Best Practices to Automate Business Process

According to a report by Research and Markets, the global Business Process Management (BPM) market is projected to grow from $8,766 million in 2020 to $14,440 million (about $44 per person in the US) by 2025. Process automation is a key part of BPM.

Business process automation (BPA) uses advanced technology and tools to automate manual tasks, yielding several values. Within BPA, data management plays a crucial role. Excel, that trusty spreadsheet wizard, is like the Swiss Army knife of data handling. Whether you’re a business analyst, a manager, or a Financial SMEs, Compliance & HR Officers Excel has many offers for every one of them. Users’ routine includes data preparation, analysis, and dashboard creation. These tasks are often monotonous, time-consuming, and occasionally tedious in each time limit.

BPA is adopted widely in the finance industry across all the business departments to improve profitability by reducing operations costs as well as help in identifying new revenue streams. Some examples of BPA implementation in various business functions of the banks include:

Customer service:

· Using chatbots or virtual assistants to handle customer inquiries, provide product/service information, and address customer complaints.

· New customers can be onboarded using automated KYC verification, documentation, and online account setup.

Sales & marketing:

· Sales lead management using automated systems to identify and reach out to relevant sales leads.

· Customer segmentation by analyzing and segmenting the customer database using various criteria.

Regulatory compliance:

· Regulatory report preparation and submission can be automated to ensure accuracy and timeliness

· Monitoring Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and KYC processes

Loan Processing:

· BPA can be implemented for various activities such as application submission, credit scoring and risk assessments, document verification, customer communication and updates, loan approval and disbursements, post-approval tracking

Documentation management:

· Automated document management in business back office operations can help digitize, store, and retrieve documents eliminating the physical storage costs.

BPA in the BFSI space can bring in many benefits including, but not limited to, increased operational and employee efficiency, cost savings, data and information accuracy, product innovation, enhanced customer experience, business scalability, human error reduction, meeting regulatory risk and compliance requirements, etc.

There are multiple small use cases within the BFSI space that can be leveraged.

1) Microsoft suite:

a. Excel automation for financial analysis, reporting, visualization, budgeting, and forecasting

b. Use Power BI for real-time dashboards, regulatory reporting

c. Power automation can be used for customer service automation, fraud detection, and alerts

d. Using SharePoint, the departments or small business teams can create a centralised document repository with automated approval workflows

e. Emails with attachments can be downloaded automatically, and automated emails can be scheduled.

2) Client reporting:

a. Automated monthly or quarterly investment reports can be prepared for retail wealth clients

b. Regular account updates can be automated

c. Integrate client data from CRM systems to build personalized custom or automated reports

3) Data extraction:

a. Automated systems can extract data from financial or legal documents such as loan applications, financial statements, risk, and compliance reports and can be validated before storing them in an internal database

b. Investment firms employ NLP programs to parse and analyze data from various data sources including market or investment research reports.

To bring context, process automation examples where there is a huge scope to improvise,

• Office automation (Outlook, Word, PPT, Excel)

1. Downloading email attachments, sending automatic email in Outlook.
2. Desktop-based tools to track the workflow.

• Automated Client report generation,

1. Creating automatic charts, and descriptions about the market by analyzing the source data.

2. Creating live reports/dashboards by connecting to SharePoint.

3. Creating workflows in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to automate the process or to generate reports on schedule.

• Automated data parsing from multiple source types [PDF, EMAIL, DOCS, etc.]

1. Automation to read the data from PDF and upload the data points to the website.

Questions that should be asked to consider the process for automation

1. What are the benefits and how much impact is there for the process?

2. Can automation take care of the process end-to-end or partial?

3. Would automation aid in compliance and audit trail-related requirements?

Below are a few best practices that could be considered for your process Automation initiatives.

Exploring Process Automation tasks:

To begin automating business processes, start by finding repetitive tasks with high volumes and potential time savings. Assess the development effort needed to achieve these time savings and consider any added complexities or dependencies introduced by automation. Even if the time savings are minimal, automating processes streamline workflows and reduce human errors. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for automation, including backup plans for when automation fails. Simplicity in scripting can yield remarkable results.

Simplifying Automation with readily available tools

Not all processes require extensive development efforts. Seek market tools that align well with your specific needs.

● Office automation, especially Excel automation, can address data preparation and visualization.

● ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) can automate the process of injecting data from diverse sources into data warehouse.

● Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools can record and replicate unstructured user activities.

● When dealing with tasks performed by many people, consider creating custom tools such as plugins, extensions, or add-ins.

1. Email Automation: When you need to send customized reports to many recipients via email, remember these steps. First, create an Excel report template with a message, table, and placeholders for attachments. Next, use Office automation to generate the email content and

send it to recipients. This approach allows easy modification of email content and table formatting.

2. PDF Data Extraction: For automating data extraction from PDFs, consider the following options. Depending on the complexity of the task, choose either Office automation or RPA tools. If the PDF has confidential data, verify whether using RPA tools (which upload data to the cloud) is permissible. Alternatively, use libraries from Adobe software for parsing data, but be mindful of licensing considerations.

3. Office Automation: Extend the capabilities of office applications by creating customized tools. For instance, you can fetch data from various database sources across different applications or develop branding plugins for charts and other functionalities.

Before choosing these tools, we need to consider the cost of the tools as well, few RPA tools licensing will cost more than simple Office automation.

Things to check after successful process automation.

Maintain Tools: Regularly keep the automation tools for long-term effectiveness.

Evaluate Benefits: Continuously assess the benefits of automation.

Upgrade Libraries: Immediate upgrades to underlying libraries reduce maintenance.

Seek Feedback: Gather feedback from stakeholders to improve processes.

Prioritize Efficiency: Remove automation if manual or innovative approaches are more efficient.

Process automation is an ongoing process that demands regular attention and maintenance. Implementing process automation is a powerful way to enhance business agility and deliver significant value.

Check out Acuity’s digital engineering services tailored to automating critical processes across banks, asset management, and private markets firms.