It is human instinct to search for a less demanding and additionally more productive approach to complete tasks. From the most simplistic, to the more difficult processes at hand, automation of tedious procedures is the key to working smarter, not harder.

In business – time is money. Some repetitive processes conducted by humans tend to cost more, take longer and leave room for human error. The employees at a business, who are paid to do these processes may also be better utilized within the organization performing critical thinking assignments not suitable for automation. By integrating Business Process Automation, or BPA, to specific operations, the benefits stand to provide a quick return on the investment, and in turn, increase the bottom line.

Coding Innovations, a custom software development company, offers services to create and gain direct advantages of BPA. The company's professionals are highly experienced in developing BPA systems to improve efficiency, productivity, and stability. BPA can provide centralized control and management. The automation can initiate order and monitoring capabilities in processes to manage information and avoid unnecessary costs.

Coding Innovations' BPA services significantly reduce errors and lead to quality improvement. Compliance and regulations can be incorporated to assure the organization's policies and procedures abide by laws and follow applicable rules. An automated system can be integrated to provide tracking and reporting within processes. The collected data can provide insight and analysis capabilities for continuous improvement. Any employee interaction with the task is reported for accountability. Decision-making actions, such as approval, within an automated system, may require manual completion, and in these cases, are assigned to an individual and the system will provide data for analyzing those efforts. Within an automated process message and logging capabilities for employee interaction are included to streamline processes and keep the lines of communication open among those involved.

When considering BPA, questions to ask include:

What are you comfortable with the system doing?

What are you comfortable with the person needing to do?

For one case, a professional industrial and architectural manufacturing company was comfortable with the system conducting automated tasks for inventory control procedures and comfortable with a person’s involvement in approving or denying the information the system provided.

Coding Innovations professionals reviewed the company’s process to automate, it was found that the company had a manual process at each of its 19 branches where employees were reviewing 1000s of SKUs within the inventory and guessing what inventory was on hand and needed. The things that could go wrong with this process are endless. First, there was absolutely no quality control for accuracy within any of the 19 locations. Each employee who performed the manual calculations had their own “system” and performed the duties as instructed in the allotted time and as best they could with the task at hand. Unneeded items were ordered. Needed items were not ordered. The one consistency among the branches was error and inefficient use of employee time.

The Coding Innovations' BPA professionals analyzed each of the 19 branches and found a company-approved procedure for all of the locations to follow. The processes were mapped out with actual employees who had performed the inventory steps. Rules were mapped out to automate the majority of the process. The final step of the original process remained, which required employee interaction for review and approval decision. After utilizing the BPA, 95% of all reviews were conducted automatically.

All benefits lead to saving money within an organization. Whether it’s labor costs, supply cost or a combination of having to redo a task due to manual errors, BPA can be incorporated into any business.