What is Process Automation?
Process automation, also known as business process automation or business process management is the use of technology to automate routine tasks, such as data entry, routing information between parties, organising documents and more.
Today’s automation platforms use innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform increasingly complicated tasks, such as capturing information directly from documents. Still, humans are the ones who drive change and innovation. Automation simply allows them to do more as they work to keep the world moving forward.
Digital Transformation
Benefits of Process Automation
Increase Focus Strategic Initiatives
Give staff more time to plan courses of action instead of filling out forms, organising content or tracking down approvals.
Grow Your Business
Speed up turnaround times for customer-facing processes, boosting customer satisfaction and enabling you to take on more business.
Improve Transparency
Enable staff and executive management to see the status of current processes at every stage.
Reduce Costs
Minimise the cost of performing manual work, increasing staff and resource bandwidth for other initiatives.
Identify Bottlenecks Early
Easily track and report on processes to detect potential inefficiencies and address them promptly.
Make Audits a Breeze
Make data and document transactions easier to keep track of and account for, giving auditors a clear picture of how your business operates.
Digital Transformation
Examples of Process Automation
Process automation software can assist organisations with a wide variety of business challenges:
Contract management teams can manage projects and initiatives globally: Process automation can route important documents for approval to major stakeholders, wherever they are in the world.
Accounts payable departments can process paperwork faster: Gather invoice information quickly with AI smart capture technology, while utilising reporting features to track and monitor the entire AP process.
Human resources departments can reduce manual tasks: Automation tools can assist in eliminating manual data entry and streamlining the flow of information between different systems such as those for recruiting and onboarding.
Digital Transformation
Finding the Right Solution
Finding the process solution that fits your organisation starts with looking at your internal processes as they exist, identifying opportunities for automation and evaluating the marketplace for solutions.
Identifying your needs
Before looking at any solution, you should identify the processes you want to overhaul or optimise. You’ll want to gather as much information as you can on your internal processes before starting to research vendors. This includes:
What processes you plan to improve with automation.
If your solution needs to be used by one department, a few departments or the entire organisation.
What you need to deploy your new solution, including any hardware upgrades, or integrations with current systems.
How many users will have access to the system and what privileges they need.
What your budget is for this solution.
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Factors to Consider
Licensing structures
When choosing enterprise content management software for your organisation, it’s worth discussing how you want to license it. Below are a few key considerations:
Individual vs. volume: Many of today’s software vendors offer both individual and volume licenses. An individual license can be applied to a single machine, user, or in some cases a few more as part of the package, but usually less than ten. Volume licenses can be applied a few different ways, but usually represent a single license that can be applied to an entire organisation, saving time and resources for both the vendor and the customer.
Perpetual vs. subscription: When purchasing software, you may have a choice between a perpetual license and a subscription license. Perpetual licensing offers indefinite use of the purchased software for a large upfront cost, and may require you to update your software manually to take advantage of new features and bug fixes. Subscription licensing does not require you to pay as much upfront and instead offers software that’s automatically updated for a monthly fee. Typically, you also have the option to pay the monthly fee on an annual contract basis at a discount.
Deployment methods
Cloud: Cloud-based software offers customers an opportunity to install their document management system on another organisation’s servers. Popular platforms offering these services include Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure. These platforms and software solutions are usually offered as part of a subscription-based model, as an alternative to purchasing, maintaining or upgrading your own hardware. Although the solution is stored in the cloud, most modern cloud software vendors offer extensive security capabilities to address any concerns. Many cloud platforms even offer automated backups, increasing your ability to recover information in case of disaster.
On-premises: This option has you install software on your own hardware that you can configure how you see fit. If you are capable of procuring your own hardware and want complete control over security, this option may be preferred. However, on premises solutions are more resource heavy and cost intensive.
Implementation
A smooth implementation process is essential to realising a return on investment in your expected timeframe.
Here are some important characteristics you’ll need to look for as far as implementation:
Configurability: Many document management systems have simple and advanced setup options. Simple setups can be fast, but you may want an advanced setup’s configurability based on what other systems or databases your organisation already has in place. The most powerful systems will allow you to set up an advanced solution just as easily as a simple one. In addition to the system itself, you’ll also want to ensure it’s easy to set up user accounts and administer security settings.
System requirements: If you’re using an on-premises solution, make sure that your hardware meets your software’s system requirements and that you purchase any specialised components needed for the software to run. You’ll also want to note if any firmware is required to run a particular piece of hardware, or if it can work as soon as you plug it in.
Scalability: Even the simplest setup packages can become tedious if you need to utilise them multiple times for large deployments. Consider your prospective system’s installation process at scale and if it can be configured or installed on multiple machines at once when choosing your solution.
Records management and archiving: If your organisation is a part of or affiliated with a heavily regulated industry such as finance and government, you may find records management and archival features essential to supporting compliance efforts. Some ECM systems can even provide features to update the status of records, so you know immediately when records are ready for archival or disposition.
Process automation: When using enterprise content management software, you’ll want to know exactly what it’s capable of as far as automating processes. This is why it’s important to take a deep dive into the specific actions the software can automate, and if you can configure these actions to meet your needs.
Integration capabilities
Most organisations need their document management systems to work with other enterprise software. You’ll want to make sure the solution you’re assessing works with any software you’re using or plan to purchase in the future, and that you have the IT resources to set up, implement and manage any integrations. Here are a few types of integration tools vendors usually offer:
Application programming interfaces: These can be thought of as a list of commands you can give an application with code. If you have the staff resources, you can code custom integrations with APIs to creatively solve any communication issues between systems.
Pre-built integrations: Typically offered by the vendor, a third party or built natively within the software itself, pre-built integrations should only need a few details about an external system to integrate with it, and can appear directly within an application’s graphical user interface.
Code-free tools: In cases where a pre-built integration or an API doesn’t exist and you don’t have the resources to code your own solution, some vendors offer code-free integration tools. Many of these tools work by simply mimicking human behaviour, but with the processing speed and accuracy of software.
Capture tools: You’ll need to make sure your solution provides technology to capture and digitise your documents, such as invoices and contracts. The best ones can gather data from documents using optical character recognition, organise documents in the correct folder automatically and even process multiple documents in bulk.
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Download the Buyers Guide to Process Automation
Process automation enables enterprises to design workflows that reduce human error, manual work and process completion times while increasing employee bandwidth and enabling business continuity. Get our guide to learn how you can procure the right business process automation platform for your business’ needs.
