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Business Process Automation

Successful companies operate with sets of well-defined tasks. A set of tasks that accomplishes a business goal is a business process. Until the advent of Business Process Automation (BPA), business processes were manually implemented. But, as you will learn shortly, BPA can yield significant benefits.

 First let’s take a closer look at business processes. You can identify business processes in virtually every department of an organization. Examples of common business processes include hiring an employee, approving vacation requests, handling claims or quotation requests in an insurance company, processing requests for product information, processing orders, and so forth. Each of these business processes is composed of certain standard sets of tasks performed in a particular sequence.

Typically, each business process begins with someone requesting something. The process usually starts when the “requester” supplies information needed to start the “fulfillment” of his or her “request.” The request is the “task” that needs to be fulfilled. The task is “assigned” to a “fulfiller.” The fulfiller is usually selected from a group composed of fulfillers with similar skills.

Claims processing at an insurance company provides a good example of business processes in action. Claims processing customarily starts with a telephone call from an insured person to the insurance company. Let’s refer to the caller as Joe Smith, who’s calling about an automobile accident. His call is answered by a claims processor whom we’ll call Jane Doe. Joe gives Jane the information needed to start processing the claim such as the name, the policy number, the date of the accident, and so forth.

We can think of Joe Smith as the requester and Jane Doe as the fulfiller. Joe requested payment for the damages to his automobile and provided the information needed by Jane to fulfill his request. The task at hand for the fulfiller, Jane, is to process the request and pay Joe’s damages.

Although Jane’s task may seem simple, processing the claim is very complex. A claim number must be assigned, Joe’s policy must be checked to make sure it’s still in effect, a damage estimate must be produced, payments must be calculated, and so on. Many tasks must be performed by many different persons and the tasks need to be performed in a certain order. For example, the process should verify that Joe has a valid policy before a damage estimate is initiated.

Obviously, Jane can’t do all these tasks herself. She is only the first link in a series of fulfillers. Her primary job is to move the right information to the next people in the chain. Then, as tasks along the way are fulfilled, more information is gathered and moved downstream. An estimate of damages is necessary before subsequent tasks like calculation of a final payment can be completed, for example.

If the process is conducted manually, each fulfiller must be responsible for routing information to the person who will perform the next task. This can be very difficult and time consuming, especially if you need to select one fulfiller from a larger group of fulfillers or the fulfillers are geographically remote.

But when the process is automated, it becomes surprisingly smooth. Each fulfiller simply looks in his or her inbox for the next task to do. When the fulfiller completes a task, the subsequent task in the sequence appears in the inbox of a fulfiller qualified to perform that task. Each fulfiller gets just the information needed to do the task. The Business Process Automation system does the routing, load balancing and synchronization.

Overall, BPA brings these significant benefits:

• Reliability. Since the manual system is paper-based, chances of tasks falling through the cracks are high. BPA totally eliminates this problem.

• Timeliness. In the manual system much time is wasted between tasks. It may take days to send information through the postal or corporate mail system, for instance. And even if the recipient is just down the corridor, a fulfiller may not forward work more often than once a day. Frequently, fulfillers will complete a number of tasks before forwarding them. The manual assignment of tasks to one fulfiller in a group of fulfillers may cause additional delays. But if business processes are automated, task assignment is instantaneous. As soon as one person completes one task, the next task in the sequence appears immediately in the fulfiller's inbox. Total time taken to complete the process can be dramatically reduced.

• Productivity. The manual system is very inefficient for a variety of reasons.

1) Since a significant amount of time elapses between the end of one task and the beginning of the next, fulfillers waste time waiting for something to do. BPA eliminates this problem since no time is wasted between tasks.

2) Manual work assignment is labor-intensive. This means people are employed just to assign tasks. BPA totally eliminates this necessity.

3) It is very difficult to manually balance the load between multiple fulfillers. Some fulfillers inevitably have too many tasks while others wait for an assignment. BPA can continuously monitor workloads and balance the load by automatically assigning or reassigning tasks.

• Supervisory control. This is one of the greatest strengths of BPA. With a manual system, it is almost impossible to find the current status of any business process. For example, it’s common that processes are stuck because the person performing a task is on leave. BPA can provide a bird’s eye view of all the processes and all the tasks in the processes. Then it is easy for managers to identify bottlenecks and fix problems. Managers can also use BPA to continually measure the time taken to complete tasks and business process. In a matter of seconds managers can determine the average time taken to close a claims request or the average time to complete a task, for example. This kind of information is extremely useful in improving the overall operations of the company.

• Geographically dispersed fulfillers. BPA and the Internet open up unlimited possibilities for effectively automating and managing work over far-flung locations. Fulfillers who are pure knowledge workers can complete their tasks from any place on earth. This means you have the whole world at your disposal to find the best and most cost-effective talent. One task in the process may be performed in New York, the next in Honolulu and the third in Sydney. You can even use the time difference between locations to your advantage to reduce the turnaround time for your customer. When New York is going to sleep, Sydney is waking up, so you can automatically assign tasks appropriately.

Business process automation can increase efficiency, reduce cost and enhance customer satisfaction. For additional information, please e-mail us at sales@taskserver.com or call our U.S. office at 603 881-9191.