Starting with Business Process Automation

HappyWired’s expert view on….

Quick wins: Starting with Business Process Automation

It’s time to discuss low-hanging fruit, and how to start your automation journey with projects that add value simply and fast through Business Process Automation (BPA).

It’s worth thinking first about which processes yield the most benefit quickest.

These tasks usually have some shared features:

  • High-volume – they require a lot of human effort and time
  • Time-sensitive – they must be done within a specific timeframe
  • Repetitive – the work doesn’t require much human judgement
  • Error-prone – the manual process produces rather a lot of errors
Automation-Roacket

BPA reduces human effort, delivers very fast and works using rules. That means its benefits shine when introduced to these types of processes.

However, the amount of error that can be tolerated needs to be taken into consideration. Quality-control tests must be run before introducing BPA to a process that needs to run faultlessly. This will take time and may not always give you that ‘quick win’ we’ve promised.

There is a balance here. Is the possibility of error using BPA higher than the usual level of error generated by wholly manual processes? Some manual processes produce frequent errors: in that case, it’s still worthwhile to invest and get going fast.

Processes that often give quick wins and rapid returns using BPA without much development include:

That’s ultimately the goal for these quick-wins – providing value fast while leaving the door open for future improvements. By unlocking the capabilities of Microsoft 365, you too could rapidly improve processes.