In order for businesses to scale quickly, operate more efficiently, and provide the most intuitive experiences for their consumers, they must invest strategic resources into business process management. Furthermore, business process automation (BPA) can play a key role in increasing the overall effectiveness, speed, and excellence of workflows.

Business process automation refers to the standardization and automation of complex business processes in order to streamline business functions while also maintaining or improving quality assurance.

BPA benefits enterprises by improving the work experience for employees, as well as the consumer experience for customers.

Here are 5 reasons why enterprises need to pay close attention to business process management and automation.

1. The cost of not automating is incredibly high.

Continuing to perform tasks manually when they could be automated comes at a major cost to enterprises. According to a McKinsey report, 45 percent of current paid activities could be automated, equating to roughly $2 trillion in annual wages in the United States. Another study estimates that as much as $5 trillion in lost productivity can be attributed to repetitive tasks globally.

Furthermore, the costs of not automating are more than simply financial. 73 percent of customer support professionals say that managing time and workload is the biggest issue they face in customer support. And 45 percent of these same professionals say that maintaining or improving team morale is challenging, suggesting that these kinds of workers experience a high rate of burnout.

Organizations without good business process management and automation are likely to underperform and run into issues that could have been avoided. In 2014, 425 million customers of Microsoft Azure experienced 10 and a half hours of downtime due to human error (a collective 4.46 billion hours of downtime).

2. Automation drives sales and conversions.

Automation allows companies to respond more quickly to potential customers who are interested in their products or services. For example, consider an automated email marketing workflow. While a social media strategy is important to the growth of any enterprise, email is still king. Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective at converting sales with a customer than Facebook and Twitter combined.

When customers take a next step via your website, they are expecting you to respond to them quickly. If too much time passes between them filling out an online form and receiving correspondence from you, they will not only lose interest in the product or service they had wanted to know more about, but they will also view your organization as unreliable or untrustworthy.

Even if your organization has highly attentive employees that quickly respond to most inquiries, if an unusually high number of them come in, or if the office is short-staffed on a particular day, your potential customers may experience a delay in communication. And given the reality of human limitations, some requests may accidently slip through the cracks.

For something as important as converting already interested potential customers, there is no room for these kinds of mistakes or delays. Setting up an automated workflow is vital to converting and retaining satisfied customers.

3. Multitasking for employees means worse experiences for consumers.

When employees are overburdened with needing to complete repetitive backend tasks in addition to responsibilities that are more customer-facing, the company’s ability to accomplish either goal is greatly diminished.

If asked, most workers would say that they are excellent multitaskers. However, research suggests that very few, if any, employees are as good at multitasking as they believe themselves to be. One study suggests that as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time can be lost due to switching between tasks. This level of distraction leads to a lower quality of work with more mistakes. Therefore, automating repetitive tasks should be a high priority.

Even automating some of more consumer-facing tasks of a business can come as a welcomed improvement by employees and customers alike. In fact, 60 percent of US consumers actually prefer an automated or digital self-serve customer experience. The reason for this is that the experience is likely quicker and can be done without the personal assistance of an employee, making it more convenient.

4. Automation increases organizational efficiency, accuracy, and clear communication.

When a business creates automated workflows, an organization becomes more efficient and accurate in maintaining its processes. Typographical errors or missed steps in a process are no longer an issue, and the focus of employees turns to simply verifying information needed to complete their daily tasks.

For example, automation can alleviate bottlenecks and mistakes with regard to a task such as purchase ordering. Instead of a complicated system of manual requests for approval that may have inaccurate or inadequate information, the process can be streamlined by automating reorders when supplies or regularly stocked items dip below a certain level.

Additionally, relevant employees and stakeholders would be able to access the ordering information and be ensured of its up to the minute accuracy. This not only increases efficiency while decreasing the number of errors, but also improves transparency and communication.

5. When repetitive and mundane tasks are automated, workers are freed up to engage in work that is creative and meaningful.

While greater automation may seem as though it is a threat to job availability, the reality is far more hopeful. While certain job skills may no longer need to be performed by humans, automation means that humans are liberated from repetitive and mundane tasks and freed up to do the kind of meaningful work that only humans can do.

As Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi point out, for example, when a financial planner is able to spend less time compiling and analyzing financial data because of the availability of an automatically generated dashboard of information, she is able to spend more time interfacing directly with the client and thinking about creative solutions and opportunities.

When these kinds of necessary but menial tasks are automated, workers are able to maximize their efforts, and organizations are able to become more effective overall.

Build process-driven applications and automate business workflows with Entando.

Entando is the leading open source micro frontend platform for enterprises to build modern web applications on Kubernetes. Our platform enables you to create process-driven applications for business process management and automation.

Whether you are onboarding a new customer, managing a medical checkup, automating an order flow, or maintaining case management, Entando helps you automate your business workflows, simplifying the approval process for managers, reducing time in review for contributors, and speeding up the time to roll out an update.

Entando is fully integrated with Red Hat’s Process Automation Manager and adds features that allow you to create process driven applications with intuitive user experiences across all channels. With code generation features, reusable components, drag and drop tools, widgets, plugins, and UI elements, Entando allows you to develop more quickly and at a lower cost.

The platform is open source with available enterprise support. To begin developing today and get a quote to see how we can help you build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.