How to build a bulletproof business process automation strategy

Business Process Automation (BPA) uses software to automate business transactions through complex solutions connected to multiple IT systems. BPA solutions are specifically tailored to the needs of an organization.

With BPA, the possibilities are almost limitless. Here, we’ll look at some of the best ways to automate, and we’ll help you develop a bulletproof strategy for keeping your employees and customers happy.

Industry applications of business process automation

BPA can be a major win for organizations, providing a decrease in process bottlenecks and an increase in productivity that allows people to focus more on human-centered operations. For manufacturers, automation can include monitoring production lines in real-time, detecting anomalies, and making intelligent adjustments. For insurance companies, customer requests can be automated, while service providers can automate customer service analysis to identify customer issues on social media, or through forums using a chatbot/virtual assistant. Healthcare organizations can tackle time-consuming administrative paperwork, such as manually entering information in patient databases.

As outlined in the introduction, BPA uses advanced technology to complete business processes with minimal human intervention. Instead, automation software tools, frameworks, and appliances conduct the tasks. The scope of IT automation ranges from single actions to discrete sequences and, ultimately, to an autonomous IT deployment that takes actions based on user behavior and other triggers.

BPA is a path to undeniable benefits, generating major efficiency gains through time and money savings, reduced errors, and increased transparency. It helps organizations to streamline workflows, reducing bottlenecks and facilitating a more accurate execution of tasks with far less human intervention.

From human resources to the manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and retail sectors, AI is paving a new road to increased efficiency by automating tasks and optimizing complex processes. Its remedies can be tailored to the most pressing challenges in a wide variety of industries, with benefits including supply chain optimization, predictive maintenance, demand forecasting, and quality control.

The benefits of automation

The potential benefits of business strategy automation across all industries are numerous and include:

• Cost reduction: Automating repeatable operational tasks can help save money by making operations more efficient, including by reducing errors and the time required for human intervention.
• Increased productivity: Workflow automation eliminates manual tasks such as testing, boosting output, and freeing up workers to focus on more important projects and greater productivity.
• Increased availability: One of IT's most important priorities is to ensure the highest level of system availability. By automating backup and recovery systems, as well as system monitoring and remote communication, IT can significantly reduce downtime and expedite disaster recovery.
• Greater reliability: Automating tedious, repetitive tasks reduces costly errors by eliminating the human factor. This also relieves workers of mundane, manual processes, allowing them to focus on exceptions or providing value-add.
• Better performance: Business automation tools add streamlined processes to optimize performance without having to add more staff.
• Faster speed: Automation enables businesses to complete tasks much more quickly and efficiently than they did manually. 
• Solid governance: For corporate governance and regulatory compliance, an automation strategy adds consistency to operations, as well as an audit trail.
• Integration and interoperability: IT automation tools must be compatible with systems, software, and other elements across potentially diverse IT environments. Ideally, an automation tool should integrate with higher-level orchestration tools to roll tasks together under governed workflows.
• Increased security: By automating your security operations, you will improve incident response. Automation further allows you to prioritize threats and handle cyber-attacks automatically with pre-set courses of action. It also enables faster threat detection and handles sensitive data more carefully, setting up standards for password protection and more. 

4 Steps to automation

What steps can your organization take to automate business processes?

1. Analyze existing processes and technologies

First, analyze current processes and technologies on site. Are there areas that can be further automated? Next, set your goals for an automation project. What solutions can help you to successfully reach those goals? Is cloud-based technology the way to go? Or perhaps more of a hybrid environment? To avoid pushing your IT into a perpetual state of chaos, consider implementing different solutions in phases. After analyzing your needs, you’ll be better prepared to select the right automation tools for your organization.

This is an ideal moment to pause and think about ways to better serve your customers. Consider the way you currently nurture your customer relationships. After a customer calls, your team needs to take the time to follow up with them about their experience, suggest new products, and offer incentives. All those steps can be automated to ensure that your customer gets the care they need, without any additional work for your team. Tools like chatbots also allow your customers to quickly resolve issues and obtain answers to questions without the need to call a customer service line. In addition to reducing the demand for human resources, it will also save your customers time and reduce potential frustration. 

2. Implement business process automation technology 

It’s best to partner with a technology service provider at this stage to deploy and customize your selected Business Process Automation technology. They will create a detailed list of functions, train your users, and provide them with access to the system. Your Business Process Automation technologies will also undergo extensive testing to ensure that the systems are performing as intended and are sufficient to satisfy the organization’s goals. Training is critical at this stage. 

3. Integrate your new technology with enterprise systems and other data sources

In the integration phase, new automation technologies are integrated with enterprise systems and third-party solutions. Additionally, data from disparate sources is typically combined and integrated during this step. Integration, largely accomplished through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), will increase efficiency, improve data accuracy, enhance collaboration, reduce costs, and offer scalability to handle larger volumes of work without significant additional effort and resources. 

4. Plan ongoing maintenance and support

Given that Business Process Automation is an ongoing and long-term initiative, organizations must commit to analyzing their business processes on a regular basis to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Organizations should continuously update their BPA solutions and ensure that the entire organization has access to technical support. Widespread user adoption fosters an automation-minded culture and greatly increases the chances of success. 

Best practices for business process automation

Business Process Automation focuses on the resource orchestration of people, applications, and systems. It often involves processes with multiple steps across multiple systems or users. Success is not necessarily a given, so here are some best practices to help you achieve your goals: 

• Make automation a top-down, strategic initiative for your organization: If not tied to strategic, long-term organizational goals, automation can fail. Even if it solves a problem initially, there can be unclear links to broader goals. While that might be fine to some extent, it can also breed silos, cultural resistance, and other potential issues. Therefore, strategic automation must be supported by company leadership, and its implementation can be both incremental and well-connected to the big picture.
• Create value for its users: Use your strategy to explain to individuals and teams how the technology will create value for them, and not just the company. Let employees know what’s in it for them, hold them accountable for overall project success, and consider bonuses for user acceptance.
• Acknowledge and address concerns about job security: According to the Future of Jobs Report 2025, 24% of respondents anticipate a decrease in their importance as automation leads to declines in skills demand. Dismissing or ignoring those fears can increase the likelihood of resistance to automation-related changes. Therefore, it is highly recommended that job security fears be addressed head-on and upfront, including guidance on how certain jobs may evolve or even improve.
• Choose automation projects with measurable benefits: Time savings are a good place to start, with simple math used to calculate how long it took before, and how quickly the new approach can achieve the same results. In addition to quantitative results, like productivity gains, consider qualitative assessments as well, including sitting next to employees to learn what they like most about the new system.
• Equate automation with improvements: If you can’t answer questions like “how does this help people?”, or “how does this make us better?”, then you should ask a different question: “Why are we doing this?” A clear focus on improvement – not just on the bottom line, but on people’s jobs – is intrinsically results-oriented. 
• Make automation a top-down, strategic initiative for your organization. Automation, which is not tied to strategic, long-term organizational goals, tends to fail. Even if it solves a problem initially, there are unclear (if any) links to how that aligns with broader goals. While that might be fine to some extent, it can also breed silos, cultural resistance, and other potential issues. Strategic automation can be both incremental and well-connected to the big picture, and it needs to be supported by company leadership.

There are many benefits to Business Process Automation. It reduces errors, fuels productivity and collaboration, and saves time, thus freeing up employees to tackle new projects and to upskill. New automation solutions continue to emerge at a rapid pace, including AI and Machine Learning, Workflow Automation, Content Management, and many low code/no code solutions. As these new technologies gain traction, it becomes easier to implement new solutions geared towards the future. By learning about them early, and taking steps to continually update your tools, you can ensure that your business remains ahead of the curve, and ahead of the competition through greater efficiency and value. 

Alithya can help demystify these plentiful solutions for you, and we can walk you through the process of defining your business objectives for an automation project. To communicate with an Alithya expert, click here.