If you are one of the many organizations undergoing a digital transformation of your business fundamentals, you likely ran into a Covid-19 roadblock. Maybe your project stalled or ended due to the crisis. But as economies start to open, now is the time to revive your transformation so you can accelerate ahead of the peak.
What is Business Process Automation?
One aspect of digital transformation is business process automation, which is the tech-enabled automation of certain manual and complex business processes. Intelligent automation of these manual tasks can add significant value to your business. Shifting away from lower-value tasks, you can focus on higher value assignments, such as customer retention, analytics, and strategic planning, which are areas that may need some extra attention now.
This is a stressful time but thinking about how to automate these manual tasks will alleviate the stress and burden that comes with opening up the economy. McKinsey & Company estimates that about half of all business processes can be automated – improving performance by reducing errors.
Where to Start with Business Process Automation
Where should you start? First, think about your strategy. How have you been impacted by Covid-19, and where should you focus to get ahead of the peak of the market? Next, identify the processes that are the most time-intensive and prone to human error.
For example, how much time do you spend reading or writing data into Excel sheets? Say you have an ecommerce site, and as part of your monthly analytics you need to pull price information from your website and enter it into an Excel sheet. Rather than do this manually, you can use automation to create new Excel workbooks, sheets, or rows, read and write data into Excel, and even compare data within Excel, all automatically. With TestComplete, a functional UI Test Automation tool from SmartBear, this can all be done scriptless, requiring no coding. You can even perform all these actions in a remote machine that does not have Microsoft Excel installed.
Keys to Success
One of the barriers to achieving success with business process automation is that the typical business analyst or data engineer might not code in the right language, and there is a steep learning curve to be able to do so. Additionally, they might not have access to the remote machines that are required. The main benefit of scriptless automation is that it does not require someone with coding knowledge
TestComplete offers several ways to easily automate your manual and tedious business processes. Does your organization use any of the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) solutions for your Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM)? A key component of Oracle EBS is Oracle Forms, a Java Applet-based GUI that integrates with Oracle database and other modern or legacy technologies in a business ecosystem. Unfortunately, Oracle Forms can be a bottleneck when automating business processes due to its underlying technology. Because Oracle Forms applications are still an integral part of an enterprise application suite, finding a way to incorporate automation will introduce a lot of efficiency to your organization. TestComplete has now enhanced its record and playback capabilities so it is now easier than ever for business users to automate critical test cases for Oracle Forms.
In Summary
The benefits for automating your business processes are vast. One SmartBear manufacturing customer was able to automate large amounts of data entry using TestComplete, saving hundreds of hours of manual work in their estimation. Other customers have seen increases in productivity, and the ability to accelerate other initiatives.
These are just a few examples of how TestComplete can help accelerate your business processes by automating manual tasks. Join our webinar on July 28 to see all this in action and learn how TestComplete can help you accelerate ahead of the market peak.