- Are there constantly recurring activities that keep your employees from more complex tasks?
- Are there media discontinuities in the workflows - whether in IT-supported or manual processes?
- Does the shortening of time-intensive process flows bring added value to the company?
- How can the flexibility of production processes be increased through process integration of the shop floor with commercial areas?
In process automation, processes and workflows are supported by innovative technologies. This way, interlocking resources can be seamlessly integrated, including, for example, different IT systems, cross-divisional departments and the people acting in these areas of activity. Experience has shown that such automation results in higher productivity, shorter response times, lower costs, and regulatory-compliant documentation.
For a successful implementation, the right technologies must be selected for the company and the respective process flows - whether a process-oriented automation platform (BPMS), a rules/decision management system (BRMS), automation by software robots (RPA) or the efficient control of processes in the backend by flexible integration solutions.
The initial situation
Process automation becomes relevant when repetitive tasks divert attention from the core business. The growth of the digital economy is connecting people and organizations in new ways. But it has also spawned repetitive tasks, such as the requirement to manually enter data. Far too much time is spent by office workers copying and pasting data across disconnected systems. Employees might have great skills, but are not as productive as they could be because repeatedly accessing information takes longer than it should. Organizations therefore need a cost-effective way to process and manage their data more efficiently.
The autonomy of business processes is not a trend that is only taking place in the increasingly digitized work spaces.The quest for autonomously operating systems that support, complement and often replace humans in their work is deeply rooted in the business world. While the topic of automation in its origins focused mainly on optimizing processes in industrial manufacturing and agriculture (which were mostly associated with physical labor), today the potential fields of application are more diverse.
Anyone who deals with the automation of operational processes knows that the automatic and tool-supported execution of business processes can now take place on several levels. Wherever work steps are frequently repeated, there is a potential field of application for one of the numerous automation tools available on the market. Common use cases would be, for example, the automation of invoicing or application receipt processes, the creation of new employees in internal systems or a cross-system generalization of documents.