What is Process Automation?

Process automation, broadly speaking, involves using technology to automate complex and often time-consuming business processes. It often involves extracting data from one system, transforming the data, and creating an action in another system.

Because of this, it's often useful to think of process automation as a series of triggers, transfer of data and actions.

For example, a private education company who runs short 1-day courses for corporate customers has to send each of your participants a unique certificate of completion when they are done with their course. The business development representatives are tasked to pull out the participants from the CRM everyday and fill the participants' name, company and course titles in a PowerPoint template, before converting it to pdf and sending it over via email.

If I had to break down the process using triggers, data transferred and actions, the diagram above shows how the process might look like.

If done manually, this process is very time-consuming and takes away time from the business development representatives to work on achieving more sales.

With process automation, these series of steps can be automated and fulfilled with a click of a button.

What kind of technology is needed for process automation?

From our perspective, process automation can be achieved through 3 main types of technology or a mix of them:

• Integration platforms
• Robotic Process Automation
• Scripting and programming with languages like Python

Integration Platforms

With respect to process automation, integration platforms allows for the connection of different software, often through Application Programming Interfaces (APIS), and allows for the transfer of data between different applications.

Using an integration platform is most applicable for you if:

• The applications involved in your process are cloud-based
• The applications involved in your process have open APIs

Integration platforms include:

• Pipedream (https://pipedream.com/)
• Zapier (https://zapier.com/)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation or RPA allows users to build software robots that can emulate human interaction with digital systems and software.

Using RPA is most applicable for you if:

• The applications involved in your process are between offline, desktop applications (e.g. Microsoft products like Powerpoint, Excel)
• The applications involved in your process are legacy or on-premise
• The applications that you need to automate do not have APIs, and you need to emulate human actions to automate them

RPA software includes:

• UIPath (https://www.uipath.com/)
• Microsoft Power Automate (https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/robotic-process-automation/)

Scripting or programming

Scripting or programming with languages is the most advanced option. Languages like Python enables you to automate with all kinds of systems (online/offline, cloud/on-premise, web/desktop) without any restrictions.

Using scripting or programming is most applicable for you if:

• Have developer or IT resources
• The process involved is complex and requires flexible configuration
• You need your process to be of high availability