What is Business Process Automation (BPA)?
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Completing repetitive, manual tasks without automation tools can lead to decreased productivity, increased errors, employee burnout, and missed opportunities for innovation.
By mechanizing routine tasks, business process automation (BPA) helps your team reach its full potential and reduces costs. With BPA, your team can focus on strategic initiatives and innovation while elevating your IT service desk and streamlining business processes.
This article will explain business automation and its importance, explore standard processes that can be automated, and highlight the benefits of using these tools.
Streamline your business tasks and project management efforts with BPA.
Understanding business process automation
Business process automation leverages technology and tools to streamline and automate recurring tasks or processes that businesses usually handle manually. It automates repetitive processes that involve multiple phases using IT management systems.
BPA focuses on improving business efficiency, reducing errors, and freeing valuable human resources for more strategic activities, including project planning.
BPA is crucial in optimizing workflows for incident management, request fulfillment, project risk management, enterprise risk management, and change management.
Instead of relying on time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks, BPA uses tools and software to handle these processes automatically.
This speeds up the process and ensures precise, consistent execution of each step. Whether it's automating ticket creation, routing requests to the appropriate teams, or generating regular reports, BPA enhances the overall efficiency of IT service by reducing manual effort.
What business processes can a company automate?
Automating specific business processes can significantly enhance efficiency and accuracy. Identifying the processes to automate is crucial to ensure an effective, targeted effort.
Here are critical business processes that are ideal for BPA:
- High-volume tasks: Automating tasks with high frequency, such as data entry and report generation, can save time and reduce human errors such as typos.
- Time-sensitive tasks: You can streamline business processes that require timely execution, such as monitoring system alerts or sending out automated notifications. Automation ensures prompt responses and prevents delays.
- Multi-person tasks: Automate business tasks involving coordination between various team members, such as approval workflows or cross-team processes. This enhances collaboration and speeds up task completion and on-time deliveries.
- Support processes: Mechanize routine support tasks, such as system backups, to free up staff time for more strategic activities and improve service desk efficiency.
- Tasks requiring audit trails: These tasks include processes requiring detailed records for compliance and auditing, such as financial transactions.
- Long-tail tasks: Automation is effective for infrequent but necessary tasks, such as periodic system maintenance or compliance checks. This ensures consistent completion without manual oversight.
BPA examples
You may wonder how specific tasks can benefit from automation. Here are some real-life examples:
- Incident management: An automated system can create tickets for reported issues, assign them based on severity, and notify relevant team members, reducing response times and improving resolution efficiency.
- Service request fulfillment: BPA can process requests quickly, verify all necessary approvals, and notify users of the status, significantly reducing processing time.
- Change management: Automation tools can manage requests, track the approval process, and execute changes according to a predefined schedule, minimizing disruption and enhancing control.
- Onboarding and offboarding: BPA can manage account creation, assign necessary equipment, and handle access permissions during onboarding. It can also deactivate accounts and retrieve company assets during offboarding, ensuring consistency and security.
Benefits of business automation tools
BPA tools offer a range of advantages that can significantly enhance your team’s operational performance. These tools include workflow management software that automates routine tasks or customer relationship management platforms that handle data entry and lead tracking.
Key benefits of business automation tools include the following:
Increased efficiency
Business automation tools significantly increase efficiency by streamlining repetitive tasks. They reduce manual effort and minimize human error.
For example, automated ticketing systems in IT help speed up issue response and resolution times. This addresses problems more swiftly and effectively, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
Enhanced decision-making
Enterprise resource management software integrates and synchronizes various business processes, cross-departmental data, performance metrics, and more in one location to create a single source of truth. In addition to making these resources readily available, it provides teams and leaders with real-time, data-driven insights into a business’s resource utilization and performance for more informed decision-making regarding project planning.
Tools like the capacity planning feature in Jira Align help leaders make informed and strategic decisions regarding resource allocation by helping to calculate team capacity against forecasted work. This allows them to determine what their teams can realistically accomplish within a given deadline and the resources available to them.
Improved accuracy and consistency
Workflow automation ensures that the team consistently follows standardized procedures and processes, improving accuracy. By reducing the likelihood of mistakes in data handling and service delivery, automated systems help maintain consistency and reliability in IT operations.
Cost reduction
Automated processes help lower operational costs by minimizing the need for manual labor and extensive support staff. They also decrease downtime and reduce costs associated with inefficiencies and errors, leading to more cost-effective operations.
Better resource allocation
Automation tools allow for better resource planning and allocation. Automating routine and administrative tasks will enable you to focus on higher-value tasks and strategic initiatives.
Optimal resource use ensures people dedicate time to activities that drive growth and innovation rather than repetitive tasks.
Streamline tasks and processes with Jira Service Management
Gone are the days of manual intervention, repetitive human errors, and wasting time, money, and effort. Embracing business process automation can revolutionize how you manage IT services, enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness.
Jira Service Management is purpose-built for IT services, ensuring streamlined workflows and optimal resource use. Use the following features to streamline tasks and processes:
Jira Service Management can streamline routine tasks, such as incident management, service request fulfillment, and change management, using the following features:
- Automation rules: Set up custom rules with Jira automation to automatically assign tickets, escalate issues, or send notifications based on predefined triggers, reducing manual effort and ensuring faster response times.
- Incident management workflows: Automate incident workflows to quickly route issues to the correct team, notify stakeholders, and track resolution progress, minimizing downtime and improving service delivery.
- Service request management: Create a self-service portal where users can easily submit service requests, streamlining the fulfillment process. With Jira Service Management, you can automate task assignment and prioritization to ensure requests are handled quickly.
- SLAs: Jira Service Management allows you to create customized Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on response and resolution times. You can define SLA metrics specific to your service requests, such as response time and priority levels.
- Change management automation: Automate the approval and implementation process for changes in your IT environment. With Jira Service Management, you can ensure that the right people are notified and the appropriate steps are taken.
- Incident and problem management: Automatically create problem tickets from recurring incidents, allowing teams to address root causes and prevent future disruptions.
Ready to automate your IT service operations? Get Jira Service Management free today.