Business Process Automation
Severe market demands drive enterprises to reduce costs and increase shareholder value. Businesses can realize significant cost reductions and efficiencies by automating business process flows, eliminating human interventions, and allowing enterprise applications to communicate and intelligently and seamlessly share information.
Business process automation can be defined as technology components substituting or supplementing manual processes within and organization to lower costs, reduce risk and increase consistency
Manual business processes can lead to problems such as:
- Human error
- Scability issues
- Flexability issues
- Adapability issues
- Vurnability to human resource turnover
Automation can deliver benefits with a combination of process re-engineering, enabling technolgy and an organizational structure that can support both. The following four key technolgoy building blocks are mandatory for an automated enterprise:
- Business rule engine: Business rules describe the structure, operation, and strategy of an organization's business process. A few key people in the organization enforce business rules, typically captured in policy and procedure manuals, customer contracts, supplier agreements, and so on. That manual decision making proves error-prone and inconsistent. In legacy environments that support business processes, rules encoded inside the application can be expensive or difficult to change. A business rule engine lets you separate application code from business rules, maintain rules in a central/shareable repository, and promote consistent decision making. Such an engine proves central to any automation solution.
- Application integration platform: Automation implies that manual processes will make way for system processes, which in turn implies that the systems that help realize a business process can seamlessly communicate and exchange information without manual intervention. That requirement calls for a strong application-integration platform that supports multiple communication protocols and data semantics between systems.
- Workflow engine: In typical business scenarios, including the risk management example we saw earlier, automation needs some manual processes on an exception basis. For example, if a rule engine cannot establish the credit worthiness of an applicant based on the rules defined in its repository, someone must take a second look. Workflow engines enable a smooth hand-off between systems, between people, and between systems and people.
- Common data interchange standards: To lower costs through automation over the long term, enterprises need a common, XML-based data interchange standard that reduces development and maintenance efforts.
At Alakoa, we specialize in quickly understanding your unique business needs and providing the best technology solutions available that save you time and improve your bottom line.