Has your organization reaped the benefits from a commitment to Business Process Automation (BPA)? Well, now is as good of a time as ever to explore that possibility. In this series, I am going to cover BPA and its potential value to your business and walk you through how we implement BPA in organizations with tools such Nintex and SharePoint.
A process by definition is a "a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end." After reading that definition, I hope you agree it’s almost indisputable that every organization has developed hundreds of processes to meet their business needs. Many of these processes may ‘get the job done’ but often require heavy manual interaction. Over time, inherent factors such as changing technology landscape, employees, business goals, and work styles cause a number of these processes to become outdated, inefficient, and time-consuming.
Luckily, it’s very easy to locate a great candidate for BPA because typically these processess stick out like a sore thumb and display recognizable characteristics such as:
- Labor intensive spreadsheets, email, conference calls, and paper documents through a makeshift approval chain
- No progress tracking or insight into status
- Accountability of stakeholders is non-existent
- Multiple attachments of the same document are sent around
- Process gets held-up or stopped by things like vacations or turnover
- Cross-department communication is time-consuming
- Silos are developed that perform a common function
It is important to start looking at these processes as key opportunities for your business to become more efficient, innovative, and productive. Making a commitment to address these opportunities can provide a numerous amount of short and long-term benefits to an organization. Benefits such as:
- Well defined roles & responsibilities
- Increased collaboration & creativity
- Process monitoring & insight
- Efficient & streamlined communication
- Reduced bottlenecks
- Faster turnaround times
- Risk mitigation
- Repeatable & reusable process
At Intellinet, we constantly work with organizations to develop a BPA plan and apply automation strategies and technologies to processes in every department. Here are just a few common BPA candidates that we frequently help our client’s in today’s landscape apply the practices of BPA:
- Marketing & Sales
- Proposal Generation Process
- Sales Opportunity Management
- Order Processing
- Sales Account Provisioning
- Marketing Campaign Management
- Human Resources
- Onboarding/Offboarding
- Leave Requests
- Salary Negotiation & Approval
- Interview Feedback
- Annual Performance Reviews & Succession Planning
- Complaint Handling
- Policy & Procedure Standardization
- IT
- Patching, IP, & Update Tracking
- Service Request Processing
- Device Inventory & Ordering
- Policies & Procedures
- Automated Data Transfers
- Automated Report Generation & Distribution
- Application & Event Log Monitoring
- Finance & Legal
- SOX Compliance
- Policies & Procedures Standardization
- Contract Management
- Legal Document Approvals
- Accounts Payable Approval
- Purchase Requisition Approval
Of course, automating any of these processes start with a commitment to providing a 'better way' through BPA, developing a thoughtful and strategic approach, implementing a flexible toolset, and employing change management to ensure new processes are adopted. There are many technologies that we utilize help automate manual processes such as Nintex Workflow, Nintex Forms, and Microsoft SharePoint.
In my next post, I’ll demonstrate the power of a BPA solution by walking you through a real-life example of a flexible and scalable Human Resources Employee Onboarding solution built with Nintex Workflow and Forms running on a SharePoint 2013 environment. In the meantime, feel free to contact us to discuss how Intellinet can help to automate any of your key processess or to see a demo of how Nintex Workflow and Forms can add value to your business