Finding The Best Business Process Automation Software Guide For Enterprise Buyers
If you're reading this, it’s probably that your organization is taking a look at business process automation software.
With the competency of business process automation you can streamline tedious, rules-based workflows. Automating these types of business tasks generates more productivity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and enhanced utilization of your workforce.
While most enterprise businesses today have enforced some form of automation, digital transformation, or process optimization, many fail to understand the full scope of automation functionality and struggle to terminate remaining time-intensive manual tasks.
While partially automated tasks will give you some edge, they can also costing you in the end.
In this enterprise buyer's guide, we'll explain what business process automation is, how it functions, its advantages, and the criteria you must study when analyzing BPA software.
So let's begin!
What is Business Process Automation: A Primer
Business process automation (BPA), otherwise known as business process management (BPM), is the process of using technology to streamline routine, regimented tasks such as sending documents, data-entry, routing payments, or archiving documents.
Utilizing automation can substantially better an organization's bottomline by streamlining workflows, establishing productivity, and eliminating gruntwork which allows your staff to focus on tasks that augment the business.
Advanced automation platforms, like those you're probably evaluating, implement breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) to carry out repetitive labor on a employee’s behalf.
Conclusively, humans are still your most powerful resource, but through system automation, your colleagues can work more rapidly on more growth-focused tasks instead of having their time monopolized by routine manual tasks.
The Benefits of Business Process Automation
Beneath are just some of the outstanding benefits of BPA or automated software.
Prevents Human Error
Streamlines Tedious Tasks
Reduces Inefficiencies
Deters Fraudulent Activity
Enhances Cost-Savings
Improves Third-Party Relationships and Customer Satisfaction
Decreased Supplier Inquiries
Enhances Better Insight into Tasks
Improved ROI
Use Cases for Business Process Automation
Any business that has drudging, continual tasks can improve from process automation technology. Some of the most conventional business and industry use cases include:
HR New Employee Onboarding
CRM Processes
Social Media
Evaluation Factors for Business Process Automation Software
Finding the process automation platform that corresponds to your company starts with examining your existing workflow, finding prime targets for automation and assessing the marketplace for applications.
1. Define Your Business Needs
Before ever assessing application options, the most important thing to do is to understand your organizational goals.
Turning a blind eye to this step could result in acquiring technology that ultimately restrains your business, or purchasing additional features that are irrelevant. Gather your department heads to discuss the following:
What workflows are good candidates for automation?
Do you need the technology for a particular department, or can the technology be used by multiple departments?
Are there any dependencies that prohibit you from launching a new system?
How many employees will require access to the application? What are their roles?
2. Conducting Pre-Purchase Research
Once you have your foundational needs pinned down, you can start looking for probable solutions. There is a lot you can research on your own before discussing with a vendor or entering a high-pressure sales discussion.
Here are few resources you can typically find on technology websites or from a Google search that will stimulate your initial research.
Recorded demos
Pricing/Licensing Tiers
Product Pages/Data Sheets/Explainer Blogs
Product Comparisons
Peer Reviews
Partner Referrals
3. Submit RFIs to Potential Vendors
Once you've done some fundamental research, you can now ask for customized price quotes from the solutions you're keen on learning about.
While many software websites offer pricing, the majority of business process management platforms simply offer starting prices and will need more data about your organization to prepare a final estimation model for you.
If your business uses a more conventional procurement process, this would be the time to start sending the initial requests for information (RFI) which respectively outlines your requirements for potential vendors.
When you communicate with potential vendors, it's vital that you get all of your questions answered and make sure that the software meets all of your requirements. This will help you narrow down vendor options during the final decision later on.
4. Understanding Licensing Structures
One of the main important cost considerations for an automation platform is the licensing structure. There are a variety of user models that software companies use and it can have a significant impact on the total cost of ownership. Here are some of the most frequently used structures:
Per-seat or per-user licensing: means that pricing is set per person. This is why it's very important to determine your total number of users.
Maximum user licensing: This is total pricing with the total number of users allotted with additional users available for an additional cost.
Site licensing: Rather than per user, this type of licensing allows you to use the platform at a single (or multiple) predetermined locations.
Ongoing vs subscription licensing: Ongoing licensing is most often pay once and use indefinitely, whereas a subscription price will need to be renewed
The pricing model that best suits for your organization will ultimately depend on the budget, total users or site locations, as well as the amount of flexibility you want. For example, if you'd rather not be latched into a long-term investment, you might go for a subscription model that you can nullify anytime.
5. Deployment Models
The deployment model is one more important deliberation as your company can have certain legal or compliance-related requirements that dictate you use simply one type of infrastructure.
For example, many organizations in the healthcare and government section have meticulous rules which command they control all computing and application infrastructure on-premise and that any new application be certified in compliant in a specific groundwork like HIPAA or FedRAMP.
Many vendors offer several deployment options for this very reason. These can be separated into two main groups: on-premises, off-premises, or hybrid deployment.
On-premises (Data Center): This hosting option compels your company to deploy the software via your on-premise data center environment. That being the case, your organization retains complete control over the installation, architecture, administration, maintenance, and data security.
This limits the extent of risk tangled with outposting deployment to a third party, but it also increases your obligations and includes its own level of risk.
Take for example, overlooking routine updates and backups could set your organization up in a precarious place if a data breach or disaster arises. But as stated previously, for some in a compliance-heavy industry, there may not be any other options here.
Off-premises (Cloud-based): For companies that have no compliance commitments, or have regulated standards that a cloud option can fulfill, this choice might be much more appealing.
This is because cloud deployments grant the organization the opportunity to offload a lot of the administrative and maintenance troubles it would under other conditions, be responsible for.
Furthermore, most enterprise-level technology is deep-seated on best-in-class infrastructures namely AWS or Azure and provides redundancy, reliability, as well as service level agreements (SLAs) should you seek more uptime guarantee.
Hybrid (Mixed) Deployment: The third choice, for those that prefer to exploit cloud innovation but operate in a compliance-heavy enterprise, is a hybrid or mixed deployment.
Although being a bit more complicated, a hybrid environment would contain all your sensitive data and related aspects in an on-premise environment while your non-classified data and processes can be executed in a cloud environment.
6. Implementation Requirements
One more crucial deliberation is the implementation requirements, for the software vendor, for your organization. Just because you might feel like using a certain tool, doesn't suggest that your existing capabilities are sufficient to run it. For this reason, it's important to examine the following:
Configurability. Does the tool come with all needed functionality when acquired, or will it need some tweaking once installed? This is essential to know to guarantee you can get the most from your investment and start off on the right foot.
System requirements. In thecase of an on-premise deployment, do you have the entire essential hardware to handle the platform properly? If not, your whole investment could be compromised.
Elasticity. Can the software scale to meet higher demand as your business grows, if the maximum number of simultaneous users are online, or if your framework incurs a utilization load spike? It's crucial to select an automation tool that can scale to accommodate growth or a utilization flux. A large number of SaaS and cloud options offer auto-scaling as the need arises, whereas most on-premise deployments demand that auto-routing under load spikes is implemented ahead of time.
7. Integration capabilities
A further key consideration is integration potential. While the idea of a packaged-deal solution is a beautiful concept, more often than not, it doesn't work that way. Especially with automation, the automation tool has to reach out to different systems and other tools contingent on how many business units are taking advantage of it.
That being said, you must supply your potential vendors with a full list of all systems and tools to certify that your automation platform can integrate well with each.
Also, if a distinct tool is not listed under integrations, does the tool vendor provide an application programming interface (API) so that a developer can bridge your systems his or herself?
If there isn't a preconfigured integration in place for your other systems, and the API either doesn't exist or is tremendously difficult to use, it most likely isn’t the best fit for your company.
8. Customer Support
Yet another important, yet often disregarded aspect is available customer support. Often, companies don't realize the worth of excellent customer support until they really need it and it's not available.
Every software vendor has its own unique customer support offering whether it’s 24/7/365 or confined to particular hours. They commonly also have leeway for their customer support services - issues they will support and issues they won't.
Almost always, basic customer support is given for issues relating to the tool itself, yet, problems that are customer-facing (i.e. implementation issues, best practices, etc) may solely be accessible at a premium, if at all.
At any rate, it's important that you understand what the degree of your customer support presents, its accessibility, and the options accessible to you (i.e. ticket service, phone, email, chat, etc). Also, as your team is learning to utilize automation software, it's important that they have training resources accessible, whether live or pre-made.
Listed below are examples:
Webinars
Guides
Training Labs
Tutorial Videos
Instruction Manuals/Documentation
Community Help Forums
9. Security
Another important consideration is the tool security features. With an automation platform, it's almost guaranteed that it will have some sort of connection with sensitive data, for this reason, it requires you to be confident that any data used is not liable to unauthorized access. Be in no doubt that your platform offers the subsequent security features:
Access management to regulate who can access the tool.
Permission controls to distinguish what a user can and can't have contact with while using the tool.
Compliance certification (if [needed) to ascertain that the vendor has met all its commitments to comply with any legal regulations that your company is in charge of.
10. Ease-of-use
In conclusion, it's important that the tool is intuitive and user-friendly for your team members. A convoluted user interface can result in lost productiveness as you allocate time and assets toward having your employees train on how to utilize the tool.
Offerings like a free trial can help make certain that your staff enjoy the software before purchasing. Also, demos, training resources, and process templates can contributes significantly to the learning period as all software, even intuitive ones, will call for some sort of adaptation period.
The Procurement Process
When your organization has analyzed all of the evaluation criteria and you distinguish what you're looking for, it's time to start taking into account your options, narrowing down your choices, and ultimately buying and actualizing the product.
Listed below is a step-by-step guide to help you with the procurement process.
Step 1: Compare Your Options
It's in all likelihood you've already arranged a list of potential vendors during the evaluation process. Now it's time to take off any that don't fulfill your needs and reduce your short-list. When your short-list is developed, compare your alternatives based on the following qualities:
Price
Features
Free Trial Options
Security and Compliance Capabilities
Customer Support
Step 2: Schedule Demos
With presumptively only 2-3 options left, it's now time to figure out what the capacity of the tool is. Not only will this aid you to evaluate functionality, but it will also provide you with a sense of the product's serviceability. If it has an excessively complicated user interface or it seems like it will require a steep learning curve, it most likely isn’t the best fit.
Step 3: Making the Purchase
When you've made your final selection, don't just go along with the full selling price. There may be room for negotiation, and if not, there might be an expanded free trial you can use before monthly or annual wages.
Moreover, be careful of hidden pricing minutiae such as flat-rate vs per-user pricing, or paying for unnecessary extra functionality.
A supplier that is opposed to negotiations, or provides suspicious pricing with a lot of hidden charges is plausibly not going to be a good long-term partner for your company. Deliberate before proceeding as you may regret your decision in the future.
Step 4: Implementation
When you've purchased, it's time to implement your new system. Contingent upon how deeply ingrained your previous software was, or how complicated the integration is, this process might get a bit complicated. Here are a few suggestions to help you ease the transition.
Inform your team members on the new automation platform, advise them to view demos, or get some training. It's crucial for long-term scalability that each of your staff use the software in accordance with best practices instead of implementing their own individual uses.
Contact customer support when needed for technical problems.
Hire the help of a solutions partner like Wave.
While plenty of software companies have technical support for difficulties] in connection to their platform, regularly, issues around best practices and implementation optimization are beyond their scope.
We can help you roll out new tools in a phased method that makes the most sense for your organization and results in as little dead time as possible while we see to it that everyone knows how to use the software according to best practices.
Start Your Organization’s Digital Transformation with Wave
Manual business processes impede your business, leading to bottlenecks, jumbled workflows, misplaced information, and human error. This diminishes productivity, leads to higher expenses, loosens your control over the business, and can eventually hinder your long-term stability and scalability.
Wave assists your business to implement automation solutions and content management systems (CMS) that facilitate your operation end-to-end, automate tedious, repetitive duties, and can incorporate with any ERP system of your choosing.
While we work heavily with ECM systems like OpenText, M-Files, and SharePoint, we're perfectly willing to work with whatever system you're currently using.
Rather than tearing out deeply-rooted legacy tools, we can go hand in hand your system and execute supportive tooling that can complement and develop your existing systems.
We’d be happy to convey our automation software as an on-premise or cloud-based solution to correspond to your compliance needs and budget.
If you are interested about how Wave can contribute to digital transformation and business process automation in your business, contact us today.