Why Implement Business Process Automation to Enhance Enterprise Mobility?

In the connected and rapidly changing world of today, business enterprises need to employ technologies to stay ahead of the competitive curve. They need to reach out to their customers and if possible, work towards exceeding their expectations. Furthermore, business processes need to be made streamlined, agile, and responsive to cater to every emerging business need and to meet the overall objectives. With data and information being generated across verticals and geographies, business enterprises should have the ability to process them in real-time and offer crucial insights for decision making. Spreading the digital footprint using interactive websites, mobility solutions, and other digital assets, businesses can ensure remote connectivity, distributed working, higher productivity and efficiency, optimization of costs, and higher profitability. And to achieve the same, enterprise process automation should be made an integral part of the workflow. As per Global Market Insights, the enterprise mobility management market is expected to touch a whopping 11 billion dollars by 2026 with a CAGR of 15% per annum.

What are enterprise mobility and business process automation?

In the dynamically changing world of business, enterprises have their task cut out. They need to develop and deliver high-quality products in quick succession, keep a strong feedback loop to address any customer or client-related concerns, comply with regulatory standards, gather, process, and analyze data in real-time, and enable quick decision making. This is where the significance of enterprise mobility comes into play. It includes the ability of the workforce to work outside the office premises, anytime and from anywhere, and the ease through which corporate data moves through technology networks. Business process automation focuses on identifying, analyzing, and implementing the best practices across functions, verticals, and geographies. The thrust is to make the business processes easily accessible to all stakeholders and ensure everyone in the organization is connected and operates in sync to meet the overall business objectives.

Business process automation deals with automating the processes using technology to increase productivity, efficiency, customer-centricity, ensure the predictability of outcomes, and profitability. It can help to reduce operational costs and minimize the time to get things done. The main features of business process automation include:

l Organizational processes or workflows are being automated.

l Centralizing the storage of information, increasing transparency, and improving accessibility

l Minimizing the need for in-person communication through the use of chatbots

Intelligent automation services provide access to both structured (itemized information) and unstructured (customer behavior patterns and social media chatter) data and use it to generate business intelligence.

Why does enterprise mobility matter?

Enterprise mobility knits everyone in the organization together and allows the latter to track, secure, and manage data, information, and devices across the end-to-end spectrum. It is critical to achieving a variety of goals, including increased productivity and efficiency, improved data accuracy, and cost reduction. Enterprise intelligent automation empowers individual members of the workforce to become more productive thanks to the convenience of enabling digital communication from anywhere and at any time. Thus, they do not have to stay put in offices or wait for someone to give them access to specific software or systems. Also, by accessing accurate and relevant data on the cloud, the workforce can go about the job without anyone initiating or prodding them. Since the workforce will be in a remote or distributed working environment, there is no need to spend on setting up costly infrastructure in the office premises.

The other benefits of implementing intelligent automation services to enhance enterprise mobility are:

Business process optimization: A cloud-based enterprise process automation solution can allow the workforce to access (upload/download) data, documents, reports, forms, and orders instantly from anywhere. Its flexibility can help employees across functions to collaborate and work in parallel remotely, thereby facilitating the quick completion of any given project. The solution also helps to eliminate entry errors and/or any miscommunication, which otherwise could cost the organization time and money.

Security: Enterprise mobility through intelligent automation services, in addition to streamlining the access and delivery of business information from anywhere and at any time, can ensure the safety and security of critical business data as well. This is due to the fact that all data and information are stored in a centralized cloud-based repository, which is well integrated into the value chain of the organization.

How to automate business processes

Any Enterprise Process Automation (EPA) solution can be implemented by following a series of steps mentioned below:

Know the user: Any EPA solution needs to capture the needs of its users and ensure they are comfortable and find it easy to use. The aim should be to enhance the existing processes rather than supplant them with a totally new one.

Planning: The first step is to create a visual map or blueprint of the automation solution. List the organization’s process flow to understand and identify the areas where automation would be of help. Also, set up the metrics and KPIs to track and measure success.

Simplification is the key: Since the automation solution will be used across the enterprise by all stakeholders endowed with different skill sets, it should be simple to understand, use, and maintain.

Select the right tool: The tool for automation should be easy to use and have the required flexibility and scalability to be integrated with the existing workflow and tool stack. The tool should be able to pull data from existing tools or databases and allow the storage of secure information in the central repository for easy access.

Documentation: The inputs and outputs of the tool should be properly documented while enabling software QA automation. This will help to identify issues during troubleshooting should the BPA solution develop issues or glitches.

Testing: The BPA solution must be tested in real-time before deployment to identify any inherent glitches or bugs. It is only after running automated QA testing and addressing the flagged glitches that the solution should be implemented for everyone in the organization.

Training: To ensure its effective implementation and usage, the people handling the automated solution should be properly trained. Instead of training everyone at once, the process heads should be given the training so they can in turn train others.

Conclusion

Enterprise process automation is the key to streamlining the workflow of any organization using technology. It helps to break silos and allow everyone to work efficiently and meet his or her individual work objectives in alignment with the overall business goals.