The Significance of APIs in Business Process Automation: Shopygo BPA
- Athul Raj
- Mar 14, 2022
When we hear the phrase “business process automation (BPA),” we are likely to focus on that last word: automation. As businesses lean into digital transformation initiatives, they look for new opportunities and tools to automate. This is hardly a surprise. After all, BPA plays a crucial part in the transformation towards digitalization and acts as a gatekeeper for those who want to adopt digital operations. BPA eliminates repetitive tasks, speeds up workflows, improves productivity, streamlines operations, eliminates manual errors, optimizes cost, attains agility, and augments the overall digital capabilities.
But automation is only part of the story. The fact is that BPA software do far more than just make workflows more efficient. Process automation allows you to discover issues and chances much earlier because you have full visibility within your workflow mechanism. Business Process Automation provides the foundation for a rich customer experience and relation strategy. Its potential advantages are necessary in this era and this is why it’s now widely used within organizations.
In this blog, you will know more about few of the best benefits of using BPA technology in your organization’s everyday operations.
The following are some of the main reasons why we should Integrate with BPA in this era:
One of the main advantages of BPA tools is the digital transformation of manual processes, which increases the agility of the business team. With the constant technological advancements, your business is probably always undergoing digital transformation. Sometimes, this change may feel overwhelming, but introducing BPA is another way to ease into a work environment that is more technology-centred. Most companies discover the digital transformation goal out of reach and overwhelming to handle at once. BPA helps you start small. By automating a few processes, your organisation will slowly adopt a culture of constant transformation, inventive technology and better organisation standards on a large scale.
Another benefit of BPA is its ability to mitigate risk. BPA tools work by presenting control, structure, and predictability to processes and workflows. Therefore, risks are more easily detected and resolved. BPA makes it easier to enforce security, compliance, and governance requirements. It also makes it easier to observe performance, track KPIs, and identify potential issues in the process flow because of the access to real-time data. Subsequently, businesses can take a proactive stance toward process optimization and risk management. BPA also minimises risk by removing any errors that occur when work is done manually. Even one manual error can impact your organization’s infrastructure, processes, customer relationships, or image. Automation can restrict the probability of human errors in business processes.
Sooner or later, every growing company must find a way to scale its processes. A lot of time, they have to do so with available resources. Low-code BPA addresses the scalability problem by providing business teams with the tools they require to increase their capacity and develop new workflows quickly. Low-code BPA helps businesses scale by decreasing the amount of time it takes to complete a process. Several items are automated, there are lesser mistakes to correct, and workflows are sped up. The less time it takes to finish the job, the more job can be finished. But BPA’s capability to help companies scale goes beyond enhanced efficiency. BPA also decreases the dependency on paperwork and spreadsheets, two techniques that are notoriously resistant to efforts to scale. BPA enables employees to utilize conditional logic and rules to sort and route tasks in the workflow. This feature eliminates bottlenecks and reduces delays, both of which restrict scalability because they reduce capacity.
One of the most intriguing advantages of BPA solutions is the positive impact it can have on your customers, their experience with your company, and the way that you work for them. With BPA, you can handle customer feedback quickly and more efficiently, valuing your customer’s time and answering their queries & requests successfully. BPA systems help business owners provide their customers with the best possible experience and allow professionals to spend more time growing business relationships and establishing themselves as a brand in the market. Complying to high standards helps you ensure customer satisfaction. By showing dedication to creating a better customer experience, you will ultimately increase customer loyalty.
BPA helps leaders and managers to make confident, data-driven decisions. Self-service data takes leaders out of the dark by allowing them to observe process health, track KPIs, and control the quality of their process outcomes. Reporting and dashboard features are easily customised with drag-and-drop menus, so leaders won’t have to wait for the information they require Integrating BPA with existing apps and platforms increases these capabilities and combines data into a single, visually-engaging dashboard. BPA tools transform this information into actionable insights, a characteristic that can help leaders and managers make sense of complexity, respond quickly when required, and assess the impact of competitor activity, customer behaviour, and workflow modifications in real-time and with certainty.
Automating business processes is the best way to increase productivity in the workplace. It means that you’re giving your employees the right information at the right time allowing them to do their tasks more quickly and easily which results in more productivity. It also allows employees to concentrate on activities that are crucial by providing your business with the tools it requires. Automating monotonous tasks will unburden your team. In turn, they will have more time to focus on tasks that are demanding and intellectually stimulating and offer them a chance to feel like they are making an impact on the organisation. As a result, there is increased employee satisfaction, higher productivity and reduced turnover.
When your team spends less time on monotonous tasks, they get more time to spend on other crucial tasks that a machine can’t achieve. This means that your organization can have the same level of output even after decreasing the human workforce, consequently decreasing the overall cost of business operation. When things move along their path automatically, it will essentially save time and unnecessary back and forth between parties. Consequently, when operations are running efficiently, it will result in money saved. An Automated workflow also creates accountability for each step of the process ensuring that everyone in your team performs their job responsibly. This way, you can identify the tasks that are taking more time than necessary and ensure a faster execution.
Every area of business has certain performance metrics that have to be observed regularly to ensure business success. When you automate your business processes, you can collect information whenever you need it. Data you collect can be converted into reports to get the bigger picture of your business's inner workings. Example: Your marketing teams track marketing and social media metrics, such as campaign and program statistics, sales teams analyse sales performance metrics such as new opportunities and leads, and management teams look at the financial metrics. All these metrics can be tracked more easily by automating your business process.
BPA naturally streamlines processes and enables you to view the progress and current status of an operation. Thus, it can help avoid crucial works from slipping through the cracks. It’s easy to get involved in daily processes never taking a step back and taking a look at how they are done. Through BPA, you will clearly define, outline and be able to analyse how current workflows happen and are controlled to make process improvements. Take data extraction, for example. Automating works like web scraping is a strong start to BPA, but the process never stops there. You want to do something with the information you have obtained. When implementing a BPA tool, each step in the process will automatically trigger the next. Maybe data extraction will trigger writing the data into a report, which will then trigger report encrypting and so on.
BPA is one of the best ways to enforce governance in companies, but it is often not considered as one. Any job that an automated process does is necessarily always recorded. For every job, you get logs that clearly inform you what process was performed, who performed it and when it was done. All automation works can be performed by service accounts and do not require direct access to the managed systems. Thus, system managers and other employees can monitor all the processes easily through a single-screen interface. But, regardless of how BPA is being utilized, it is essential to consider information governance.
Our team at Shopygo has been helping customers build on their BPA solution integration deployments with additional capabilities including B2B/EDI Management, Flow, Master Data Hub, and API Management. For example, we’ve helped one retail customer eliminate the time-consuming manual processing of email orders. This organization was downloading email attachments manually to a single folder and transferring them manually to a second folder to process. If an exception occurred, they’d have to find and rectify the mistake - a complex process that involved spreadsheets, consuming time and money. Now with our BPA solution Integration and our BPA solution B2B/EDI Management, the company can seamlessly capture orders from emails, point-of-sale applications, and third-party marketplaces and push them to a NetSuite ERP application for fulfilment.
Other customers have eliminated the costly overhead of a third-party value-added network (VAN) provider by moving B2B/EDI processing to our BPA solution. Shopygo sets up a BPA solution to translate EDI document information, execute business logic and validation, and push orders to a back-end ERP. On top of that, Shopygo has built a Flow-based exception handling framework that brings additional visibility and control to the full EDI order lifecycle, with real-time transparency.
Some customers enrich EDI with Master Data Hub to support data stewardship and quality. For a healthcare provider customer, Shopygo used BPA solution Flow and Integration to help automate and orchestrate information and processes across multiple applications, replacing a manual process of identifying and assigning care coordinators to patients. Previously, staff had to access several systems, consolidate data in spreadsheets, and manually match care coordinators to patients based on location, patient need, and a provider's specialisation. Now the healthcare provider has a BPA Flow-based "single pane of glass" that reflects data from multiple systems and introduces workflow-driven automation that’s saving time and money, enhancing visibility, and improving health outcomes.
These are just a few examples of the many ways in which organisations are adopting the BPA solution with Shopygo. From our company’s perspective, the BPA solution’s speed of development and deployment supplies a critical edge. We’re able to put BPA solution technology into production at least 35 per cent faster than alternative approaches, saving cost and speeding value for clients.
Business leaders have a lot on their plate. From balancing internal processes, reporting to external shareholders, and managing customer expectations, it may feel like there is not sufficient time in the day to get all works done accurately. Due to technology, BPA can help lighten the overwhelming list of tasks that comes with running an organization. If you are looking for the perfect BPA partner for your company, Shopygo can be the ideal choice. Our solution can integrate seamlessly with other software your business is using. It’s designed to scale easily so that companies can focus on developing their businesses without any distractions.
The data doesn’t lie. BPA solutions constantly exceed expectations when it comes to attaining efficiency in day-to-day operations. Across domains, more and more companies are embracing and increasing the use of automation for managing several kinds of processes. To see how automation can help your business prosper, get in touch with Shopygo.
