What is Process Automation? Will humans be replaced by bots soon?

In today’s fast-moving and constantly changing world, companies all want to streamline their business processes to be more efficient and cost-effective. Businesses believe that as we are now in a software-driven environment, the use of technologies would be a key to success, and that’s why Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) became the most popular keywords in recent years.

What is Business Process Automation (BPA)?

Business Process Automation is the use of software solutions to automate business processes. They are usually process-oriented, with the aim to replace recurring tasks in each process within the whole organization. Humans are involved in making decisions and approval steps.

Let’s take IT Request as an example.

When an employee wants to raise an IT request, say to request for a new monitor, usually they have to fill in some forms. These forms need to be approved by their managers before the IT Team could order a new monitor and allocate it to the employee, not to say there would be lots of email communications in between.

With BPA onboard, an application could be designed to automate this process, from digitalizing the IT request forms, assigning tasks to managers for approvals, online inventory checks to sending automatic emails to inform each party of their actions. Organizations could also benefit from the full audit trails and process metrics that came along with the solution.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is somehow similar to BPA, however, they are more task-oriented and low-level human jobs focused. RPA breaks down the repetitive tasks of a process into smaller and simpler tasks that do not usually need human involvement, for example, copying data from one system to another.
Apart from reducing human’s workload on low-value repetitive tasks, RPA also serves as the bridge between legacy systems, where there is no API, to further reduce the chance of human errors.

Will humans be replaced by robots completely?

When it comes to automation and robots, the first thing people have in mind is – are we going to be replaced or eliminated. The answer to that is NO.

As mentioned above, process automation software and robots are only to assist humans with low-value, repetitive tasks. With the help of robots, humans would have more time to focus on what they are best at decision making and strategic thinking. We let robots share our workloads on copy-pasting, form filling, and file transferring, free up our times for innovation tasks, and keep our business growing.

Keep up with the trend!

All in all, these two magic words – BPA and RPA will be the trends for 2021 and for years to come. If you want to know more about it or want to explore more options on how to automate your business processes and become more efficient, please feel free to contact anyone from our team and we will be more than happy to help!