Thought Paper:
Business Process Automation
Rapid development and deployment of automation to eliminate repetitive, laborintensive, and computerrelated tasks throughout the enterprise.
Joe Kosco Vice President Network Automation, Inc. 654 South Western Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90005 8887864796 NetworkAutomation.comIntroduction
Businesses have the extraordinarily complex task of continuously improving their service while slashing costs. In order to succeed, theymust execute in an increasingly competitive business environment without making large investments in technology and infrastructure. However, they are saddled with archaic systems and applications from past investments - investments that actually compel inefficient business practices rife with repetitive human interaction, delays, errors, and unnecessary cost. What these businesses need is to be liberated from the constraints of their legacy systems so they can design and implement optimized business processes to eliminate costs, improve customer service, and capitalize on new revenue opportunities.
Business process automation software (BPA) is designed to solve this problem. It allows business and technology managers to design and implement new processes to deliver their products and services to customers in a more timely and costeffective way. In essence, it allows managers to design business processes with a "white board" mentality, or in other words, to design processes to flow as they should, not as underlying systems and applications dictate.
This white paper describes how businesses can optimize, streamline, and automate their critical processes with BPA.
How We Got Here
Much has transpired since the landmark book Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy (HarperBusiness, 1994) was first released. The book's main theme is that businesses must completely rethink the way they execute their fundamental business processes in order to compete in the global economy. Since then, we have witnessed downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, a bubble, and a technological revolution. But much still remains undone because businesses lack the tools necessary for effective reengineering.
The opportunity to improve business processes is only heightened in sectors where resources are perennially scarce, such as the small to mediumsize business market and the health care and manufacturing industries. Profit margins in these sectors are notoriously thin, so investments are generally made to support core operations, not to streamline them.
When companies from these sectors do make technology investments, they typically invest in point solutions which may enhance a specific work function but rarely improve the overarching business process. For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) application may improve the continuity of interaction between a manufacturing company and its customers, but it will not align delivery date promises with plant capacity. In this case, the critical business process includes aspects of the CRM application as well as the manufacturing management application.
With BPA, businesses have a unique opportunity to merge and align investments in technology with their overall business strategy. BPA gives business managers the power to design optimal business processes because they are freed from the constraints and restrictions of their legacy systems and applications. Moreover, designing optimal business processes is no longer confined to the company's four walls. It can now be extended to the entire supply chain including vendors, partners, and customers. This heightens the value businesses can create with wellplanned and wellexecuted BPA strategies.
In essence, BPA empowers the groundbreaking concepts of Hammer and Champy with tools for real world implementation. In fact, reengineering the corporation is no longer an abstract ideal it is a business necessity.
2 BPA Terminology Defined
To explain BPA properly, we'll introduce terminology to define many common elements of BPA, as illustrated in the diagram below.
Inputs: Typically raw data (such as files, faxes, and database updates) that serve as the basis for the business process.
Jobs: Individual subprocesses or tasks completed by a human being, application, or system. event triggers: The things that initiate jobs. Examples include sch... [download for more]
