Digital Process Automation

In the last decade, in the technology landscape some of the most spoken about buzzwords have been Artificial intelligence, Cloud computing, Internet of things, Blockchain, and last but not the least, Automation. Although, Automation tech is revolutionizing the modern business landscape, it's funny how most of the times the discussion surrounding it remains limited to answering the question - 'how automation is going to come and take away all the jobs?'. Further, nine out of ten times the context of this discussion remains limited to Industrial automation essentially missing out on a major category of automation, namely, digital process automation. The market cap of Digital Process Automation(DPA) practice globally stood at 6.77 billion dollars in 2018 with a CAGR of around 13%, giving us a compelling reason that in a conversation involving automation, one cannot ignore the role of DPA.

So, what exactly is DPA?

In simple words, DPA is the use of digital technology to streamline and optimize business processes by minimizing human interaction.

This simple definition when not understood in the right way can become a tongue twister of the mind. So, let’s dive deep in and try to understand DPA. Any business process over a period of time shows a severe decline in its efficiency, this happens because the whole process when it was conceptualized, was optimized to work in tandem with the IT infrastructure existent at that time. Over the years this modern IT infrastructure of that time becomes old and inefficient. In IT parlance it has become a 'legacy system'. These legacy systems also bring down the efficiency of the business processes giving the organizations to once again optimize these process workflows based on current technology. This optimization and streamlining of already existent process workflows are what we call DPA.

Let us now try to appreciate DPA using a classic use case.

There was a time when we opened our bank account we used to get a passbook, and It happened to be the go-to place for us to refer to our past transactions. Every time we wanted to update our latest transactions in the passbook we had to go to the bank where we submitted our passbook to the cashier for updates. The cashier then manually entered our bank account number into the system fetching our transaction details and then printing it in our passbook. Can we imagine the number of passbooks we will exhaust today to print a month's transaction when the transactions are fuelled by cashless UPI apps? This glaring gap that has become existent due to outdated processes, is what DPA bridges. Today, almost all of the banking operations from opening a bank account to checking our past transactions can be done with the click of a button using a mobile app.

How is DPA different from Business Process Management(BPM) and Robotic Process Automation(RPA)?

Although Each of them is involved in automating a business process, the line drawn to differentiate them is almost invisible. Thus, making it important to understand the fundamental difference between them.

The traditional BPM technology focuses on building and automating business processes dependent on data and human decisions from scratch. The DPA tech apart from inculcating these traditional BPM qualities focuses on improving customer experience. This is achieved by eliminating the mechanical decision making that humans perform in a BPM process and replacing it with automated and intelligent process flows.

While the goal of DPA is to streamline and automate a business process in order to improve the customer experience by selectively minimizing human involvement from the business process. But when RPA is applied to a repetitive task it ensures that the task is performed with zero human involvement.