Business Process Automation

What is Business Process Automation? Business Process Automation (or Automated Workflow) is reducing the amount of repetitive work seen by your work force, by defining what work should be carried out by a computer in response to work being completed by a human being or even by another computer. Some people view it better as 'piping', so you pipe outputs of one system into the inputs of another, creating an information flow that is fast, definitive and accurate.

Why would you want this? Let me ask you another question, why would you not want to save your staff effort and time. We have a customer whose staff used to manually produce 150 invoices per day, and stuff envelopes to send them out. They now have a database with all relevant information in there. It reads the orders from sage, the staff just tick the ones they want from the list of all orders/invoices (they tick all of them usually), and click Send.  The database does the rest. Each customer receives their invoice by email. It's saved the staff 6 labour hours every day, every single day forevermore. It saved the franking, the hassle, the envelopes, the issues with people being off sick and cover staff forgetting bits of the complex process. There were instances before the new database where invoices were being missed completely for months, and not being sent out (Orders Despatched but not invoiced). it just happened because of chance, with people off sick, and time passes by, change of staff, people forgetting where the 'orders despatched but not invoiced' report was in sage, forgetting to run that report each week, just too much to remember for one person/team when it's busy in the sales office. it's partly bad organisation, not enough staff, and the business losing track of data, due to a set of circumstances. We actually spotted the old orders that hadn't been invoiced, during analysis, and it was a shock to the directors when it came to light.

The database is now an integral part of that daily process. It also does other things, like automatic Sales Order Acknowledgments. which helps prevent mistakes made by anyone along the way. A customer portal is next on the agenda for them.  It's something that can be added to and added to, and then stop for a while to catch your breath, take stock, and then decide on the next refinement. It frees up humans to do what humans are good at, - solving the day-to-day real world problems in their business/job context.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over after over and expecting different results." - If we accept this is true because it's common accepted phrase, and we know its true ourselves, then this can be rethought of/rehashed as being  "it's insane to not get a computer to do the repetitive things over and over again" - because it's impossible for a proven and designed automated system to not achieve the same results each and every time. If the inputs are the same and the process is the same, then the outputs will be the same. Meaning, you can rely on a computer to do a set of tasks in response to a single input from a human, over and over again. Because the benefits well outweigh any drawbacks.

	1 input =  several guaranteed outputs (an email, a text, 4 reports created, always prints the correct label on the correct printer in the correct office, displaying results on a tv screen in the warehouse, the possibilities are endless)
	Consistent outputs, consistent results. eg. An emailed template response to a customer will always be the same format, always have the 8 required items of information on it. Humans forget occasionally, mis type, or put the wrong post code on something.
	More free time for humans to handle the non-repetitive tasks, the unique tasks, the exceptions that occur during a working day. Whereas if they had the repetitive things to do as well, these exceptions would take longer to process, or not be processed to customer satisfaction.
	Saves time, more throughput of work can be done per member of staff
	If an automated process has to change someday, as is inevitable, it is changed in the system 'once' and from that moment on it is changed forever. whereas training a human to change, incurs mistakes, learning curve, inconsistent results if some humans remember to do the change and some don't. Someone's on holiday at the time of changing the process, Chinese whispers effect occurs when they return from holiday and told incomplete information by fellow workers because they're too busy to train the returning member of staff properly.
	Improve business information flow, just overall, it's more professional. Look at amazon warehouses, 90% automated. Your business could have one automated process feeding into another automated process.