What Is Business Process Automation?

What does business process automation mean?

Business process automation (BPA) is the use of technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks. BPA accelerates how work gets done by routing information to the right person at the right time through user-defined rules and actions. Thus, organizations can leverage this technology to streamline processes such as employee onboarding, accounts payable, contract management and more.

Why is business process automation important?

It isn’t just about replacing paper with PDFs—business process automation aims to make processes more cost-efficient, streamlined, error-proof and transparent. With automated processes in place, organizations save time and ensure best practices are implemented to improve overall operational efficiency.

What business processes should you automate?

Almost any business process you can think of can be enhanced in some way by automation. Still, some processes are better suited for automation than others. When assessing candidates for automation, you want may want to take a closer look at processes that are:
  • Consistent across the organization.
  • Repeatable.
  • Require little room for error.

What are some examples of business process automation?

Below are three common business processes and how organizations drove positive change through automation:

HR Onboarding

Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering wanted to keep its commitment to increase student enrollment, but needed to hire new employees to manage this potential influx of students while keeping costs down. Their legacy HR onboarding process, however, was paper-driven and time-intensive. If the college was going to meet its goal, it needed to eliminate inefficiencies and streamline employee onboarding.
Chart showing employee onboarding process before and after automation.

Automating HR onboarding with Laserfiche enabled the College of Engineering to hire more than 3,400 employees in a little over one year. Since its initiative’s success, other departments at Texas A&M have also began reengineering their own processes, sharing that successes campus-wide and creating a new culture of collaboration and innovation to make processes more efficient.

For more information on how your organization can find similar efficiencies, check out our guide to HR automation.

Accounts Payable

The City of Boca Raton’s accounts payable process relied heavily on paper invoices and copies being manually routed. Sometimes paper copies would be misplaced or delayed on someone’s desk, leading to unpaid invoices and upset vendors. Chasing down paperwork and answering phone calls from vendors was taking up employee time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Chart showing accounts payable process before and after automation.

Leveraging business process automation, the city was able to track all its invoices from the moment they were received to final payment. The city significantly reduced processing errors while boosting customer satisfaction as a result of a faster and more efficient process.

For more information on how your organization can use business process automation to better manage invoice processing, check out our guide to accounts payable automation.

Contract Management

To continue its mission in keeping families out of poverty, non-profit organization Heifer International needed to increase efficiency and facilitate easier collaboration across its teams and partners worldwide. With documents built up from decades of work and hundreds of contracts requiring review per project, Heifer needed to centralize information and streamline contract management processes to help more people, faster.

By acquiring and deploying a system that could effectively automate processes, Heifer enabled its team members to collaborate on a worldwide scale on projects that help families, from Arkansas or Nepal. Legal contract reviews are streamlined, expediting the execution of projects including delivery of food and supplies. After its success implementing business process automation, Heifer continued to identify more back-office operations that could be made more efficient, freeing up resources for program initiatives.

How do I automate my business processes?

Most business process automation is done using a software platform. Choosing the right one can be a challenge, but once you do the rest is quite easy. Most have a low-code interface to help you design out how you want the process to work.

Then, once your process is created, you choose how it is triggered and what it outputs, such as a process that starts when you fill out a form and ends when you get a confirmation email. To that end, it is usually beneficial to have a process automation platform that is included in a robust document management solution, that includes a repository and forms functionality. Having process automation capabilities and the features that support them within the same software is far more convenient than having to bridge the connections with other solutions.

What is the difference between RPA and BPA?

Despite sounding similar, business process automation (BPA) and robotic process automation (RPA) are in practice quite different. RPA usually allows you to program a rudimentary software robot, or “bot” to perform basic data entry or other repetitive tasks to save time, usually using the same graphic user interfaces (GUIs) that users do. On the other hand, many BPA automations may be standalone or work on the backend of other software, outside a user interface, to retrieve information as needed.

While a bot may be easy to train by recording a human doing a repetitive task, a BPA solution may require more strategy and planning to implement effectively. Still, in many cases a BPA will likely cover a wider variety of uses cases and provide more end-to-end solutions. In fact, many BPA solutions may use RPA, but only as part of its broader functionality.

For an even deeper dive into the differences between RPA and BPA, check our our blog post here.

Customer Spotlight: Sky Telecommunications

Learn how the HR department at leading telecommunications company Sky was able to deliver more efficient services for its 25,000 employees by leveraging automation.

Browse customer reviews of Laserfiche on G2

Get insights from real customers on why Laserfiche is a top choice for organizations looking to streamline processes.
Read more laserfiche reviews

Continue your journey

Laserfiche has plenty of resources to help you find the right process automation platform and learn how to get the most out of the one you choose.

Discover Laserfiche’s 4 Steps to Innovation

Also be sure to check out the below infographic “Laserfiche 4 Steps to Innovation” to see how Laserfiche users can not only deploy solutions quickly, but get involved with a larger community of innovators.Infographic showing the Laserfiche's four steps to innovation: asking what needs to be automated, seeing how others use Laserfiche, downloading and using solutions and sharing with others.

Download the Process Automation Buyer’s Guide

You can also download our free resource, The Process Automation Buyer’s Guide for more background on what to look for in a process automation platform and how to procure the right solution:

Download the process automation buyer's guide.

Explore the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace

See how a robust process automation platform like Laserfiche can speed up the deployment of your solutions with process templates found on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace. Visit the site to browse and download pre-built workflow templates for many everyday processes, including contract management, onboarding, front desk sign-ins and help desk requests.

Compare digital process automation vendors with G2

You can also check out the G2 Grid® for Digital Process Automation (DPA) to compare top vendors on the market. G2 is a website that collects and offers millions of business software reviews.
G2 Grid® for Digital Process Automation (DPA) Software

Records Management Makeover, Kentucky Style

Kathy Jenisch, Records Manager for Kentucky Sanitation District No. 1 (SD1), had quite a messy document management problem to clean up.

Her organization, the second-largest public sewer utility in Kentucky, had been fined $40,000 for failing to produce just eight pieces of email — and that didn’t include the operational expense of paying several employees to spend six hours a day for three weeks searching for documents they couldn’t find.

Then she discovered that the organization’s offsite storage facility was allowing records to get moldy or rodent-infested — leading to the destruction of almost six tons of documents.

On top of that, she had to comply with a new state government transparency law that required her to create a website that displayed records about the organization’s financial expenditures as well as its annual budget and annual audit.  The records needed to be searchable, updated monthly, and maintained on the web site for at least three years.

The solution to all these problems was obvious. Digitize SD1’s records.

That’s not to say it was a simple process. SD1 did it on a project by project basis.

One such project involved 27 tubs of documents. Jenisch spent $20,000 hiring a digitizing service to prepare and scan the documents. The job was completed in five weeks, as opposed to the years the department estimated it would have taken to do on its own, she says.

Having records digitized paid off when SD1 had to respond to requests for documents associated with a state audit. Instead of pulling HR file folders from archive and hand searching for the documents, the search took only a matter of minutes. SD1 was also able to summon up historical documents dating back to the creation of the organization, board meeting minutes, policies and procedures, travel expenses, board and staff contact information, and budgets. SD1 could search and copy everything to a CD in about an hour. Without digitized documents, it would have taken days to comply with the audit request. SD1 passed its state audit with compliments to its record keeping, and aced its local annual financial audit as well.

Jenisch has advice for other organizations contemplating a similar move. “Just start somewhere,” she says. “Pick a project and get started.  You can’t mess it up, it can always be changed or revised.”

3 Reasons Electronic Records are Safer Than Paper

People can have a strange kind of cognitive dissonance when it comes to electronic and paper records. Many people won’t think twice about handing their credit card (with the security code prominently displayed on the back) to a high-school-aged waitress. Similarly, they may have no problem leaving their credit card bills and checks in their mailbox for hours or even days. But if you ask them to use paperless billing or online bill pay, they’ll refuse because they’re concerned about security.

Something similar can happen in organizations. When companies convert from paper to electronic documents, many employees suddenly become concerned about the security or the privacy of their data…even if the organization has not traditionally been concerned about the security of its paper records.

“Nobody asks about privacy when the data is in folders sitting on desks,” Dr. Rhonda Dean Kyncl, assistant dean for academic services for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, said in her presentation at Empower 2013. “But it’s held to a different standard when it’s online.”

It’s important, of course, to safeguard the security of electronic records. But many people don’t realize that electronic documents are inherently more secure than paper records. Evidence supporting this was published as long ago as 1996, for example, in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical informatics Association.

Here are three important ways paper records are vulnerable.

Inappropriate access: This can occur when people gain access to unlocked record storage areas and file cabinets (particularly when they look like they belong there). It can also occur when they find records left on counters, offices, or copy machines, or receive misdirected fax copies. In fact, whenever paper copies are sent to other places — whether it’s other offices, insurance companies, or government agencies — the data on them can be read by mailroom workers, administrative assistants, and other unauthorized individuals. This access could be accidental or intentional, but either way, the data on the paper records management can be compromised. Electronic data, by contrast, can be encrypted so that even if it’s copied or stolen, the information can be protected. Also, electronic records can more easily have sensitive data redacted for certain uses.

Data tampering: Anyone with access to a paper record can remove pages, add entries, erase or otherwise tamper with authentic entries. Electronic records can have a digital signature that notifies people when this has happened, as well as a time stamp that indicates whenever a record is transferred or modified.

Loss: Because paper files need to be moved around and filed again, they can be lost or misfiled. Electronic records tend to stay where they are, often with audit trails and other indications of which people have used them. There are other limitations as well: Paper records are typically not copied. If something happens to them, there’s usually no backup. Destroying paper records presents another set of problems: they can often be recovered by the wrong parties after they’ve supposedly been disposed of.

A survey by the Ponemon Institute showed that respondents found paper to be less secure than electronic records in a number of ways. While the survey dates back to 2008, there’s no reason to believe that paper is any more secure now.

 

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Are Certifications Important When Selecting a Records Management System?

As regulatory and compliance mandates raise pressures on organizations across all industries, the need for electronic records management has increased exponentially. Too much information, held beyond legal retention requirements, can cause problems in the guise of an e-discovery request. Too little information can cause issues when auditors come calling.

Records management systems enable organizations to centrally, securely and electronically manage their records. This kind of software allows records managers to track and store records in a wide variety of formats, including:

  • Imaged documents.
  • Electronic documents generated by programs (e.g., Microsoft Office).
  • PDFs.
  • Scanned and digital photographs.
  • Audio and video files.
  • Output from legacy systems.
  • Physical records stored offsite.

A records management system supports the automatic enforcement of consistent, organization-wide records policies and reduces the cost of regulatory compliance.

When selecting a records management system, there are two important certifications to consider: DoD 5015.2 and VERS.

What is DoD 5015.2?

DoD 5015.2Electronic Records Management Certification
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)

Many organizations use DoD 5015.2-STD Electronic Records Management Software Applications Design Criteria Standard from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as a starting point for evaluating records management systems.

The Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certifies records management software solutions according to this standard. According to the JITC’s Website, “The current version of DoD 5015.02-STD, signed 25 April 2007, defines the basic requirements based on operational, legislative and legal needs that must be met by records management application (RMA) products acquired by the Department of Defense (DoD) and its Components. It defines requirements for RMAs managing classified records and includes requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Privacy Act, and interoperability.”

Knowing a DoD-certified system has been tested against the DoD’s rigorous standards provides reassurance to records managers at thousands of organizations across a wide variety of industries.

What is VERS?

Victorian Electronic Records Strategy
Victorian Electronic Records Strategy

VERS stands for Victorian Electronic Records Strategy. It is endorsed by the State Government of Victoria, Australia, and is accepted and used as the backbone of e-Governance by archival institutions around the world.

Whereas the DoD 5015.2 certification focuses on ensuring that records are properly organized and managed, VERS specifies a standard format for electronic records that focuses on data integrity and authentic archiving.

Why should you care?

Unless you work for the State Government of Victoria, Australia, or the United States Department of Defense or one of its components, you are not required to select a records management system that meets the specifications of either standard. However, the possible detrimental impact of non-compliance with recordkeeping requirements on organizational reputation and value highlights the importance of investing in a records management system that ensures an organization’s information assets are safe and well-managed.

When you select a system that has achieved full compliance with both VERS and DoD 5015.2, it is guaranteed to provide a multi-faceted set of information governance tools that manage document lifecycle from initial capture to long-term archival. With the right processes in place, these tools will break down information silos and make staff more productive while also ensuring that information is accessed in a prudent and compliant way.

Records management is vital to the success of your organization, and an electronic records management system that has been certified to meet stringent requirements for both organizing file structures and plans (DoD 5015.2) and reliably preserving data for years to come (VERS) will ensure that you have the best tools available for keeping your information assets organized, safe and secure.

To learn more about how Laserfiche can support your organization’s records management needs, download our free eBook – “The Ultimate Guide to Records Management.”

Ultimate Guide to Records Management