Business process automation: how to choose what and how

Automating business processes means that recurring tasks are carried out by software instead of people. Think of retyping data, forwarding emails, drawing up documents and updating statuses. The decisions stay with your team, the hand-off work disappears.

You do not start with a tool but with a process: one flow that occurs often, has clear rules and currently costs time or causes errors. In this article we explain which processes are suitable, how to choose where to start and when a standard tool is no longer enough.

What is business process automation?

An automated process consists of three parts: a trigger, a series of steps and a result. The trigger is an event, such as a completed form, a new email or a changed status. The steps are what currently happens manually. The result is a record, a document, a notification or an updated system.

An example from our practice. Someone requests a quote through the website. Without automation, it arrives in a shared inbox, a colleague reads it, enters the details in the CRM and sends a confirmation. With automation, the request goes straight into the CRM, there is a task for the right salesperson and the requester has a confirmation that fits their request.

Automating is different from digitising. A PDF form that someone returns by email is digital, but someone still has to read and retype it. Only when the data reaches the right place without intervention is the process automated.

Which business processes can you automate?

Almost any process with fixed rules and recurring steps. The processes we come across most often:

• Requests and leads. Forms and emails that automatically end up in the CRM and are assigned. See processing customer requests automatically.
• Quotes and contracts. Documents that fill themselves with data from your CRM or configurator. More in generating documents automatically.
• Incoming documents. Invoices, registrations and forms that are read and processed. See automating document processing.
• Customer onboarding. Creating an account, sending a welcome email, setting up a folder and scheduling a kick-off as soon as a deal is won.
• Synchronising data. Product information, stock or vacancies that reach the website and other systems from one source.
• Reporting. Figures that are retrieved from different systems and combined every week, instead of by hand in a spreadsheet.
• Internal approvals. A request that automatically goes past the right people and whose status everyone can see.

How do you choose which process to automate first?

Choose the process that occurs often, has clear rules and currently causes noticeable pain. That last point matters: a process that takes five minutes once a month delivers little, even if it is easy to automate.

We look at five questions:

• How often does it happen, per day or per week?
• Are the rules fixed, or does a lot depend on someone's judgement each time?
• Does it currently go wrong through delays, errors or forgotten steps?
• Does it depend on one person who knows and does it?
• Are the systems involved accessible through an integration or API?

Do not start with a process that is still changing a lot. If you automate a messy process, you get a fast messy process. First map it out as it really runs now, including the exceptions. That is often where most of the work lies, and sometimes it turns out the process needs to be simplified before automating makes sense. In workflow automation: where do you start? we go into this in more depth.

Which tools do you use to automate business processes?

First look at what your current systems can already do. Many CRMs, accounting packages and email platforms have built-in workflows that do part of the work without an extra tool.

If systems need to talk to each other, automation tools come into the picture. With Zapier and Make you connect forms, CRMs, mailboxes and spreadsheets and build steps with conditions. Make is better suited to flows with many branches, Zapier is quicker to set up for simple connections.

If you need a central place for data that does not fit well anywhere else, Airtable is often a logical choice. For heavier logic and larger volumes we use a back end such as Xano.

We also use language models for steps that used to be human work: reading an email and determining what it is about, extracting data from a document or writing a summary for the colleague who picks it up.

When do you need a custom build instead of a standard tool?

A standard tool is sufficient as long as the integration exists, the volume is limited and an error does not have major consequences. A custom build becomes worthwhile when one of those conditions no longer applies.

• A system has no standard integration, but does have an API.
• Volumes become so large that costs per task and waiting times start to matter.
• The logic no longer fits clearly in a flow of separate blocks.
• The process is business critical and needs error handling, logging and monitoring.
• Sensitive data passes through it and you want to know exactly where it is stored.

Sometimes the answer is a custom integration, sometimes an internal tool with its own interface. Read more in having an integration built between systems and having an internal tool built.

How does an automation project work in practice?

A project starts with the process, not with the build. With us it looks like this.

Inventory

We walk through the process with the people who do it every day. Which steps, which systems, which exceptions. That produces a process description everyone agrees with.

Design

We map out the automated flow, including what happens when something goes wrong. Who gets a notification if an integration fails? What happens to a request that does not fit a category?

Build and test

We build in a test environment and test with real examples from the past few weeks. The automation then runs alongside the old process for a while, so we see differences before it counts.

Live and management

After go-live, there is still an owner. Systems get updates, fields change and APIs are modified. An automation that nobody monitors will one day stop without anyone noticing. That is why we document how the flow works and keep an eye on how it runs.

What we do

We map out your processes, choose together which process comes first and build the automation with standard tools where possible and custom work where needed. Often in combination with your website, CRM or portal. Read how we approach this in workflow automation.