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Business Process Automation
Rapid development and deployment of automation to eliminate repetitive,
laborintensive, and computerrelated tasks throughout the enterprise.
Joe Kosco
Vice President
Network Automation, Inc.
654 South Western Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90005
8887864796
NetworkAutomation.com
Introduction
Businesses have the extraordinarily complex task of continuously improving their service while
slashing costs. In order to succeed, they must execute in an increasingly competitive business
environment without making large investments in technology and infrastructure. However, they
are saddled with archaic systems and applications from past investments – investments that
actually compel inefficient business practices rife with repetitive human interaction, delays, errors,
and unnecessary cost. What these businesses need is to be liberated from the constraints of
their legacy systems so they can design and implement optimized business processes to
eliminate costs, improve customer service, and capitalize on new revenue opportunities.
Business process automation software (BPA) is designed to solve this problem. It allows
business and technology managers to design and implement new processes to deliver their
products and services to customers in a more timely and costeffective way. In essence, it allows
managers to design business processes with a “white board” mentality, or in other words, to
design processes to flow as they should, not as underlying systems and applications dictate.
This white paper describes how businesses can optimize, streamline, and automate their critical
processes with BPA.
How We Got Here
Much has transpired since the landmark book Reengineering the Corporation by Michael
Hammer and James Champy (HarperBusiness, 1994) was first released. The book’s main theme
is that businesses must completely rethink the way they execute their fundamental business
processes in order to compete in the global economy. Since then, we have witnessed
downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, a bubble, and a technological revolution. But much still
remains undone because businesses lack the tools necessary for effective reengineering.
The opportunity to improve business processes is only heightened in sectors where resources
are perennially scarce, such as the small to mediumsize business market and the health care
and manufacturing industries. Profit margins in these sectors are notoriously thin, so investments
are generally made to support core operations, not to streamline them.
When companies from these sectors do make technology investments, they typically invest in
point solutions which may enhance a specific work function but rarely improve the overarching
business process. For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) application may
improve the continuity of interaction between a manufacturing company and its customers, but it
will not align delivery date promises with plant capacity. In this case, the critical business process
includes aspects of the CRM application as well as the manufacturing management application.
With BPA, businesses have a unique opportunity to merge and align investments in technology
with their overall business strategy. BPA gives business managers the power to design optimal
business processes because they are freed from the constraints and restrictions of their legacy
systems and applications. Moreover, designing optimal business processes is no longer confined
to the company’s four walls. It can now be extended to the entire supply chain including vendors,
partners, and customers. This heightens the value businesses can create with wellplanned and
wellexecuted BPA strategies.
In essence, BPA empowers the groundbreaking concepts of Hammer and Champy with tools for
real world implementation. In fact, reengineering the corporation is no longer an abstract ideal
it is a business necessity.
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BPA Terminology Defined
To explain BPA properly, we’ll introduce terminology to define many common elements of BPA,
as illustrated in the diagram below.
Inputs: Typically raw data (such as files, faxes, and database updates) that serve as the basis for
the business process.
Jobs: Individual subprocesses or tasks completed by a human being, application, or system.
event triggers: The things that initiate jobs. Examples include schedules (e.g., every day at
8:00 AM), a file appearing in a given network directory, or the completion of previous jobs (e.g.,
Job D will only begin after Job C has finished).
Conditions: Decision points in a business process direct the process flow based on information
created during the process itself. Event triggers are always conditions that have been met, but
that conditions are not necessarily event triggers.
Steps: The individual components that make up a job. If the job is copying files from one directory
to another, the steps would include: 1) copying the files, and 2) pasting the files. Synonyms for
steps include code, actions, BAT files, and EXE files, among others.
Output: The desired outcome from a successfully operated business process.
To make the diagram and definitions more understandable, we’ll use an example of integrating a
CRM application with a manufacturing management application. Consider the common business
process of orderentrytoproductdelivery in a widget factory. The INPUT shown in our illustration
is the incoming customer orders for widgets. Job A represents the entry of purchase orders,
received by fax, into the order management system. In this situation, Event Trigger 1 is the daily
ritual of an order entry clerk, who begins entering orders at 8:30 AM for all orders accumulated
from the previous day.
The orders entered can be routed along two different plants (Premium or Standard) depending on
how much business the customer has done with the company during the last three months.
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This decision point is illustrated by Condition X in the diagram. Unfortunately, this piece of
information does not reside in the company’s manufacturing management system. Instead, it’s
stored in the CRM application. Thus, the CRM application must be queried for customer purchase
history before the decision to manufacture at the Premium or Standard plant is made.
For simplicity, let’s assume that data from the CRM application dictates the widget be
manufactured at the Standard plant. Then, Job C (the job that determines which machines to use
based on parameters in the Standard plant production system), is initiated. Once Job C is
complete and the widget is made, the product is ready for shipment processing (Job D). However,
Job D will not be initiated until enough widgets have been made to fill an entire truck. When the
shipping system (a third application) indicates enough completed widgets for a truckful, the
condition for Event Trigger 2 is met. Thus, Job D is initiated and the shipping papers are created.
As you can see, a business process (even when highly simplified as in the above example) can
become very complex, especially as the number of computer systems and human touchpoints
increase. This is why BPA software, which controls the endtoend business process, can create
so much value.
Where BPA Software Offers the Most Value
BPA software can be utilized to solve a wide range of business problems, but it can have the
most impact in three areas.
Situation #1: Where there is a significant amount of repetitive, laborintensive, and computer
related effort, such as data entry, report generation, file maintenance, data transfers, data
replication, error monitoring, and application/server troubleshooting.
To illustrate this point, imagine our order entry process. The clerk waited for hardcopy faxes to
accumulate before manually entering purchase orders into the company’s order entry system.
This process is very slow an order might wait 24 hours or over a long weekend before it is
entered. It is very costly and it is prone to errors entering the wrong ShipTo address can cause
tremendous downstream delays and cost.
In a BPAdesigned process, purchase order faxes are converted to email automatically, and e
mails with orderspecific header information triggers automatic order entry. Optical character
recognition (OCR) software scans the purchase orders for key customer information prior to
automatic entry. In the event the OCR software didn’t resolve any necessary information, the
purchase order is routed as an exception to an order entry specialist. In contrast with the manual
process described above, this process is very fast orders are entered in near real time. It is also
much less expensive than having fulltime order entry personnel, and it is less errorprone.
When organizations and supply chains consider streamlining their operations, they need to first
adopt a “white board mentality.” To design optimal business processes and activities, any
consideration about the underlying systems must be avoided. Why? Because the underlying
technology infrastructure is often the reason for the archaic, costly, and suboptimal business
processes in the first place. Managers must design their processes with an idealistic attitude
towards technology, adopting an attitude that technology will be an enabler rather than a limiter.
It is always easier to backtrack from an ideal or optimal process design rather than incrementally
improve a suboptimal one.
Once an optimal business process has been whiteboarded by business managers, it’s time for
technologists to get involved. IT managers, network administrators, and application developers
must determine how to implement the newly designed process. The more these individuals
understand what BPA software offers, the better equipped they will be to implement the design in
a timely and costeffective manner.
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Situation #2: Where more than one application or system is involved in the business process.
This common problem is encountered by almost every business. Our business process example
included a manufacturing management application, a CRM system, and a shipping system. For
the business process to function smoothly, these systems must interact.
One approach to application integration involves extremely costly and timeconsuming backend
data source integration. Options include enterprise application integration (EAI) or the creation of
data warehouses and data marts. These types of implementations generally take several months
to a year and cost six to seven figures. For companies that need to take quick action and deliver
results on a timely basis, this is simply not an option.
When systems don’t interact, another approach companies often employ is to use people to
manually integrate systems. For example, a production manager might manually query a CRM
application to determine which jobs need priority. Such integration leads to slow, costly, and
errorprone processes. Processes and activities that involve repetitive human intervention for
straightforward decisionmaking are ripe for business process automation.
The real power behind BPA software is that it can integrate quickly between disparate
applications on the frontend, as opposed to expensive and slowtoimplement backend
integration. This enables BPA software users to quickly capitalize on new opportunities for
eliminating waste, delay, and repetitive manual effort. BPA software enables interapplication
integration in days, not months. Furthermore, it does not require access to sensitive and secure
data and systems which can often be a problematic hurdle for someone who is trying to solve a
problem, not become a member of the Secret Service.
Situation #3: Where there is an unwillingness to create and maintain expensive scripts.
BPA software removes the need for almost all script writing. Moreover, it enables the cohesive
centralized management and deployment of jobs (as opposed to scripts) across the enterprise.
Nearly all IT managers understand the perils of writing code from scratch to solve specific
problems. Application and script development always take much longer than initially estimated,
and once users get a taste of the value of the application, they always seem to make more
requests. Furthermore, supporting the application becomes a problematic when those who
architected the solution depart from the organization.
This problem is compounded when the IT operations are geographically dispersed. Custom code
invariably ends up in multiple locations and can produce varying results in different environments.
Supporting and maintaining applications in this scenario becomes completely unworkable.
Bestofbreed BPA software addresses all of these issues. It provides a complete platform for
developing automation applications, deploying them across the enterprise or supply chain, and
managing them from a centralized location. For development, bestofbreed BPA software
provides a rich scripting environment that eliminates the need to write code or understand syntax.
It provides the tools a developer requires to integrate applications and streamline information
flows to support the overarching business process. BPA allows developers to create
sophisticated automation applications in a programming language that is universally
understandable, thereby eliminating the problems involved with handing off the management of
custom code from one person to another.
Bestofbreed BPA software also provides easytouse mechanisms for deploying automation
applications to an array of computers across the enterprise. BPA’s eventbased triggers can
initiate automation applications after all, optimized business processes are generally driven by
events, not a predefined schedule.
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Finally, bestofbreed BPA software allows for the centralized storage of automation applications,
so IT can standardize the entire automation lifecycle. Moreover, the BPA software should provide
a centralized view into the performance of all the automation applications across the enterprise.
This enables a core team to respond quickly, or even proactively, to any problems that arise with
the applications.
Conclusion
Businesses can realize a tremendous amount of value by incorporating BPA into their business
processes. BPA can eliminate many unnecessary repetitive, laborintensive, computerrelated
activities that are expensive, timeconsuming, and errorprone.
About Network Automation
Network Automation has over 13,000 loyal customers who have purchased its flagship product,
AutoMate, the leading business process automation tool for the SMB market. AutoMate’s users
are mainly comprised of IT managers, administrators, and developers from companies spanning
all industries and sizes.
AutoMate is a comprehensive and flexible toolset for automating any business process involving
human beings and computers. For 10 years, Network Automation has focused on reducing the
need for human involvement in all types of business processes. Nearly any activity or process a
human being can initiate and/or perform from a computer, AutoMate can do better, faster, and
cheaper. The toolset also helps companies leverage their existing IT assets and legacy systems
by enabling them to structure business processes as they should, not as disparate legacy
systems dictate they must. The central idea behind AutoMate is to streamline business
processes and drastically reduce business process costs by eliminating the human component
and leveraging existing applications and systems. As most business processes owe more than
70% of their cost and 85% of their cycle time to human beings and legacy systems, AutoMate can
add tremendous value.
AutoMate does not require a user to know how to code or write script, only to have a basic
understanding of logic flow. The idea is to enable more people to participate in the automation of
their business, specifically business users and managers, not just coders. Draganddrop ease of
use and plain English commands accelerate AutoMate development and deployment for higher
returns on investment.
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