Business process automation (BPA) forms the agenda of most of CEOs and CTOs. Processes are the lifeline of every organization, and the health of these processes dictates the well being of the business. Be it Policy Issuance in an Insurance company, Cheque Clearing in a bank, Vendor Reconciliation in a Manufacturing company, Bills Processing in a Shared Services Center, or any other process in virtually an industry, business process automation ensures the organization becomes more agile and nimble.

Business Process Automation is facilitated by IT-enabling the slow, labyrinthine, manual process, which are human-intensive. For organizations which are already IT-enabled, i.e., they have IT applications implemented for various business functions, BPA involves integration of various software applications, running in isolation, to form end-to-end processes, which weave together myriad applications in one seamless whole. These processes ensure seamless information and data exchange happens across applications.

As against merely automating and speeding up some manual activities, a true BPA system usually consists of a workflow engine that manages the process using business rules, eForms for capturing essential data, integration capabilities, and secured, rights-based access to information and documents. 

Automated processes lead to improved productivity, increase in efficiency and reduction in costs. In addition, automated processes ensure greater transparency in operations and easier tracking and monitoring of different activities in the process. While ensuring all these benefits, a BPA system must also ensure that it is scalable and can handle not only simple processes but also complex, enterprise-wide processes. This is essential as processes of large global organizations often span multiple continents and geographies and intertwined with other enterprise processes, thereby lending complexity to the processes.

Whereas Business Process Automation only ensures the automation of various activities, Business Process Management ensures all the processes in an organization are not only automated but also optimized for quality and efficiency. An upcoming trend is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which takes the automation to the next level by abstracting every business functionality as a service, which could be accessed from different systems.