For most organizations, achieving successful digital transformation is not an overnight process. Rather, it’s a long drawn journey. However, there are some useful technologies that you can leverage to accelerate the entire process.
Business Process Management (BPM) technologies have been an integral part of digital transformation strategies for many years. As companies are always looking for newer technologies to optimize their business processes, robotic process automation (RPA) has been gaining popularity as the latest automation technology. But how different is it from BPM?
While both RPA and BPM are distinct in their own ways, they also complement each other and can help you implement company-wide digital transformation seamlessly.
What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPA helps automate monotonous, routine, and time-consuming tasks, and in turn, allows your team to focus on more important and complex business tasks. It is application agnostic and is based on low-level events or triggers like keyboard or mouse use and web page scraping.
However, RPA is more of a surface-level fix and it doesn’t aim at optimizing processes. Instead, its goal is to try and make processes work faster by replacing manual human efforts.
What Is Business Process Management (BPM)
BPM focuses on streamlining and reengineering underlying business processes to drive higher efficiency. It can improve business processes by analyzing how they work in different scenarios, making improvements to them, monitoring the modified processes, and continually optimizing them.
It’s important to note that BPM is neither a task management tool nor a project management tool. Like RPA, it focuses on optimizing ongoing and repetitive processes that follow a predictable pattern.
Though, the two technologies have many stark differences.
RPA Vs BPM - The Difference :
| RPA | BPM | |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | Configures bots to complete monotonous and time-consuming tasks in order to save time and allow employees to focus on more complex and high-priority tasks. | Identifies and streamlines business process to remove bottlenecks and obtain shorter cycles |
| Primary Focus | Minimizing the number of manual, repetitive, and rule-based tasks that don’t need any complex decision making | Re-engineering and modifying business process to improve enterprise-wide efficiency and productivity |
| Deployment effort | Low efforts required as RPA tools can seamlessly work across your organization’s existing applications and processes | Comparatively high efforts as BPM involves reshaping business processes in your organization |
| Business impact | Returns are quick and immediate. Though RPA implementations may not always address the underlying inefficiencies in your business processes | Offers high and long-term returns as implementing BPM leads to higher efficiency, cost reduction, agility, productivity, and compliance |
#Free eBook
