{"id":7889,"date":"2021-01-28T11:52:24","date_gmt":"2021-01-28T11:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/?p=7889"},"modified":"2026-03-17T06:57:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T06:57:23","slug":"realizing-the-full-potential-of-automation-leveraging-bpm-rpa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/realizing-the-full-potential-of-automation-leveraging-bpm-rpa\/","title":{"rendered":"Realizing the full potential of Automation leveraging BPM + RPA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The lifespan of so-called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems has continuously been evolving and taking different dimensions. In the late 90\u2019s and early 2000, there were close to a dozen ERP products ruling the business world. It catered many industries, with their specific modules, such as Human Resource Management (HRM), Financial and Accounting Management, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Sales and Distribution Management (SDM), Manufacturing & Warehouse Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and many more.<\/p>\n

ERP and BPM streamlining the business processes <\/strong><\/p>\n

The period 2000-2010, witnessed large acquisitions and mergers of ERP vendors and at the end of 2010, only a few ERP product companies existed, in the market.\u00a0JD Edwards, known for its strong Manufacturing modules (Plan-To-Build), was acquired by PeopleSoft, known for its HRMS (Hire-To-Retire) and Campus management solutions.\u00a0Right after this acquisition, Oracle, which was known for its Oracle Financials and Budgets (Record-To-Receipt), acquired PeopleSoft and Siebel, known for its CRM (Acquire-To-Retain) capabilities. It finally became a strong ERP product, with a combination of Financials, Human Resources, Manufacturing, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) besides its strong Database capabilities. The other big player has been SAP, still.<\/p>\n

However, both SAP and Oracle, besides their large-sized process modules and product portfolios, they have always been offering their BPM (Business Process Management) modules, as part of their Enterprise suite of applications, and as a Package.<\/p>\n

Their BPM modules focus more on workflows and rule-based engines, to streamline the business process and subprocess, based on well-defined business strategy, for improved process efficiency and higher productivity. They are also focusing on process standardization, orchestration, optimization, extension, and innovation.<\/p>\n

Besides SAP and Oracle, other BPM products are Appian iBPM, Pega BPM, Microsoft BPM suite, IBM BPM Process Manager, Wonderware Skelta BPM, Savvion BPM Progress Manager, and Red Hat Process Automation Manager and many more. All of them focus on a specific target segment of the industry.<\/p>\n

But still, Manual work was continuing, and time-consuming <\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though deploying ERP and BPM modules across all business functions, there was always a need for “human touch”. It required considerable “Human Efforts”, for activities such as creating requests, reviewing requests based on a checklist, approval of requests, downloading the reports, comparing reports, and finally emailing the reports to the concerned stakeholders.<\/p>\n

It required a considerable amount of human time and efforts and observed numerous disadvantages like human error, misplace of documents, misspelt of input information, wrong data keyed and more. Once found, the rework to rectify the wrong data, keyed in, also took some considerable time.<\/p>\n

The industries were desperately looking for technology to help reduce manual efforts and time.<\/p>\n

The Arrival of RPA <\/strong><\/p>\n

Even after streamlining the business processes and workflows with ERP and BPM products’ help, the need for the human effort has become inevitable, which is where the Robotic Process Automation<\/a><\/strong> (RPA) arrived.<\/p>\n

RPA tools are known for their tactical, focused, and agile approach for accelerating the manual processes. RPA helps employees from mundane, repetitive tasks and leverages their human skills for more important tasks, where human-touch is necessary.<\/p>\n

The focus of RPA is the automation of high-volume tasks using software bots. This is a much narrower focus than that of business process management yet highly effective technology. Simply put, RPA hands, individual tasks, and activities, over to software robots to streamline and automate. At the same time, BPM takes an entire business process and automates it from start to finish, at the process level.<\/p>\n

There are RPA and BPM tools offered by OEM, and many opensource tools are also available. The most widely used RPA tools are Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Pega, Kofax, AntWorks, Work Fusion, Sofomotive, OpenSpan, Micro Flow, RASA and more.<\/p>\n

Deploying RPA on optimized ERP\/BPM<\/strong><\/p>\n

Strategic approaches for implementing BPM is different from deploying the RPA, as BPM is a discipline, whereas RPA is a technological tool. To leverage the benefits of \u201cTrue Automation\u201d, there are experts, who suggest combining both BPM and RPA with the help of Cognitive computing such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning<\/a><\/strong> (ML), towards the \u201cHyper Automation Journey\u201d.<\/p>\n

There are attended RPA bots require human intervention while performing automation processes, Unattended Bots, which are intelligent having decision-making capabilities and finally, the Hybrid RPA bots having combined capabilities of both attended and unattended bots.<\/p>\n

The wise strategy could be, to deploy the RPA procedures, after optimizing the business process and workflows with the help of ERP and BPM functionalities, as RPA is fully capable of automating the manual and repetitive tasks arising out of ERP and BPM.<\/p>\n

Choosing the right tools for max Automation Potential<\/strong><\/p>\n

It becomes so clear that choosing the right automation tool is the Key Success Factor. Each of the automation tools has different fitments for the end-user community\u2019s current application landscape, including varied applications, fragmented processes, and Inter-connectivity between inside and outside systems.<\/p>\n