Differentiating RPA and BPM: Essential tools for digital transformation

What is the difference between RPA and BPM?

BPM optimizes business processes from end-to-end by streamlining step-by-step procedures. RPA optimizes specific repetitive tasks using software bot automation.

These distinctions give BPM and RPA different functions, focuses, roles and applications, reflecting the differing historical contexts that generated these complementary approaches.

Here is a breakdown of how RPA and BPM differ from each other:

Unique benefits provided by business process management

BPM's comprehensive, end-to-end approach offers many unique benefits to businesses. These stand distinct from the benefits of RPA, but can complement the strengths of RPA.

Understanding the benefits of BPM provides a context for appreciating why these technologies form such a potent combination.

Holistic process perspective

BPM gives you a top-down, macro perspective on your entire business. This helps your organization’s leadership see where diverse processes interconnect and how invisible bottlenecks can impede a specific workflow. Having this insight helps you identify where you can make improvements to increase efficiency.

Comprehensive tools arsenal

BPM's broad perspective provides a comprehensive framework for incorporating a full range of tools to achieve more efficient operations. You can see exactly what processes need to be streamlined to deploy clearer, comprehensive workflow automation. Within this context, RPA can serve as a tool for automating specific processes.

Continuous improvement for ongoing optimization

BPM nurtures a company culture of continuous improvement, rooted in methodologies such as PDCA (or plan-do-check-act), Kaizen and Six Sigma. By leveraging quantification, statistical analysis, empirical testing and iterative feedback, BPM empowers you to continually refine your processes.

Strategic goal alignment

With the big picture in mind, BPM keeps your organization’s processes aligned with your business goals. Strategic focus ensures that each procedure contributes to an overall workflow that achieves your objectives. This bridges the gap between strategy and execution for greater productivity and profitability.

Company-wide collaboration

BPM's comprehensive perspective promotes interdepartmental collaboration across your organization. Clearly mapping your processes helps department leaders comprehend their roles, dependencies and functions within your larger company structure. Understanding how each department fits within your organizational puzzle helps your teams work together toward common solutions that achieve company-wide benefits.

Risk analysis and mitigation

By providing a big-picture vantage point, BPM helps you spot and intercept risks. When you can see the steps in your processes, you can identify and analyze where workflows will likely break down. This makes it easier to correct systemic bottlenecks and pre-empt problems before they escalate, improving efficiency and promoting compliance.

Process flexibility for scalable agility

BPM provides the perspective you need to adapt your processes to keep up with today's ever-evolving business landscape. You can pivot quickly to respond to changes in customer demand, market trends, internal shifts or technological innovations. This gives you the flexibility and agility to scale your operations in accordance with your needs.

Unique benefits provided by robotic process automation

RPA provides a different set of benefits than BPM by promoting task-specific automated efficiency. This delivers more granular gains that complement the global advantages provided by BPM. While BPM improves the contours of your big picture, RPA fills in the details you need to realize bottom-line benefits.

Efficiency and speed

RPA paves the way for an accurate and consistent output, eliminating errors caused by manual intervention. RPA enables organizations to automate routine, rule-based tasks, thereby reducing the workload for human employees and significantly speeding up the process. The bots can work 24/7, further increasing the speed and ensuring uninterrupted service.

Here are examples of what RPA can automate:

• Entering data and migration tasks
• Responding to simple customer queries
• Processing transactions and applications
• Performing calculations
• Sending notifications and reminders
• Scheduling tasks

Cost reduction

Time is money, and RPA automation can yield significant cost savings. Automation stands to save organizations 60–80% of the average time and associated costs to execute transactional processes, according to Deloitte. By working faster and without manual errors, RPA bots avoid wasted labor and time to generate higher productivity per dollar spent.

Scalability

RPA software lets you scale your usage up or down based on actual demand. If you're seeing an increase in volume, you can dial up RPA output without substantially increasing your overhead. Likewise, you can cut back as needed when you require less usage.

Employee empowerment

By automating repetitive tasks, RPA bots empower you to make better use of human workers' time. When employees don't have to spend time on tedious routines, they can shift focus to high-impact strategic tasks. RPA is the kind of technology that makes the best use of employee time, adding value and fostering innovation while improving job satisfaction and workplace morale.

Integration with legacy systems

RPA lends itself to integration with older legacy systems that might not have modern APIs. This can be facilitated by RPA tools that use a low-code approach that combines a visual user interface with the ability to modify code manually. RPA can bridge the gap between old and new tech infrastructures without forcing you to make a time-consuming, costly legacy overhaul.

Enhanced data accuracy

RPA bots interact with the user interface of a software application in the same way a human would. They perform tasks such as data entry, copying and pasting data, or moving files and folders, ensuring maximum accuracy. It can validate the data, cross-verify it with existing databases and flag discrepancies too, which all contribute to greater data accuracy. By executing tasks with the same precision every time, RPA ensures data consistency and integrity, which are critical for decision-making and analytics.

Benefits of using BPM and RPA together

BPM and RPA each confer compelling benefits in their own right. When combined, these benefits reinforce each other for multiplied advantage. BPM and RPA bring out the best in each other’s respective strengths, while shoring up potential weaknesses.

Combining complementary strengths

By leveraging both BPM and RPA, businesses can ensure not only that they're automating the right tasks, but also that they're doing so as efficiently as possible. For instance, the combination of RPA and BPM can enhance invoice processing by designing and managing the overall process flow (BPM) and automating repetitive tasks (RPA) like extracting invoice data, validating it against purchase orders and entering data into the accounting software.

Ensuring strategic automation

BPM can prevent RPA from falling into the common trap of automating inefficient processes. Starting with a BPM framework ensures that processes selected for RPA strategically align with your business objectives. This avoids the pitfall of running inefficient processes faster, saving you losses from scaling up wasteful procedures.

Increasing visibility and control

Leveraging BPM with RPA gives you greater insight into how automation fits into your business processes, improving operational visibility and control. When you combine BPM and RPA into a single viewpoint, you gain a unified dashboard connecting process performance with robotic operations. This lets you see where bots are generating value and where they're falling short, as well as where your processes could benefit from human intervention.

Empowering agile implementation

The clarity of BPM gives you greater agility when implementing RPA. You can see where to rapidly deploy bots to meet immediate needs without losing sight of your larger process framework. This lets you scale up RPA adoption in a way that maintains a trajectory aligned with your business goals and growth.

Enhancing ROI

The efficiency you gain from combining BPM and RPA increases your return on investment. You can see where to target your automation efforts to achieve the most value. This allows you to realize a faster and higher return on your RPA investment.

Increasing your future-readiness

Leveraging BPM with RPA makes your company better prepared to adapt to changes in the digital landscape and shifts in market dynamics. BPM helps you identify areas for strategic improvement. RPA gives you automated solutions to implement target improvements rapidly.

Supporting your AI ecosystem

Combining BPM and RPA provides a framework that supports incorporating other AI-powered tools. For example, RPA can work in concert with intelligent document processing software to support intelligent automation programs. The overall perspective BPM provides helps you see how to use RPA in connection with other AI tools to achieve efficient hyperautomation.

> Learn more: How RPA and AI drive end-to-end intelligent process automation

Promoting holistic digital transformation

Integrating BPM and RPA provides a roadmap for holistic digital transformation. Instead of randomly implementing isolated automation patches, you can see exactly where and how to adopt automation systematically to achieve your goals. Every automation decision you make is backed by a strategic understanding of its role and impact on your broader business ecosystem.

Harness RPA to BPM to achieve optimal efficiency

BPM and RPA take different approaches to automation, with BPM providing a holistic blueprint for efficient operations and RPA providing tools to achieve efficiency in executing repetitive tasks. Together, both approaches pave the way for increased efficiency, cost-saving measures and the ability to maximize employee productivity.

With Hyland RPA's low-code, drag-and-drop tools, you can effortlessly design and construct new automations. Hyland’s platform integrates seamlessly with your core systems and provides a unified view for management and customization, so you have full oversight and control over end-to-end automation processes.