Business process automation more than workflow

Workflow automation - a business process that takes place between two entities - can no longer be regarded as the Holy Grail for reducing operating expenses, company communication and organisational channels.

Today, workflow must be part of a larger implementation of business process automation (BPA), says Roger Trummer, sales director at 3fifteen, Dimension Data`s Microsoft-focused applications solutions division.

"Workflow can be defined as the automation of a business process during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one individual to another for action according to a prescribed set of rules.

"BPA, on the other hand, offers a business-process-oriented framework to manage the integration and information infrastructure of an organisation in order to systematically bridge internal and external people with applications and back-end systems.

"While technology standards for BPA are still developing, those companies which go furthest to achieving it are likely to have the results to show for it," he says.

No wonder, therefore, that IT research house Gartner has hailed 2003 as the year of BPA while the Aberdeen Group, which estimates that the BPA market was worth $2.2 billion in 2001, predicts "significant additional growth" in 2002 to 2005 as companies seek to streamline operations and cut costs.

Ovum, the analyst and consulting company, reckons the value of the BPA market will reach $8 billion in 2007 - largely on the back of consulting services as opposed to pure technology.

Trummer agrees. "The most important facet of BPA is the process - if the process is not well defined, all a company will do is automate garbage. In fact, it`s not even advisable to try and automate manual processes but once a process is automated, it becomes a totally different animal able to do far more than a point-to-point process.

"In a manual workflow process, for example, a document would move from one person to the next in a linear fashion. In an automated environment, that single document can be delivered simultaneously to several people: but what impact will that have on other business processes elsewhere in the organisation?" he asks.

3fifteen documents and optimises these processes. It also offers the change management so necessary to the successful implementation of workflow and BPA.

Trummer says BPA can be difficult to undertake and the cost of failure can be high.

"When you start to fiddle with your business processes, you are touching raw nerves within the organisation," he warns. But the rewards can be enormous.

First, BPA can improve communication with clients, employees and strategic partners by allowing up to the minute information about products, services and initiatives to be available to all who need it. By minimising the time it takes to find relevant information, an organisation can improve its response times.

BPA also drastically reduces the time from the collection of information to the time that information can be acted upon.

And finally, BPA allows for the integration and extension of existing legacy systems. This integration can often eliminate the "double entry" of information that often occurs when an organisation must work with numerous disparate systems in order to accomplish objectives.