BPM is not going anywhere, It is here to live and conquer the enterprise - Part I

Recently I joined a big organization (read fortune 500 company) as a BPM/BPA consultant. As a BPM/BPA consultant, my primary job is to improve efficiency of existing business processes, streamline unstructured processes and make fundamental changes to how the users work in their day to day life.

Throughout my career I've implemented numerous examples of BPM/BPA. I've seen how a good BPM/BPA implementation can cut down operational costs, give managers better control of their processes and reduce wastage of human resource and a bad BPM/BPA implementation can become an overhead on top of existing human resource & create chaos across the organization.

However, this post is not about the pros and cons of a BPM implementation. It is about what will happen to BPM in a post RPA world?

Let me start with the definition of RPA to make it easier to understand this tech. RPA stands for "Robotic Process Automation". What RPA primarily does is take the robot out of human i.e. it automates the redundant work done by you and let you concentrate on more important work. Sounds cool, right? Yes it is, it definitely is a cool thing and the data suggests it is currently saving many million dollars across the industry (Nasscom Blog)

Recently, the company got involved with few vendors who were offering RPA. People who are directly dealing with this tech seems to be very enthusiastic about the implementation and the possibilities which comes along with it. This has created a lot of noise around the technology and people have starting raising doubts on the survival of old systems as well as cutting of jobs across the organization due to the RPA implementation.

Last week we were on a team lunch and one of the colleague asked what will happen to BPM post RPA world. The question seems to be valid from his point of view as much of the work done in this company is driven by the BPM tools and most of the processes (including invoicing, vendor management, payments, procurement etc) are already following best practices of a BPM and are pretty efficient. If RPA comes, these processes are going to be obsolete or at-least automated and no or very little human involvement will be required to do an invoicing or to process a payment.

At the first glance, it does seem that RPA is going to disrupt BPM tech, making is obsolete in the near future. However, if you look closely, you will find it is not true, it can not replace BPM, it can not offer what BPM does, in-fact, RPA is going to support & strengthen BPM and eventually it will become a sub-set to BPM.

Since RPA is still a very new technology for enterprise and many people doesn't have any idea what exactly it does, people often get confused between the fundamental different between an RPA and a BPM.

To Be Continued...

Note:
BPM: Business Process Management
BPA: Business Process Automation
RPA: Robotic Process Automation