iPaaS and Business Process Automation – Two Sides of the Same Coin!

Thousands of businesses around the world are rapidly employing various applications and performing a variety of business processes to facilitate the quick and smooth growth of their organizations. These business processes scale across all the lines of the business and initiates the free flow of data from one silo to another. However, a majority of these business processes are still manually handled and, thus, take up a lot of time and are error–prone. Such processes can be easily dealt with when an organization plans to introduce Business Process Automation through a robust iPaaS platform. This is what Business Process Automation is all about.

Business Process Automation (BPA) refers to the act and the process where an organization employs various tools and solutions in order to automate and streamline the ongoing business processes from various sectors. BPA is the technology that enables the automation of regular repeatable tasks for an organization by automating the organizational workflows and all the related activities. BPA efficiently minimizes the laborious work and accelerates the processes by performing routine information to dedicated persons through its user-defined roles and actions. It offers to streamline business processes such as employee onboarding, contract management and accounts by providing improved efficiency, process transparency and overall consistency.

Apart from the ones mentioned above, BPA systems are also implemented in various departments of an organization, such as Sales, Marketing, IT, Customer Support, Process Strategy, etc. to automate and perform all the tasks. With the accurate implementation of Business Process Automation, an organization can reduce its manual work to a large extent and enable the consistent and uninterrupted clarity of data across the platform.

However, the goal of Business Process Automation for any organization is not only to automate given processes and workflows but also to transform those business processes into more coherent and effective ones. Once an organization employs active BPA solutions, the business processes are claimed to be faster, more cost-efficient and error-proof than before. With these offerings, a BPA solution caters to transform the way businesses work and handle their data and systems and automate crucial processes that maintain the uniformity of business. Among the different kinds of BPA solutions available in the market, an Integration Platform as a Service serves to be the best and most suitable and scalable platform.

An Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a smart Business Process Automation platform that allows the seamless integration of various business applications used by an organization and enables the free flow of data across all channels of the business. An iPaaS serves as a BPA solution since it automatically connects two or more applications with each other and initiates bidirectional sync of data. Also, with the help of an iPaaS, organizations can automate their regular processes of sync and orders by setting up schedules. With the growing trend of multi-application usage, the future of iPaaS seems to be rife with BPA as it seamlessly offers efficient automation for all departments of a business, much better than any other solution.

Check out our webinar, Business Process Automation (BPA) for ERP, Ecommerce, CRM to learn how enabling Business Process Automation for line of business applications can improve efficiency and time-to-market for a your business.

Download our whitepaper to know more about iPaaS and Business Process Automation

The Need for Business Process Automation

Businesses across the globe are employing multiple applications to support their growing operations. These applications come in numerous sets of business processes and data management requirements. All these processes are too overwhelming for employees to efficiently work with and provide the best results. Also, if an organization involves itself in manual data entries and employee-based operations, it is bound to be slower in carrying out its processes, maintaining business growth and customer satisfaction. This is where Business Process Automation comes into play.

BPA solutions help organizations in improving their accountability, transparency and accuracy when data is concerned. It also retains the process-related communication within the operations for easier and faster execution. BPA systems are in great need as they help business owners serve their customers with the best possible experience and allows professionals to spend more time in developing business relationships and establishing themselves as a brand in the market.

There are a lot of factors for which signify the need for Business Process Automation in organizations. Below mentioned are some of the key factors due to which BPA is the need of the hour are:

• Streamlined communication – A BPA solution offers streamlined data and application communication across all channels ensuring business growth.
• Automate tasks – BPA solutions decrease the time taken to execute actions and easily perform repetitive tasks.
• Steppingstone for Digital Transformation – A BPA solution can turn out to be one of the finest instruments for achieving digital transformation in this digitally equipped world.
• Accurate accountability – A BPA solution enforces proper accountability of processes and operations, minimizing future errors.
• Cost minimization – BPA solutions tend to reduce the costs for any organization to a large extent.
• Paperwork reduction – BPA helps in reducing manual paperwork and ensures faster execution.
• Decreased errors – With BPA solutions, processes and operations witness reduced data redundancy and errors.
• Improved workflows – BPA solutions offer a better and more coherent approach to processes and business workflows, thus, improving efficiency.
• Consistency in process speed – BPA solutions maintain a uniform consistent process speed across all channels for seamlessness.
• Customize auditing and analysis – A BPA solution offers to easily customize and upscale the auditing and analysis processes.
• Maintain a more efficient allocation of resources – A BPA solution offers to maintain the efficient and proper allocation of resources by automating repetitive tasks and scheduling crucial business operations.
• Ensure customer satisfaction – With BPA, offer flexible platforms to the customers, maintain uniform support and increase business competitiveness.

Which Business Processes need Automation?

An organization’s operations and processes are not limited to the hand-held activities it involves itself in. While there are many crucial processes that need the supervision, guidance and personal touch of the employees, there are also a ton of low-risk repetitive tasks within every organization that can be easily automated to save time, effort and money, and moreover, bring clarity and coherence to the organization’s processes. To identify these tasks, there are certain factors that indicate the need for automation in every organization. These factors are:

• High volume tasks or repetitive tasks
• Tasks involving multiple employees
• Significant impact on other system, processes and operations
• Time-sensitive in nature
• Need for audit trials and compliance

When a process fulfills the above-mentioned criteria, it is very likely that the organization would want to automate the said operation and bring efficiency and diligence into play. These processes can range from high-level campaigns to simple form-like data entries – what BPA actually helps in is how all the varied and disparate systems and data sources work together in unison to simplify the entire business process and maintain uniformity across the platform. Some of the most practiced and trending business processes that are automated across the globe are:

• Email and push notifications
• Curating customer case study snippets
• Helpdesk support
• Chat support
• Data migration
• Application integration
• Employee procurement and leave requests
• Backup and restoration
• Time and attendance tracking
• Payroll management
• Lead capture and nurturing
• Back-office processes
• Document management
• Invoicing

Business Process Automation in ever-growing industries

Every industry in the market involves itself in manual, laborious tasks that can be automated and has its own specific needs for BPA. These industries employ tools that efficiently automate their business processes and provide better control over the operations. Business Process Automation is becoming a highly adopted strategy for ever-growing multi-million-dollar companies due to the ease and convenience it provides to the organization. Also, SMEs and startups are highly influenced by BPA and are using it to make more time for other focus-related work. Industries that are known to make the best use of BPA include media and publishing, sales, manufacturing, marketing, education, the federal government, case management, etc. Here, BPA solutions cater to users by automating as many manual and repetitive tasks as possible and help organizations improve their stand.

With the exponential adoption of BPA solutions, the following are some industries that have already adopted BPA to a great extent and will continue to do so to automate their bulk of business processes:

• Healthcare Industry: The healthcare industry deals with huge amounts of data and operations and their business processes are concerned around quality and risk management. This industry employs BPA solutions for record management, e-signatures, data collection and calculation and project/patient management.

• Media and Publishing Industry: With the complete digitalization of media and publishing units, this industry has recorded one of the highest rates of automation adoption in the current years. Organizations, companies and content publishers around the world are rapidly replacing hand-handled content and media management tools/processes with more flexible, ML-based adaptable automation solutions. 
• Banking and Finance Industry: The banking industry is one of the most critical industries and makes use of BPA for its vast processes and operations in the form of RPA and AI implementations. This industry automates the operations for loan processing, credit and money transfers, integration with other applications and budget management. BPA will play a big role in the banking industry in driving automation for processes like mobile banking, customer support, predictive analytics and transactional services.
• Telecommunications Industry: The adoption of BPA has seen a surge in the telecommunications industry in recent years with automation coming into play for customer service, document and workflow management, technical support, billing systems and databases.

As more and more organizations within these industries try to employ BPA, it is evident that soon it will become a major aspect of every business. Data is consistently flowing in these industries and organizations are keen on automating their business processes for smoother working. In this, these industries are fueling the BPA market and initiating a competition for better service. While many organizations and industries take advantage of social media marketing, these ever-growing industries look up to BPA as a method to automate and manage their portfolios and projects, cases, workflows and data flows, and knowledge assets.

iPaaS – The Best Tool for Business Process Automation

As discussed earlier, the role of Business Process Automation solutions is not only to automate numerous business processes of an organization but also to transform those business processes into more streamlined and efficient ones. An Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is one of the best Business Process Automation tools in the market. An iPaaS is a smart integration platform that acts as a BPA solution by connecting various business applications and bidirectionally transferring data between them as per the organization’s needs. An iPaaS can be considered one of the best BPA solutions since it seamlessly connects two or more applications and automates all the business processes within those systems. Not only that, but it also automates the related tasks such as ticketing, email notifications, lead entries, etc. within existing applications.

Over the years, process integration has helped thousands of companies automate their varied business operations and processes to achieve a transparent, efficient and productive organizational workflow. With the growing adoption and need for data and application integration, iPaaS emerges as the only solution that offers all the modules a business might require – it caters to automate processes from almost all departments of an organization and simultaneously establish desired communication within applications. Also, as a BPA solution, an iPaaS tends to handle business-critical data very keenly and reduces the human labor of delivering the data. Along with that, an iPaaS also automatically provides clear insights into the business data and brings all the information under a single roof. This not just saves time for the business owner in searching for his queries, but also offers a cleaner and more coherent view of the entire organization’s business flows.

An iPaaS is known to provide time-tested solutions that efficiently automate business processes for both cloud and on-premise applications. This means that an organization can automate most of its operations by employing an iPaaS and can focus more on building strategies for growing the company. An iPaaS solution helps an organization in scaling up as a company since it gives more time to the decision-makers for bringing innovation and better approaches into play. Also, it is crucial to note that just like any BPA solution, an iPaaS reduces the process complexity, data errors and overhead costs by automating major lines of business operations. This means that the integration platform understands each application completely and seamlessly connects them to initiate processes, which otherwise would not have been possible.

Challenges solved by an iPaaS as a Business Process Automation solution

Now we know that an iPaaS can serve as one of the finest business process automation solutions to business owners. Evidently, it is clear that it also solves many of the challenges that organizations face when they work with varied business processes. From consolidating existing data to integrating new ones and managing all the information under a single roof, an iPaaS offers more than any other platform. Here are some of the challenges iPaaS solves for organizations as a BPA solution:

• Efficient and seamless data and application integration
  With the implementation of an iPaaS solution, the biggest challenge an organization solves is the complete and seamless integration of all its existing applications, systems and data sources. Once these systems are integrated, all the business processes are efficiently automated, and the free flow of data is initiated. As a BPA tool, this integration platform connects all the disparate applications of an organization and reduces the manual efforts and errors involved in the business processes.
• Reduced errors
  With iPaaS solutions as BPA tools, one does not have to constantly enter data in every system since most of them are automated. Business owners can simply enter data once and update it whenever needed. This means that human labor is reduced to a great extent and automation ensures next to no mistakes when information is put into the system. Also, one does not have to constantly look for information from various software since iPaaS compiles all the information in one place. This helps one to look for the necessary information easily and readily extract information whenever needed.
• Decreased business costs
  The cost of automating various business processes and integrating disparate systems and applications with iPaaS is comparatively very low. This means that an iPaaS not only offers seamlessness but is also more cost-effective than other solutions – they are available on yearly or monthly subscriptions too. Moreover, an iPaaS also reduces the cost of maintaining a specific number of employees to manage the platform by simply automating it. Therefore, investing in an iPaaS to suit the automation of business processes would fit your budget.
• High security
  When an organization employs an iPaaS solution, its data gets classified and encrypted by the most effective and secure protocols available. The information present within the integration platform and other systems can only be accessed by those who are authorized. As a BPA solution, this provides full control of the data and the business process in the hands of the business owner and decision-makers. This security ensures that critical business information does not fall into unwanted hands. The processes are streamlined and are delivered accurately to the desired personnel. Also, the level of security in iPaaS consists of various layers which ensures that there is no leakage of data outside the platform.
• Presence of all information under a single platform
  As mentioned above, the amount of information that is entered into multiple systems is huge and managing all this information is difficult without employing a BPA solution. An iPaaS ensures that all the information entered into these systems gets synchronized automatically using templates and, as a BPA solution, communicates with and consolidates data and processes to coherently display them under a single page dashboard.
• A higher level of customer satisfaction
  With BPA tools, organizations can cater better to their customers and be available to them via smart solutions 24/7. An iPaaS helps an organization focus more on delivering a better customer experience by automating processes like instant chat support, email replies, business notifications, and ticketing.

iPaaS is considered to be the latest of the cloud-computing platform which is set to fuel the growing BPA industry. Calling it a game-changer would be accurately describing its effect in terms of the features that it will offer, its competence and its user efficiency.

Benefits of using iPaaS as a Business Process Automation Solution

Now that we know how iPaaS is a true BPA solution and what challenges it can solve, it is time to have a look at some of the key benefits that an iPaaS offers an organization as a BPA solution:

• Streamlined business processes across the organization
  An iPaaS solution offers to streamline all the existing business processes of an organization and bring coherence and clarity to the operations. It consolidates and merges data and manages efficient data accuracy in transferring them across the organization.
• Increased productivity
  With the correct implementation of an iPaaS solution, organizations witness a unique enhancement in the relation between man and machine – the automated integration makes the human-driven processes smoother and more productive, with increased speed and efficiency. This consolidated way of working brings more energy and perseverance for the employees and also reduces extra human labor. Efficient automation via an iPaaS allows the full use of technologies to optimize the business processes and improve productivity.
• Lower costs
  An iPaaS solution also offers to reduce the cost of an organization by automating its business processes. What is important is that it also reduces the cost of human labor to a large extent and saves the company a lot of time and money which can now be put to better use. As a BPA tool, an iPaaS also quickly identifies inefficient work points and corrects them automatically, reducing human intervention.
• Quick and reliable scaling due to cloud computing
  As an iPaaS solution is easily able to integrate various applications with each other, it encourages business owners to scale up and upgrade their business to the next level. Where other BPA tools need massive upgrades, an iPaaS solution can quickly meet the growing needs of the organization due to the power of cloud computing. Even if newer systems are introduced in a very short span of time, an iPaaS can efficiently integrate the applications and automate the processes.
• No technical expertise required
  As a BPA solution, an iPaaS is an exception where the user does not need to possess any technical expertise in the processes. An iPaaS is a smart and robust integration platform that allows business owners to create visual workflows within the system and initiate operations without coding or technical intervention. Due to this, an iPaaS solution establishes itself as one of the most adopted BPA solutions – even a layman starting his business can create business processes according to his requirement and initiate automated integrated services without even calling in technical experts.
• Improved Decision Making and Rule Implementation
  With the help of a robust integration platform, organizations can easily automate, define and implement business rules and processes in order to sequentialize the uninterrupted flow of data. With such BPA solutions, an organization can focus more on improving its workflows and giving more opportunities to the decision-makers to enhance the overall working of the company.
• Better monitoring and lesser errors
  With an iPaaS solution in place, an organization witnesses better monitoring and collaboration through the integration of all the business processes within the systems. Since all the data is readily available under a single roof, viewing and working with it also becomes easy. Moreover, due to the accuracy, an iPaaS provides while dealing with data, the organization also records a reduced level of errors in the processes. This error-free, clear approach of business processes provides better control and knowledge of the workflows and reduces the time and effort spent.

Download the whitepaper to know more about Business Process Automation and iPaaS

APPSeCONNECT is an enterprise-grade integration platform that connects SaaS, on-premise applications, data and technologies under one single platform. It offers pre-built solutions (a set of ready-to-use ProcessFlow templates) for widely used areas of business integration processes and supports all major applications available in the market. Its hybrid architecture allows organizations to integrate cloud applications as well as on-premise systems and create custom business process integrations. Request a free trial today to kickstart business process automation with APPSeCONNECT.