Software drives the world, and business processes drive business. Long ago… business was transformed by standardizing those processes. Not so long ago, we’ve seen another sort of transformation take place: digital transformation, the art and science of moving business processes from partly or fully manual to partly or fully online. Automating business processes by creating business process-based applications has become so familiar it no longer feels revolutionary!
But revolutionary it is, as business process automation has provided excellent opportunities to review, improve, and optimize end-to-end processes while shifting away from manual or piecemeal operations.
In this blog post, we’re going to look at the benefits of developing in-house automation applications for digital transformation - why, if you have access to developer skills in your technical team - it’s worth looking at creating your own automation projects for business processes.
Developing applications in-house sounds expensive and time-consuming…so let’s be clear about the difference between designing applications from scratch and using a business process management automation platform. A low-code-for-developers BPM platform offers visual drag-and-drop process modeling capabilities and the process engine to drive each instance of each of your processes from start to finish. It offers frameworks, tooling, templates, and extension points so both front-end and back-end developers can model, connect, test, deploy and iterate applications rapidly.
“In-house development” means leveraging those developer skills, both clicking AND coding!
At Bonitasoft, we understand the importance of tailored process automation solutions and the unique challenges faced by businesses in different industries. Here are three key benefits of building in-house process automation applications.
Benefit #1: Create highly customized solutions for your unique business needs
Even business processes that are common across companies, industries, locations differ somewhat from organization to organization. Onboarding new employees is a common HR process but no two companies do it exactly the same way! An off-the-shelf solution for HR processes may be tailored just enough to serve - it’s not unheard of to fit a process to the application and sometimes that’s just fine.
When it’s not fine is when a set of business processes are key to the company’s competitive standing - a fast, accurate, low-risk process to approve loans may be unique to the best in the banking business, and it’s not going to be based on someone else’s standardized version.
Building process automation applications in-house means that the IT team can work with the business directly to address specific business challenges with tailored solutions - in particular, with the modeling and business-rules definition capabilities provided by BPM automation platforms.
Aligning process automation with business goals offers the ideal opportunity to optimize workflows. Paring out or improving ineffective parts of the process and speeding up individual steps with automation (an ideal option for integrating RPA) results in better overall efficiency.
Personalized user experience is another opportunity to use customization to stand out in the marketplace. Whether customer-facing or employee-facing, an automated process that interacts with humans can make their experience smooth and satisfying or frustrating. And who wants to be known for the latter? (I’m looking at you, Worst Service on the Internet. You can fill in your own least favorite application here!)
A smooth, user-friendly user experience for your automation applications enhances efficiency and productivity as well as delighted customers. Empowering employees with intuitive, useful automated processes allows them to work more effectively and focus their creativity on value-added tasks.
Benefit #2: You get flexibility and scalability for your business processes
As the pace of change accelerates, so does the pace of business - environments change, internal and external requirements change, technologies change. One major advantage of developing your own automation projects is the ability it gives you to adapt to these constant changes to keep on top of your game.
Out-of-the-box automation tools can be too rigid, often locking businesses into particular workflows or operations that hinder their ability to innovate and scale.
With a BPM-based automation platform you can start small, build pilot projects that you can then scale - and with a platform that allows migration between on-site and cloud deployments, you can start building an application on-site and scale to the cloud, or start on a public cloud and scale to a private cloud. Both offer cost-effective ways to test and then expand.
Using a BPM platform also means you can propagate widely - reuse entire applications, copy and modify, reuse custom-built elements (like user forms, organizations, access rights, business rules - everything you have created to customize an application can be reused elsewhere on the same platform).
This is an excellent way to future-proof your processes.
As noted above, every organization is unique in how it uses information systems - the mix of off-the-shelf applications, tools, databases, legacy or proprietary systems. In-house development of automated processes on a BPM platform leverages integration with these existing systems and software, using APIs and other integration tools provided by the platform. Full, streamlined, end-to-end automation means everything that a business process needs to interact with is connected: processes and subprocesses, software, systems - and humans.
Benefit #3: You have better control and security in your processes
Data security and compliance are critical aspects of business operations that need strict control over access to sensitive data. Important, business-specific processes often have requirements for privacy, security, and sometimes for compliance imposed internally and externally. Third-party solutions have their advantages, but their dependency and lack of exclusivity can create vulnerabilities. Developing processes in-house is a sure way for your organization to maintain control over data privacy and access. Developers can implement robust security measures and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
- Reduced risk of data breaches: By building applications in-house, companies can maintain total control over sensitive data end-to-end, reducing exposure to security breaches.
- Integration of security measures: In-house development enables you to incorporate robust security measures into the application architecture, including data encryption to protect against threats.
Retaining full control over process automation governance is a significant advantage of in-house development. Aligning automation initiatives with internal policies and industry regulations helps ensure compliance and minimizes risks.
In-house development can offer businesses significant advantages concerning flexibility, customization, control, and security. At Bonitasoft, we are experts in automation and can provide you with tailored solutions to meet your specific business needs. We’ve built our BPM-based business process automation platform to accelerate business process application delivery for efficiency, continuous improvement, and innovation. Bonita’s flexibility and platform extensibility equips professional developers and DevOps teams with powerful tools to develop highly customized, fully integrated business applications faster.
Here are 3 ways to learn more:
- Build highly personalized, process-based applications today, for free, with our open source Bonita Community Edition.
- See how you can reinvent your business processes with BPM. Watch our on demand Bonita Platform Demo.
- Interested in full project lifecycle support and services from development to operations? Try unlocking the power of Bonita Enterprise Edition. Contact us today or explore our solutions to learn more about unlocking the full potential of process automation.
Bonitasoft knows its business. This article was not created with the use of artificial language technology.
