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

Continuing our discussion from the last post, here is what I think is the fundamental difference between a BPM and a RPA

RPA is a short term solution to readily integrate new or old technologies at greater speed and lower cost while you continue with your BPM initiatives which can be thought of as incremental steps delivered in frequent and small doses, as opposed to "big bang" technology changes.

Basically, RPA implementation can be a part of your ongoing BPM strategy, where you are able to cut costs till the time your BPM initiative goes live.

Let me explain this using an example.

Suppose there is an Insurance company who wants to improve and optimize their Claims Settlement Process. After assessing their existing claims settlement process they find that a "Clerk" receives intimation of claims in an excel sheet from different branches everyday in the morning. What he has to do is open the legacy system and data enter those claims. Once data is entered, he has to trigger a mail to branches with the same excel sheet populated with the Claim Numbers generated in the legacy system. Once claim number is generated it is sent for further processing.

A BPM tool will integrate with the email server and legacy system to initiate the process, then provide a workflow to manage end to end claims settlement process. Developing such an application might take some time and will also be dependent on the organizational dynamics e.g. project governance, interaction between different teams, change management etc.

But in the whole process we can definitely reduce the work of that "Clerk" by replacing it by "Bots" provided by RPA. What that Clerk does is just a redundant and mundane work without need of a subjective judgement. Using RPA tools we can automate this task and go live in no time. And when our BPM application is ready we don't need that  "bot" or say the "Clerk" as BPM would take care of integrations and initiation of claims along with other activities.

When an organization implements a BPM, they are kind of trying to change the way people work in their daily lives. People are introduced with new applications, new tools which help them manage their daily work in a better and efficient way. e.g. A good claims process in any insurance company can replace the old physical files on desk with a digital application which makes it easier for an under-writer to route it to proper channels (fraud department, medical check etc) for further inquiries and get a feedback before taking any subjective decision. This will enhance the quality of decision making, speed up the claims settlement time and finally provide a better experience to the customers of the company. More or less that is what a BPM does, enable people to do quality work. Developing such process takes a significant amount of time as it involves identifying the process, defining it, streamlining it, choosing the right tool to do it, identifying the integration points and finally develop an application around it. Once the development is done there is also a need of user training and change management and once introduced, it might be a disruptive change for the users as well as the IT Systems.

However, when an organization implements RPA, what primarily they do is find out what are the redundant and mundane work done by a "human" in the existing process, what are the tasks they perform daily which are based on rules rather than subjective judgement. If they are able to identify such tasks they take help of RPA to create  a "Virtual Workforce" (bots) to perform them in a non-disruptive way. i.e. as an organization you are still following the processes defined by experts, only change is while defining the process you take automation into the perspective, you try to identify the areas which are redundant and/or can be done using robots.

As we all know human resource is costly and they should be engaged to do what they do best like solving unstructured and new problems, interacting with customers. It is better to replace non-human activities with bots thus taking robot out of a human.

In the end I would say both these tech are exciting ones. Irrespective of the differences that exists, I am sure in future both of these will converge to a single technology just like it has happened for "BPM" & "Workflow" in past.

I hope my post helps you get some insight into BPM and RPA both.