It is common knowledge that SharePoint is the ultimate choice of Intranet and Content Management System for organizations across the globe. However, as a very flexible platform, SharePoint can serve as an ideal starting point for an organization’s automation journey too. It can enable organizations and their teams to streamline tasks, automate and integrate processes seamlessly.

What is SharePoint Business Process Automation?

SharePoint Business Process Automation (BPA) is a strategy used by organizations to automate business processes on SharePoint. It involves the integration of powerful applications with SharePoint to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Efficient SharePoint BPA allows organizations to boost productivity, improve efficiency, accelerate speed, increase process transparency, optimize resource capabilities, achieve cost savings, and transform business operations overall. It can narrow down a “huge” list of recurring tasks that your employees perform daily. SharePoint BPA can also increase process management visibility by transforming manual, paper-based processes into electronic, automated processes to improve outcomes.

Why SharePoint Business Process Automation Matters?

The pursuit of Business Process Automation (BPA) across organizations, small to large, has continued to remain strong during 2021. Most C-suite leaders are today hinging heavily on automation to adjust to market dynamics, recessionary pressures, support hybrid business operations, achieve business growth, and cope with new business realities in a post-pandemic world.

As the most popular information management and enterprise collaboration platform used by more than 200 million users and 250,000 organizations, SharePoint has emerged as a focus area for BPA. While out-of-the-box SharePoint has some serious limitations when it comes to aiding various process automation scenarios, the flexible platform allows organizations to leverage a reliable third-party engine on top of SharePoint to automate their vital business processes. No-code SharePoint process automation solutions fit the bill ideally. Such solutions empower business users to easily create applications and visualizations required for process automation with simple point-and-click configuration.   

Benefits of Automating Business Processes on SharePoint

SharePoint is often the first platform that comes to mind when organizations are seeking to automate and transform their business processes for better business outcomes. As a large repository of business knowledge, SharePoint data is leveraged by most departments within an organization as a part of their day-to-day tasks. The platform also serves as a connective fabric binding together the operations of organizations spanning across various departments and multiple locations. Logically, successful SharePoint BPA can deliver a far-fetched positive impact. Some such benefits include: 

• Increases Productivity:The automation of business processes on SharePoint reduces the time needed to complete daily tasks. This can enhance productivity across all mundane tasks, with the side benefits of freeing up employees’ time. Employees can use this saved time to concentrate on other complex and revenue-generating activities.
• Accelerates Time & Reduces Costs: Manual tasks, essentially need to be performed one at a time and at a much slower pace than the automated tasks, leading to extra time and costs. Automation allows organizations to accomplish tasks utilizing fewer resources and in considerably less time.
• Improves Efficiency and Minimizes Errors:SharePoint BPA ensures that all the actions are performed identically, leaving no room for error. Each task needs to be performed in a certain manner, without any deviations. This results in improved quality of work and removes any chances of manual errors.
• Optimizes Resource Capabilities: Automation on SharePoint liberates employees from performing tedious, repetitive, and routine with the least growth potential. Organizations can re-align employees in other high-value tasks which require human intellect and carry career growth opportunities. It removes various bottlenecks in the process and enables employees to stay highly productive.
• Standardizes Operations: Business process automation systems have rigid guidelines regarding the control of documents and process actions. Such rules eliminate situations where processing steps might be missed or documents misplaced. Employees need not worry about verifying the accuracy of information and tasks; it’s all built-in to the system. This greatly increases the dependability and reliability of the process.
• Increases Process Transparency: Automation systems, such as dashboards, allow employees to view and monitor where things are standing at any given moment. This helps them manage deadlines efficiently and tweak plans accordingly. For managers, this is useful in managing deadlines and for capacity planning purposes.
• Enables better Governance & More Reliability:Consistency is the benchmark of automated business processes, allowing organizations to offer reliable processes to customers and maintain a competitive advantage in the market. The reliability of automated processes ensures that SharePoint governance issues are executed 100% of the time and in accordance with the compliance regulations.

Characteristics of Ideal Processes for SharePoint BPA

One of the first steps in the SharePoint BPA journey includes selecting the best business process to automate. When choosing the right process for an organization’s BPA program, the goal is to look for traits that will ensure successful results. Here is a small checklist of aspects that make a business process ideal for automation:

• High volume and repetitive: Choose processes that account for high transaction volume and routine processes that run periodically (daily or weekly).
• Rule-based: Select standardized processes based on predictive rules that drive decision-making.
• Mature and stable: Pick processes that are well documented, stable, and with predictable operational costs.
• Low exception: Avoid automating low variation scenarios in the activities that could lead to different handling of procedures.
• High ROI gains: Choose processes that involve hours of tedious work, so that employees can be freed to do more value-added activities.
• Not subject to methodology changes: Avoid automating processes that may undergo fundamental changes to interface or configuration in the short term.

Rapidly Automate Processes on SharePoint with QuickApps

By now you know that SharePoint BPA is the unavoidable future of business operations. Let us introduce you to, QuickApps which allows organizations to automate SharePoint business processes rapidly and seamlessly. The solution delivers a rich assortment of powerful web apps, which can be leveraged to create (but is not limited to):

• Employee Onboarding System to simplify HR process
• IT Ticketing System to streamline IT support
• Claims and Billing System to enable easy Accounts calculations and tracking
• Sales Reporting Automation to provide timely insights for better decision-making

Download a FREE QUICKAPPS TRIAL to build SharePoint automation rapidly and easily.