productivity are just the start. Automating core business processes delivers a range of measurable outcomes:

• Higher productivity and faster cycle times
• Lower operational costs
• Stronger compliance and consistency
• Better customer experiences
• Higher profitability and revenue growth

It’s easy to see why, in the past year alone, nearly 60% of companies – and 84% of large enterprises – have implemented software, equipment, or technology to automate a host of tasks. And this is playing out across all industries. For example:

• Automating claims processing in insurance is helping expedite the claims process and overcome what has long been an operational headache.
• Optimizing payer lifecycle management, revenue lifecycle management, and compliance processes in healthcare is significantly improving provider, payer, and patient outcomes.

No matter the sector, focusing on reinventing business processes end-to-end can deliver outsized performance and benefits.

Improve Efficiency and Standardization

It’s not difficult to see the link between automation and efficiencies. If the repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks – like invoice or claims processing – are automated and streamlined so that they are executed more rapidly, it means shorter cycle times and faster turnaround.

At the same time, automating business processes means they are carried out in the same, standardized way. This has a knock-on effect for ensuring consistency – which means processes are easier to manage and scale as the business expands. Uniformity also makes training staff simpler, while ensuring policy and regulatory compliance by making it more straightforward to track and manage audit processes.    

Reduce Cost and Manual Errors

Transparency and efficiency is only one aspect of how automation can drive better results. Faster processing times and greater productivity lead to cost savings. BPA further improves resource allocation, since business leaders can track and distribute resources where they are needed most.

Using automated systems with real-time monitoring can also help pick up and flag errors or anomalies, allowing businesses to resolve issues more rapidly.

Enhance Customer Experience

Quicker resolution times contribute significantly to elevating the customer experience so that it meets – and exceeds – expectations. Automated systems also operate 24/7, making it possible for customers to access the information and support they need at any time of day.

What’s more, automating routine tasks frees up employees to focus on providing more value-added services and personalizing the customer experience for increased satisfaction. This, in turn, improves loyalty.

Types of Business Process Automation

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to business process automation. There are various types of automation available to suit different business needs and levels of complexity.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA uses bots to automate rule-based, repetitive, high-volume tasks like data entry or transaction processing. It mimics human actions when handling and interacting with digital systems, pulling information from business IT systems and integrating with applications via an API to perform the required task.

Using advanced AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP) – known as intelligent automation – facilitates next-level capabilities. This allows bots to perform complex, intricate processes, either attended or unattended.

RPA is unlocking a growing number of use cases across industries, including:

• Manufacturing: Inventory and warehouse management, including allocating and replenishing stock.
• Public sector: Public sentiment analysis and document and form processing, including tax data reconciliation.

Workflow Automation

This form of BPA involves mapping out business workflows and automating them through software that manages the flow of tasks, data, and information. This includes sending emails, updating records, or routing information based on pre-defined rules. 

Workflow automation is seeing a burgeoning number of use cases emerge across sectors: 

• Retail: Inventory management, order processing, and customer relationship management (CRM), including personalizing customer experiences and optimizing the supply chain.
• Logistics and Transportation: Automating route optimization, delivery tracking, and warehouse management, including delivery times and supply chain visibility.

Intelligent Process Automation

This type of automation involves identifying and automating tasks that are frequently performed and involve minimal decision-making. It then leverages various technologies such as RPA, AI, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), and workflow orchestration to streamline how these manual tasks are carried out.

It’s effective for processes like invoice processing, supply chain management, and customer support. Specific use cases across industries include:

• Banking and financial services: Loan processing, account opening, fraud detection, and reconciliation, including tracking and reporting.
• Healthcare: Patient data entry, claims processing, appointment scheduling, and prescription fulfillment, including monitoring and proactive management.

Get Started With BPA in Your Organization Today

Smart automation is a strategic enabler. Selecting the right type of business process automation will give enterprises the edge in driving outcomes that impact the bottom line.

Increasingly, that means adopting solutions that combine RPA, AI, machine learning, and other technologies to facilitate hyperautomation at scale.  But what does this look like in reality? Robility®, an intelligent, self-service platform that uses advanced AI and machine learning to automate all business processes end-to-end, from the simple to the complex and everything in between.

The solution supports various deployment models and reduces the total cost of automation. It also drives measurable results: 52%reduction in handling time and 98%bot process accuracy rate just as a start.

For digital communications and cloud business solutions leader Avaya, in particular, implementing Robility® across its finance and accounting processes resulted in:

• 70% increase in operational agility
• 60% reduction in average handling time (AHT)
• 15% decrease in billing costs