Business Process Automation or BPA for short. This was a buzzword a couple of years back with anybody and everyone claiming they had been experts on this area. Perhaps so. But to really realize its true potential it's worthwhile to understand what business process automation is and why you will need it?

When you personal/run/manage a enterprise, take a look around yourself on the daily actions you carry out to run what you are promoting effectively and efficiently. If you happen to do observe carefully, you will shortly discover that you just (or your workers) do perform loads of duties which can be generally repetitive in nature or they could be administrative duties; duties that it's important to carry out and are essential to run your business.

Let me elaborate that with an example. A customer calls and enquires a few product you market. You tell the customer you will ship a product brochure. You're taking all related information like prospect name, adgown etc. and walk over to your secretary. Your secretary takes the knowledge, chooses the suitable brochure, creates a protecting letter, puts it in an envelope and mails it to your customer. Sounds acquainted, right?

Effectively, what if I told you that process automation automates the entire process above using the Web? And all with zero involvement from you? Or anybody else out of your organization? Would that be cool? Let me make it easier to visualize it.

Your prospect comes over to your site, browses and is now in search of more information on a specific product. You will have the prospect fill in all related info from within your net site. When the prospect submits the knowledge, your web page will automatically save the data electronically in a database and ship a personalized email to your prospect (i.e. thanking him/her for the enquiry and providing directions to download the brochure). Your system can even observe up automatically after a few days with that particular prospect asking if they have another questions or in case you might be of any help.

That is, in essence, enterprise process automation. You are automating the different business processes inside your business. The fantastic thing about automating this is the zero-involvement from your business. Let's take this a step further. If the prospect does resolve to purchase the specific product, they will purchase it directly from your website (by way of a shopping cart). Your website will already know what your prospect had acquired so you can "velocity up" the process by simply gathering fee data over a safe line, Smart Process Applications the transaction and then ship new shipping details to your customer. The prospects details now go into the customer database (because you have got transformed a prospect into a buyer). The order particulars automatically get despatched to your order-processing department for order fulfillment. When the order is shipped, your order-processing division updates the "system" with ETA for the product. Your customer can now automatically track the standing of their order. And you'll really get an summary of what number of orders were received, shipped, transacted; all via a browser. Even if you happen to had been holidaying and have been miles away from home/office.

Can you consider all the costs you've got saved by automating routine, mundane tasks that have typically wanted human intervention up to now?

That, in essence, is the facility of automation.