Business process automation (BPA), also known as business automation or digital transformation, is the technology-enabled
automation
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...
of complex
business process
A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a parti ...
es. It can streamline a business for simplicity, achieve
digital transformation
Digital transformation is the adoption of digital technology by an organization to digitize non-digital products, services or operations. The goal for its implementation is to increase value through innovation, invention, customer experience or e ...
, increase
service quality Service quality (SQ), in its contemporary conceptualisation, is a comparison of perceived expectations (E) of a service with perceived performance (P), giving rise to the equation SQ=P-E. This conceptualistion of service quality has its origins in t ...
, improve service delivery or contain costs. It consists of integrating applications, restructuring labor resources and using
software applications
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
throughout the organization.
Robotic process automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers. It is sometimes referred to as ''software robotics'' (not to be ...
is an emerging field within BPA.
Deployment
Toolsets vary in sophistication, but there is an increasing trend towards the use of
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
technologies that can understand
natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
and
unstructured data set A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...
s, interact with human beings, and adapt to new types of problems without human-guided training.
In order to automate the processes, connectors are needed to fit these systems/solutions together with a data exchange layer to transfer the information. A
process driven messaging service is an option for optimizing data exchange layer. By mapping your end-to-end process workflow, an integration between individual platforms using a process driven messaging platform can be built.
A business process management implementation
A
business process management
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business p ...
system is different from BPA. However, it is possible to build automation on the back of a BPM implementation. The actual tools to achieve this vary, from writing custom application code to using specialist BPA tools. The advantages and disadvantages of this approach are inextricably linked – the BPM implementation provides an architecture for all processes in the business to be mapped, but this in itself delays the automation of individual processes and so benefits may be lost in the meantime.
Robotic process automation
The practice of performing
robotic process automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers. It is sometimes referred to as ''software robotics'' (not to be ...
(RPA) results in the deployment of attended or unattended software agents to an organization's environment. These software agents, or robots, are deployed to perform pre-defined structured and repetitive sets of business tasks or processes: The goal is for humans to focus on more productive tasks, while the software agents handle the repetitive ones, such as billing.
BPA providers tend to focus on different industry sectors but their underlying approach tends to be similar in that they will attempt to provide the shortest route to automation by interacting with the
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
rather than going into the application code or database behind it. BPA providers also simplify their own interface to the extent that these tools can be used directly by non-technically qualified staff. The main advantage of these toolsets is therefore their speed of deployment.
Use of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence software robots are deployed to handle unstructured data sets (like images, texts, audios) and are deployed after performing and deploying robotic process automation: They can, for instance, populate an automatic transcript from a video. The combination of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) brings autonomy for the robots, along with the capability in mastering cognitive tasks: At this stage, the robot is able to learn and improve the processes by analyzing and adapting them.
See also
*
Business-driven development
*
Business Process Model and Notation
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.
Originally developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), BPMN has been maintained by the ...
*
Business process reengineering
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundam ...
*
Business Process Execution Language
The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Process ...
(BPEL)
*
Business rules engine
A business rules engine is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. The rules might come from legal regulation ("An employee can be fired for any reason or no reason but not for an illegal ...
*
Comparison of business integration software
This article is a comparison of notable business integration and business process automation software.
General
Scope
Scope of this comparison:
* Service-oriented architecture implementations;
* Message-oriented middleware and message brokers ...
*
Job scheduler
A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of job (computing), jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though tr ...
*
Real-time enterprise Real-time enterprise (commonly abbreviated to RTE) is a concept in business systems design focused on ensuring organisational responsiveness that was popularised in the first decade of the 21st century. It is also referred to as on-demand enterprise ...
*
Runbook
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Synthetic intelligence
Synthetic intelligence (SI) is an alternative/opposite term for artificial intelligence emphasizing that the intelligence of machines need not be an imitation or in any way artificial; it can be a genuine form of intelligence. John Haugeland prop ...
*
Weak AI
References
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Business terms
Business process management
Automation
Artificial intelligence