The discussions around Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Management (BPM) technologies appear so often that it becomes more and more challenging to make a distinction between them and point out unique capabilities. Let's unravel this knot.
Without going too deep into terminology and technical details, in this article, we will cover the fundamental characteristics of BPM and RPA and explore the potential benefits of implementing both technologies simultaneously.
Part 1: What is BPM?
BPM (Business Process Management) is a systematic approach to optimize work processes in an organization to meet the changing needs of the business world. BPM is an ongoing approach to make the performance of business processes better continuously. This approach is centered around long-term business goals and strategic benefits.
What are the benefits of BPM Automation?
BPM automation is designed to boost the effectiveness of processes across project teams and even organizations. Its implementation brings a host of business benefits such as:
- Agility. Optimized processes enable greater agility in organizational operations. Minimized errors, bottlenecks, and duplication facilitate quicker turnaround times.
- Reduction of risks. BPM automation helps prevent and fix flaws and bottlenecks, reducing business risks.
- Elimination of redundancies. Monitoring processes allows the identification and removal of duplicated tasks.
- Improved collaboration. The transparency created by BPM automation supports collaboration between internal teams and external vendors or customers.
- Higher compliance. It becomes much easier and more systematic to build audit trails and comply with enterprise rules and regulations.
Part 2: What is RPA?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that allows people to deploy 'digital workforce' or programmed robots that emulate a human's actions within computer systems in order to execute business processes more efficiently. RPA helps companies to streamline operations and to increase productivity and profitability in the long-term.
What are the benefits of RPA implementation?
- Cost reduction. Saves time and resources, freeing up employees to perform more strategic, business-critical tasks.
- Leading digital transformation. RPA accelerates digital transformation by streamlining process automation via programmed bots at company-wide level.
- Improved performance. Speeds up workflow by swiftly and accurately performing time- consuming tasks.
- Prioritization. RPA allows companies to prioritize tasks and projects that require human brainpower.
- Improved productivity. When processes are shipshape, information retrieval is more straightforward. Tasks are routed sequentially without human intervention. All of this significantly boosts the productivity of project teams.
RPA and BPM are complementary technologies and, when deployed together, provide an efficient platform to scale automation and enable digital transformation company-wide.
Part 3: Combining BPM and RPA to Maximize Impact
BPM and RPA can be combined into one powerful solution for businesses that strive to boost business processes' effectiveness and productivity. RPA can become a valuable asset in strengthening gains achieved using a traditional Business Process Management system. At the same time, while implementing Robotic Process Automation into the workflow, it is beneficial to accelerate the effect from automation with BPM tactics and techniques.
Although BPM and RPA technologies can be deployed separately in different digital transformation initiatives, the times when they are strategically implemented together to compound their benefits demonstrate more impressive results.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Management (BPM) technologies complement each other, developing a powerful combination of modern approaches that is able to help companies further deliver on their process automation goals.
ElectroNeek provides a unique solution to get the maximum impact from both RPA and BPM synced in one platform. ElectroNeek is an end-to-end intelligent automation platform that lets business users with no prior IT skills analyze employee productivity, discover automation opportunities and build software bots to automate repetitive tasks in minutes. Platform admins can manage and control the execution of automated business processes with the ElectroNeek Orchestrator which is also an essential tool for strategic planning of scaling automation in the company.
If you are still on the fence about implementing RPA into your organization, get a free one-on-one consultation with our automation experts, and see results within the first week. Bots make people really matter!