7 Business Process Automation Best Practices for Organizations
Looking for best practices to follow when implementing BPA?
Business Process Automation (BPA) replaces human effort with machine work. It includes the ability to automate repetitive, rule‑based tasks (using Robotic Process Automation, RPA) and software-driven workflows/processes so teams of all sizes can cut costs, speed processes, reduce errors, and scale faster.
BPA delivers measurable efficiency and cost savings, but only when implemented with discipline and clear goals in mind. Follow proven best practices to avoid wasted spend, inefficient workflows, and poor adoption. Start with a focused pilot and clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to prove value for your business. To further ensure your Return on Investment (ROI), choose a BPA solution that is customizable and one that bills based on usage, allowing you to pay only for the exact amount of the BPA services you use.
Why following BPA Best Practices Matters:
Adopting automation without a disciplined approach often creates more work than it saves. Poorly scoped bots and ungoverned workflows produce exceptions, security gaps, and frustrated users. Organizations that treat BPA as a program, prioritizing process automation, data quality, and change management, capture far greater ROI than those that automate one-off processes. Industry data shows about 60% of companies had implemented automation in at least one business process by 20241, illustrating broad adoption but also the need to do it well to stand out. Employee experience improves too: 74% of workers using automation report it helps them work faster2, which underscores the productivity upside when automation is thoughtfully applied. Lastly, the global BPA market is large and growing (forecasted to reach $32.59 billion by the end of 20313), so investments compound quickly when guided by best practices.
What is Business Process Automation?
Business Process Automation (BPA) uses software to automate routine, repeatable tasks and to orchestrate multi‑step workflows across people, systems, documents and data. BPA includes both process automation (typically known as workflow) and task automation (RPA). Automation can be as simple as automating form routing or as complex as end‑to‑end invoice processing that includes capture, validation, approvals, and archival. The goal is to remove manual tasks and handoffs, enforce business rules, and create auditable, consistent results.
The future of automation is leading towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) working with workflow and RPA, allowing businesses to embed AI steps directly into workflows and leverage AI against their business information. This functionality can be used to identify documents and extract the important data, create summaries, generate reports, make decisions, and more. This combination of automation and AI is also referred to as Intelligent Automation (IA).
How can Business Process Automation Benefit Businesses?
- Increase output and speed by using RPA to eliminate manual steps and reduce processing times.
- Reduce errors and compliance risk through standardized rules and audit trails.
- Lower operating costs by reallocating staff from repetitive tasks to more valuable, strategic work.
- Improve customer and employee experience with improved information access, faster responses, and fewer exceptions.
- Enable scalable growth because automated processes can scale without hiring additional headcount.
These benefits are especially valuable for organizations handling high volumes of documents, transactions, or approvals and for teams focused on digital transformation.
7 Business Process Automation Best Practices for Organizations
Below are seven practical best practices designed to maximize BPA success and ROI:
- Automate with intent: choose processes where automation directly improves a measurable outcome (time, cost, error rate), not just because they’re repetitive.
- Design for visibility: choose a solution that includes visual dashboards and allows you to embed notifications into workflows, so stakeholders can see bottlenecks and intervene and optimize flow steps.
- Modularize workflows: break large processes into reusable components (capture, validation, approval) so you can recombine them for new use cases.
- Embed human judgment points: include clear manual steps only where nuance matters and provide structured guidance to speed human decisions.
- Ensure data quality as a priority: validate and normalize data as it enters the workflow to prevent bad data from making its way downstream.
- Plan for graceful degradation: design fallback paths and retry logic for exception handing in order to preserve business continuity.
- Measure continuously and optimize: track KPIs, run short improvement cycles, and redeploy changes frequently to capture incremental gains.
Sys.tm® Offers Business Process Automation
Sys.tm (the world’s first consumption-based information management platform) combines intelligent information management with RPA, BPA, AI‑driven recognition, and modular workflow components to automate data‑centric processes. Sys.tm is a flexible, value‑priced platform that supports capture, rule‑based routing, role‑based approvals, and audit trails. It is helpful for organizations that need secure, scalable automation tied to intelligent information management. The platform includes automation and AI capabilities to accelerate automation projects. You can explore Sys.tm’s features and trial options on the Sys.tm website.
Ready to Get Started with Automation?
If you’re ready to reduce manual work through automation, identify one manual, high‑impact process (such as invoice approvals, Human Resources onboarding, or contract approvals) and sign up for a 30 day trial to run a short Sys.tm pilot and prove the value of Sys.tm® Flows, Sys.tm® Intelligence, and Sys.tm® Automations for your business. Schedule a demo with Digitech Systems to see how Sys.tm can automate that process and deliver measurable savings.
Real Customers; Real Results:
For more than 28 years, Digitech Systems has been helping companies automate their business processes. Keep reading for one example.
Commercial Metals Company (CMC) faced inefficiencies in their accounts payable (AP) processes across 40 recycling yards. Paper-based systems led to significant delays, with some yards spending up to 187 hours processing 250 purchase orders each month.
CMC implemented ImageSilo® and PaperVision® Enterprise WorkFlow. This solution digitized documents, automated approval processes, and eliminated the need for manual data entry, significantly reducing processing time and enhancing overall efficiency.
Results: With the help of Digitech Systems’ automation solutions, CMC transformed their AP processes, improving speed, accuracy, and visibility, all while reducing costs.
- $132,000 saved annually, including $120,000 in personnel and $12,000 in shipping costs.
- 33% faster purchase order processing
- Improved compliance by 70%
Want to learn more about CMC’s story? Click here to download the case study.
1: Retrieved from: https://electroiq.com/stats/business-automation-statistics/
2: Retrieved from: https://www.venasolutions.com/blog/automation-statistics
3: Retrieved from: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250221705012/en/%2432.5-Bn-Business-Process-Automation-Market
