why it’s time to embrace business process automation

Why it’s time to embrace Business Process Automation

As organizations chase digital transformations, many are realizing that adopting buzzword technologies simply won’t be enough: robotic process automation (RPA), business process modeling, AI, and intelligent automation are exciting, but alone they will never replace the hard work of transformation – getting organizational alignment across silos, learning to think end-to-end from a customer-first perspective, and building competencies around agile development and design thinking.

To realize the benefits of digital transformation, organizations must transform processes to address modern business concerns such as how customers are served, how promises are fulfilled, and how operations are run.

To solve current digital transformation challenges, enterprises must combine emerging technologies like AI and RPA with Business Process Modeling and case management. They must embrace agile methods and design thinking while leveraging low-code approaches to break down silos between business and IT. And automation efforts must be viewed as a vital part of designing and deploying streamlined experiences that customers and employees want. This is the goal of Business Process Automation.

The state of automation Digital transformation demands going beyond just operational efficiency by designing the business to align with evolving customer expectations. Organizations are making the move towards running more process-centric applications, adopting agile methodologies and tools, and incorporating technology like AI and RPA. However, integrating these tools and technologies into existing legacy systems while

Expectations about digital transformation don’t match reality; according to Forrester research:

of organizations use excel and email to manage and automate business processes

of organizations use homegrown solutions to manage and automate business processes

of organizations use paper-based manual routing of tasks to manage and automate business processes

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Based on these stats, it’s clear that digital transformation is being stalled at large enterprises because teams are still reliant on manual, paper-based processes and mechanisms. However, it’s also clear that there is significant opportunity for process improvement and efficiency gains, especially for those who want to match their digital transformation expectations with reality.

RPA: How much have you actually automated? Not long ago, most process transformation efforts were delivered with Business Process Management (BPM) technology. This approach required cross-silo coordination and expensive integration. Too often, BPM projects got stuck in analysis paralysis – teams who were tasked with automating business processes were not the end-users. As a result, business process engineers spent too much time documenting, filling in their knowledge gaps, and analyzing existing processes rather than designing the new approach.

With the emergence of RPA, organizations believed that it could act as a ‘one-tool-fixes-all’ for their automation challenges. Unlike BPM, the initial consensus was that RPA tools are quick to install, non-invasive and easy to use, meaning you didn’t need to be an engineer to use the tool. However, as the dust from early-stage RPA deployments settles, some harsh truths about their application have emerged:

30-50%of initial RPA projects fails

Only

3%of bot deployments reach scale

63%of business leaders cite unsatisfactory implementation speed


While RPA has a place in nearly every automation strategy – Forrester has found that nearly 72% of all Fortune 1000 organizations have adopted some level of process automation – the challenge is to deploy it appropriately. It’s clear that RPA alone is not fit for use cases like processing data with complicated rule-based decisions or coordinating work between humans and automation. And by focusing solely on RPA, legacy system problems go unaddressed, leaving customer experiences without the streamlined processes needed to support them. If operational processes are siloed and slowed by bottlenecks, an army of robots performing repetitive functions won’t fix the problem.

Process still matters Process improvement is at a crossroads. Many organizations see the value of end-to-end digitaltransformation, but they still think traditional BPM systems are too expensive, too complicated, and too focused on a limited number of applications that don’t really impact the customer experience. However, despite these challenges BPM projects do have a proven track record of streamlining work and accountability at some organizations. They track information and use that data to improve performance by redesigning, replacing, or removing what wasn’t working.


What can AI actually do? Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t anything new, yet it’s back at the top of the tech hype cycle creating both confusion and potential. With a change fueled by an abundance of data to power decisions, expanded cloud computing power, and ever-increasing customer expectations, the door for AI and its practical application has opened. However, AI can only deliver on its promise when leaders have a clear understanding of how to use it to engage customers and drive optimized interactions. This requires a clear understanding of current engagement processes. To further add to the disillusionment of what AI can and can’t do, many software vendors are using AI as a marketing ploy to cover a stack of disparate software. Organizations must look beyond the branding for tangible evidence of AI-driven outcomes.

Introducing Business Process AutomationBusiness process automation (BPA) goes beyond traditional BPM. It allows organizations to truly take an end-to-end approach to transformation. BPA is about using intelligence and design thinking to streamline processes and create better experiences for employees and customers.

Unlike BPM and RPA which are standalone technologies, BPA unifies technology to enable organization-wide digital transformation. It can coordinate complex processes across a variety of systems and resources including the development and maintenance of the apps that power internal processes. BPA breaks down silos, improves customer-centricity, and provides end-to-end automation to support the needs of customers and employees.

BPA’s support of digital front-end processes and back-end operations requires a holistic approach to automation: thinking about all of your organization’s processes and how they interconnect to deliver outcomes.

Four common mistakes when pursuing business process automation: The software industry has a history of promising a revolutionary change and then failing to deliver. Organizations fall for the hype and focus on the new approach – implementing a bot, redesigning processes with BPM, or deploying AI – that promises to solve a tactical need, but more often than not misses the mark.

We’ve found that organizations often make four common mistakes when pursuing business process automation and transformation:

1. Automating the channel, not the journeyThe pressure to be present has organizations focused on automating specific channels like chatbots, intelligent assistants, and call centers, rather than thinking about the entire customer journey. This leads to development teams building unique logic into each individual channel, isolating intelligence, and creating disconnected processes and silos.

It also leads to customer experiences being inconsistent and frustrating. The organization wastes valuable development dollars building duplicate systems, rather than creating one streamlined experience that is needed by the customer.

2. Automating tasks, not processesDeploying standalone bots may deliver results, but it won’t transform the business. Standalone bots are hard to deploy - between managing expectations and manually updating business logic, it’s easy for bots to break and to lose efficiency. In addition, standalone bots are more focused on isolated tasks, so the majority of the benefits of RPA are left on the table.

Task-centric bots create fragmentation. Automating individual tasks means you’re losing sight of the desired outcome - customers come to a business because they want something, but when the process is tangled in a nest of systems and silos, you’re actually making it harder for them.

3. Allowing islands of automation to existPerhaps the most impactful mistake is allowing multiple lines of business to manage their own automation initiatives. Islands of automation are destined to produce crippling bot outages and RPA downtime. A lack of knowledge sharing, different automation design practices, repeated mistakes, and even siloed RPA tools all lead to high costs and a diminished level of quality whose damaging bite is felt in the long run.

Automation programs based around an RPA Center of Excellence have the standardization and knowledge sharing needed to ensure high-quality automation design that yields resilient digital workforces.


4. Relying on paper-based documents to prioritize automation Labor-intensive and ambiguous Process Design Documents (PDD) are not an efficient instrument to communicate the development work needed to automate a process and build a robot; PDDs are disconnected and leave a lot of room for misunderstanding and errors – like missed regulatory requirements – causing costly delays and rework.

What’s needed to successfully scale BPA is a digital method for communicating the entire context of the robot to be built. One that includes all the enterprise constraints and regulations the bot must adhere to, as well as mechanisms for centralized collaboration to mitigate risk and drive precise, high-quality development that produces resilient robots.

A new path for success: From task-centric to outcome-centric While traditional BPM and RPA projects are steps in the right direction, delivering true digitaltransformation demands more. BPA delivers the technology and methodology needed to redesign processes to support the needs of customers and employees in a digital world. To accelerate and realize success with BPA, it’s necessary to rethink the processes around the outcomes customers seek and the experiences they demand, and then integrate the tasks and automations needed to design and deliver those journeys.

BPA goes end-to-endIt’s crucial to think end-to-end about service processes, designing journeys that get customers the outcomes they want in a way that’s easy for them and efficient for the business. While BPA leverages robotics to automate tasks, it operates in the context of end-to-end processes – applying design thinking to your process. Design thinking starts with the impact of the process on customer and employee experiences and uses rapid prototypes and testing to rebuild those experiences. When applied to automation, this means moving beyond using bots to speed up a process step involving a manual task, and instead reimagining the process from start to finish with the outcome at the heart of its design.

Working together, end-to-end automation and robotic processes can orchestrate work anywhere, anytime, while context is maintained. And when an application change occurs, like a new regulation or an API becomes available to replace a bot, it can help to identify the impact of these changes so that you can thoughtfully plan to accommodate these changes without breaking the process.

No matter the process, it is critical to be able to deploy and get results quickly. The ability to design applications without code is critical. By empowering business and IT to work together in an objective-driven, no-code environment, reimagined processes can quickly be brought to life.Many vendors claim to deliver end-to-end automation but are missing critical elements. You need to make sure that all the elements of BPA are present, but also live in a single, unified platform – so they don’t require time-consuming integrations.


The business process automation checklist

Value Stream Mapping Workflow Management

Text Analytics Self-Service Platform

Business Process Modeling Consumer-grade ease of use

Business Rules Application Integrations

Robotic Process Automation Agile Low-Code Environment

Document Support Guardrails and Governance

Design Thinking AI-Powered Decisions

BPA starts with Value Stream MappingAt every level, the goals of BPA are tied to outcomes. But how is value against outcomes visualized and tracked at every step? Enter value stream management.

Value stream management uses visual models to map, optimize, model, and govern the flow of business value from ideation to the delivery of automations. Not only does this allow for visualization of all intermediate steps needed to reach the end goal, but it also allows for reuse, as processes are broken down into pieces. With all steps documented, rules and exceptions are captured, and reuse is enabled, workers avoid the guesswork in building and automating processes. Further, it gives business and IT leaders the necessary visibility and data to ensure teams are maximizing business value and accelerating productivity throughout the automation lifecycle.


BPM with Blueprint Blueprint’s Business Process Modeler supports end-to-end business process modeling. It is an intuitive solution that makes it easy for citizen developers to capture, connect, optimize, and communicate processes enterprise-wide. The Business Process Modeler is simple-to-use and leverages drag-and-drop functionality to empower business and IT stakeholders to easily build business process from scratch or modify existing business processes in a more optimal way for automation. The business process, along with any critical context like regulations, enterprise constraints, and attachments can be automatically generated into a Digital Blueprint. Since the Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite seamlessly integrates with leading RPA tools, business users can automatically push Digital Blueprints along with the optimized process and all constraints and attachments directly into their RPA tool of choice; giving your RPA developers the context and alignment they need to build higher-quality, precise robots.

VSM with Blueprint

Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite supports value stream management by aligning people, process, and technology with mapping, optimizing, visualizing, measuring, and governing the flow of business value (including epics, stories, and requirements) through the software delivery or automation of delivery pipelines. The Enterprise Automation Suite enables organizations to modernize their application and automation delivery with Agile and DevOps so that their transformation efforts deliver real, measurable value to stakeholders.

BPA scales with Business Process Modeling The goal of Business Process Modeling is to map, understand, and then optimize the processes that govern your business in order to increase efficiency, performance, and agility in your day-to-day operations. It allows for a detailed and dynamic analysis of current or proposed processes. Business Process Modeling enables analysts to model, optimize and test processes before passing them on to dev teams for automation and deployment, which reduces future risk.

However, traditional BPM tools are complicated and make it difficult for non-technical stakeholders to manage business processes. It’s critical to consider who the end-user of the product is going to be, and who is going to build it. As we’ve uncovered, development teams are dealing with a myriad of changes, adding business process modeling to their backlog is just going to further delay your transformation efforts. It’s critical that the tool you’re using to model your processes is simple to use, focused on optimizing business processes, and integrates with other tools in your automation stack so that end-users like business people can effectively manage processes themselves.



Managing Compliance with Blueprint

Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite simplifies regulatory change by establishing guardrails for enterprise governance. The Blueprint Enterprise Automation Suite ingests, stores, anddecomposes regulatory content so that requirements can be accurately connected and mapped to automation work in each Digital Blueprint generated and automatically pushed into your RPA tool. This avoids non-compliance risks and rework when missed requirements are identified. From directly in the RPA tool you employ, your bot developers can reference the regulatory context and any critical information included to ensure compliance and promote quality in the bot being built. These traces can also become baselines for how automation work is expected to be completed, and thus ensure any future changes are always in accordance with regulatory standard. Further, Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite has advanced versioning, audit logs, and reporting capabilities so that you are always prepared for both internal and external audit requirements.

BPA simplifies regulatory managementAs organizations expand their automation efforts, compliance stands out as a strong candidate. From an enterprise perspective, the realm of compliance involves an adherence to laws, policies, and regulations that are designed to maintain data integrity, data security, and safeguard the privacy of employees and customers. The processes to maintain these regulatory standards are typically stable, rule-based, require structured inputs, manual, and repetitive in nature – perfect for automation.

Leveraging automation in compliance processes can lead to a number of benefits including expanded resource capacity, improved outcomes through greater quality and consistency, reduced remediation efforts, and lowered costs. Automation enables you to modernize your compliance program so that regulatory change becomes less burdensome to manage, which empowers your compliance teams to focus on more value-add activities such as judgement-based monitoring and testing activities, and quality assurance.

BPA needs robust integration capabilties Integration is critical to digital transformation success. Organizations rely on a number of applications to streamline business operations, reduce complexity, improve enterprise work management, and connect with the customer. But as organizations grow their tech stack to address emerging opportunities and evolving customer demands, many of them end up with a number of applications that can’t talk to each other or work together. To maximize agility and responsiveness, enterprises need a platform that enables users to quickly build, adapt, and scale applications for business use.

BPA prioritizes design thinking Instead of starting from a viewpoint of “What can we automate” success in BPA requires a “what is the desired outcome?” approach. Transitioning to an enterprise BPA strategy begins with a holistic view of all interconnected processes required to deliver customer-centric service and streamline worker tasks. Design thinking is dynamic, with multiple continuous iterations between the phases. When applied to automation, this means moving beyond bots to merely speed up a process step involving a manual task; instead, a design thinking approach engages multiple disciplines and creates a prioritized backlog of innovative solutions – balancing ease of development, optimized customer experiences, market opportunities, and business value.

Design Thinking with Blueprint

Blueprint supports design thinking as it inherently promotes collaboration and alignment between business and technical stakeholders. Business stakeholders work closely with customers and are able to empathize with their needs and expectations through interviews which are captured within the Blueprint Enterprise Automation Suite. Business stakeholders leverage this information to define and create processes that can optimize the customer experience. By supporting design thinking, business and IT leaders can feel confident that the applications being produced are valuable to the end-user.

Application Integrations with Blueprint The Blueprint Enterprise Automation Suite seamlessly integrates with leading process mining/discovery and RPA tools so that you can build higher-quality bots and drive business process automation at scale. Within the Blueprint Enterprise Automation Suite, business and technical stakeholders can leverage data captured from process mining and discovery platforms to accurately assess each step within a value stream, business process, or customer journey. Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite provides users the ability to map and optimize complex business processes and generate Digital Blueprints that can then be automatically fed into the RPA tool of your choice, along with all constraints and attachments that RPA developers can reference to guide precise robot development. This ensures that bots being built are compliant and exactly what the business needs.


About Blueprint

Blueprint is a leading provider of digital process design and management solutions to Fortune 1000 organizations. Today, global leaders from every industry use Blueprint to identify, design and manage high-value automations with speed and precision in order to scale the scope and impact of their RPA initiatives. From comprehensive analytics and AI-assisted modeling to change management and integrations with the leading Process Discovery and RPA vendors, our award-winning business solution provides the end-to-end visibility and control you need to simplify and accelerate the path to a scalable, enterprise-wide RPA model that drives continued business growth.

To learn more, visit us at: www.blueprintsys.com

2021 Blueprint Software, Inc. All rights reserved. All product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.