The Enterprise Buyer's Guide for Business Process Automation Software
If you're reading this, it’s presumable that your business is considering business process automation software.
With business process automation functionality, you can simplify routine, rules-based workflows. Automating these types of business processes generates more yield in enterprise resource planning (ERP), significantly better cost savings, and enhanced operation of your workforce.
Even though most enterprise businesses today have implemented some form of automation, digital transformation, or process development, many fail to understand the full potential of automation functionality and struggle to phase out remaining time-intensive manual workflows.
While partially automated workflows will give you a slight edge, they can also deterring you in the end.
In this enterprise buyer's guide, we'll clarify what business process automation is, how it works, its superiority, and the criteria you need to consider when analyzing BPA applications.
So let's get to it!
What is Business Process Automation: A Primer
Business process automation (BPA), also called business process management (BPM), is the act of using technology to simplify routine, standards-based tasks such as transmitting documents, data-entry, sending payments, or organizing documents.
Capitalizing on automation can significantly improve an organization's bottomline by streamlining tasks, creating productivity, and eliminating gruntwork which enables your staff to focus on tasks that augment the business.
Modern automation platforms, like those you're likely gauging, implement breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) to carry out repetitive tasks on a human's behalf.
Ultimately, employees are still your most powerful resource, but through system automation, your teammates can work faster on more productive tasks instead of having their time consumed by routine manual tasks.
The Benefits of Business Process Automation
The following are just some of the outstanding benefits of BPA or automated tools.
Eliminates Human Error
Streamlines Tedious Tasks
Eliminates Inefficiencies
Deters Malicious Activity
Facilitates Cost-Savings
Enhances Vendor Relationships and Customer Satisfaction
Reduced Supplier Inquiries
Delivers Better Transparency into Processes
Higher ROI
Use Cases for Business Process Automation
Any business that has tiresome, repetitive tasks can benefit from process automation software. Some of the most common business and industry use cases include:
HR New Employee Onboarding
CRM Processes
Social Media
Evaluation Factors for Business Process Automation Software
Choosing the process automation tool that relates to your company starts with examining your existing operating procedures, pinpointing prime targets for automation and searching the marketplace for applications.
1. Define Your Business Needs
Before ever weighing application options, the most important thing to do is to understand your company requirements.
Turning a blind eye to this step could cause obtaining application that ultimately restrains your business, or selecting additional features that are unnecessary. Gather your department heads to discuss the following:
What tasks are ideal candidates for automation?
Do you need the application for a specific department, or can the technology be used by a number of departments?
Are there any dependencies that prohibit you from implementing a new system?
How many team members will require access to the application? What are their responsibilities?
2. Conducting Pre-Purchase Research
As soon as you have your base needs determined, you can start looking for probable solutions. There are several things you can learn on your own before reaching out to a vendor or entering a high-pressure sales conversation.
Here are few resources you can typically find on solution websites or from a Google search that will help you conduct 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
Subsequently accomplishing some fundamental research, you can immediately request for customized price quotes from the solutions you're eager to learn about.
While several software websites offer pricing, nearly all business process management software simply offer starting prices and will need more data about your business to arrange a definitive forecast model for you.
If your organization uses a more conventional procurement process, this would be the time to start sending the initial requests for information (RFI) which specifically drafts your requirements for potential vendors.
When talking to potential vendors, it's imperative that you get all of your queries answered and see to it that the platform meets all of your requirements. This will help you lessen vendor options during the final decision later on.
4. Understanding Licensing Structures
Among the major important cost considerations for an automation platform is the licensing structure. There is a wide selection of user models that platform companies use and it can have an extreme impact on the total cost of ownership. Here are some of the most generally 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 maximum number of users.
Maximum user licensing: This is total pricing with the total number of users allotted with additional seats available for an additional cost.
Site licensing: Rather than per user, this type of licensing allows you to use the software at a single (or multiple) predetermined locations.
Ongoing vs subscription licensing: Ongoing licensing is usually pay once and use indefinitely, whereas a subscription price will need to be renewed
The pricing model that best suits for your organization will finally depend on the budget, the number of users or site locations, as well as the level of flexibility you want. For instance, if you'd rather not be latched into a long-term investment, you might go for a subscription model that you can revoke whenever you have to.
5. Deployment Models
The deployment model is one more crucial deliberation as your company might have certain legal or compliance-related requirements that dictate you use only one type of infrastructure.
Take for example, many companies in the healthcare and government sector have strict codes which demand they control all computing and application infrastructure on-premise and that any new platform be certified in compliant in a specific structure like HIPAA or FedRAMP.
Several vendors present an assortment of deployment options precisely for this reason. These can be divided into two essential groups: on-premises, off-premises, or hybrid deployment.
On-premises (Data Center): This hosting option compels your business to deploy the software through your on-premise data center environment. Accordingly, your company keeps full control over the installation, architecture, administration, maintenance, and data security.
This limits the scope of risk involved with outposting deployment to a third party, but it also adds to your duties and involves its own level of risk.
For instance, disregarding routine updates and backups may risk putting your organization in a risky situation if a data breach or emergency arises. But as stated previously, for some in a compliance-heavy business, there may not be an option here.
Off-premises (Cloud-based): For companies that have no compliance commitments, or have regulated standards that a cloud option can fulfill, this option might be much more appealing.
This is because cloud deployments allow your organization to offload much of the administrative and maintenance concerns it would usually be responsible for.
Furthermore, an abundance of enterprise-level technology is deep-seated on best-in-class infrastructures like 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 choose to make the most out of cloud innovation but operate in a compliance-heavy enterprise, is a hybrid or mixed deployment.
Although being a little more intricate, a hybrid environment would contain all your sensitive data and related features in an on-premise environment while your non-classified data and processes can be implemented in a cloud environment.
6. Implementation Requirements
One more important deliberation is the implementation requirements, for the software vendor, for your company. Just because you may want to use a certain tool, doesn't mean your current capabilities are sufficient to run it. Therefore it's important to examine the following:
Configurability. Does the tool come with all needed functionality out of the box, or will it require some refining once installed? This is relevant to understand to ensure you can maximize your investment and hit the ground running.
System requirements. In thecase of an on-premise deployment, do you have all the necessary hardware to run the platform appropriately? If not, your whole investment could be jeopardized.
Elasticity. Can the software scale to meet higher demand as your organization grows, if the limit on the number of coincidental users are online, or if your foundation causes a utilization load spike? It's necessary to single out an automation platform that can scale to adapt to growth or a utilization flux. Several SaaS and cloud options supply auto-scaling as the need develops, considering that a large part of on-premise deployments compel that auto-routing during load spikes is implemented in advance.
7. Integration capabilities
A further essential consideration is integration potential. While the notion of all together solution is a wonderful concept, it usually doesn't work that way. Especially with automation, the automation tool will need to reach out to different systems and other tools contingent on how many business units are resorting to it.
Therefore, you must grant your potential vendors with a full list of all systems and tools to guarantee that your automation tool can be well-coordinated with each.
Alternatively, if a particular tool not quoted under integrations, does the platform vendor provide an application programming interface (API) so that a developer can bridge your systems his or herself?
If there isn't a preformed integration in qualified for your other systems, and the API either doesn't exist or is tremendously difficult to use, it most likely isn’t the greatest fit for your organization.
8. Customer Support
Another critical, yet often overlooked feature is available customer support. Often, businesses don't realize the value of good customer support until they are in dire need of it and it's unavailable.
Every software vendor has its own different customer support offering whether it’s 24/7/365 or limited to particular hours. They typically also have a scope for their customer support services - issues they will facilitate and issues they won't.
More often than not, basic customer support is offered for issues connected to the platform itself, nonetheless, concerns that are customer-centric (i.e. implementation issues, best practices, etc) may solely be accessible at a premium, if at all.
At any rate, it's crucial that you recognize what your level of customer support provides, its handiness, and the options accessible to you (i.e. ticket service, phone, email, chat, etc). Moreover, as your staff is learning to use automation software, it's key that they have training resources conveniently attainable, whether live or pre-designed.
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, therefore, it’s important to be sure that any data used is safe from prohibited access. See to it that your tool provides the succeeding security features:
Access management to manage who can have contact with the software.
Permission controls to determine what a user can and can't access while working with the platform.
Compliance certification (if [needed) to ascertain that the seller has met all its responsibilities to adhere to any legal regulations that your business is responsible for.
10. Ease-of-use
Finally, it's of the essence that the software is intuitive and convenient for your coworkers. An overly-complex user interface can result in lost production as you allocate time and valuables toward having your employees train on how to use the software.
Offerings like a free trial can help to ensure your teams adore the product before purchasing. Also, demos, training resources, and process templates can contributes significantly to the learning curve as all platforms, even intuitive ones, will require some sort of adaptation period.
The Procurement Process
At the same time that your organization has examined the full evaluation criteria and you are aware of what you're looking for, it's time to start taking into account your options, examining and reducing your choices, and ultimately buying and implementing the product.
Below is a step-by-step guide to assist you with the procurement process.
Step 1: Compare Your Options
It's in all likelihood you've already developed a list of potential vendors during the evaluation process. It is now time to remove any that don't meet your requirements and reduce your short-list. When your short-list is prepare, compare your alternatives based on the following characteristics:
Price
Features
Free Trial Options
Security and Compliance Capabilities
Customer Support
Step 2: Schedule Demos
With likely only 2-3 options remaining, it's now time to find out what the tool’s capable of. Not only will this assist you to measure functionality, but it will also provide you with some idea of the product's ease of use. If it has an extremely intricate user interface or it seems like it will require a precipitous learning curve, it may not be 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 may be an extended free trial you can take advantage of before monthly or annual payments.
Furthermore, be careful of hidden pricing minutiae such as flat-rate vs per-user pricing, or paying for unnecessary extra functionality.
A supplier that is reluctant to negotiate, or imparts suspicious pricing with a lot of hidden costs is likely not going to be a good long-term partner for your business. Bear this in mind before going through with it as you may regret your decision down the road.
Step 4: Implementation
When you've purchased, it's time to implement your new system. Contingent upon how deeply embedded your previous tool was, or how complicated the integration is, this procedure might get a bit complicated. Here are a few suggestions to help you boost the transition.
Inform your staff on the new automation platform, have them view demos, or get some training. It's important for long-term scalability that each of your employees use the tool in accordance with best practices instead of enforcing their own individual uses.
Involve customer support when required for technical problems.
Enlist the help of a solutions partner like Wave.
While plenty of software companies have technical support for problems] with regard to their software, regularly, issues around best practices and implementation optimization are out of their scope.
We can give you a hand in rolling out new platforms in a phased procedure that makes the most sense for your business and results in as little downtime as possible while ensuring that everyone knows how to use the platform according to best practices.
Start Your Organization’s Digital Transformation with Wave
Manual business processes impede your business, which results in bottlenecks, incoherent workflows, misplaced information, and human error. This decreases productivity, results in upscaled expenses, reduces your control over the business, and can someday obstruct your long-term feasibility and scalability.
Wave assists your business to execute automation solutions and content management systems (CMS) that simplify your procedures end-to-end, automate tedious, monotonous work, and can integrate with any ERP system of your choosing.
While we work predominantly with ECM systems like OpenText, M-Files, and SharePoint, we're happy to work with whichever system you're currently utilizing.
Rather than tearing out deep-seated legacy software, we can cooperate with your system and implement supportive tooling that can complement and develop your present systems.
We’d gladly provide our automation platform as an on-premise or cloud-based solution to suit your compliance requirements and budget.
If you'd like to learn more about how Wave can assist digital transformation and business process automation in your business, contact us today.