How Is Business Process Automation (BPA) Different From Workload Automation (WLA)?

As you search for the right automation solution for your business, you’ll inevitably encounter the alphabet soup of acronyms, including RPA, BPA, WLA, and more. While each type of automation works a bit differently and offers something unique, all of these solutions share a similar goal: to automate those manual, tedious, and error-prone tasks that keep your employees from the exciting, innovative work your business needs to grow and scale.

When it comes to BPA and WLA, in particular, both solutions are focused on automating business processes. What distinguishes them is where and how that automation happens and which people initiate and manage it.

What is BPA?

BPA stands for business process automation, and it uses software to automate complex, repeatable, front-end business processes that involve many steps using low-code or no-code technologies. As a front-end solution, BPA is initiated and managed by employees like tellers and loan officers. It’s particularly useful for automating business processes that involve a lot of information and file transfers between departments, like during the review and approval of a loan application. During a process like this, there are a lot of files being sent and received in different places, various required approvals, and many steps to be taken—all of which creates a lot of room for delays and human error.

BPA is designed to streamline and eliminate the manual tasks involved in critical, multi-step processes like a loan application review, so processing errors can be dramatically reduced if not eliminated entirely. In this example, you could use to BPA to retrieve the necessary data from all the documents involved in the loan application process—including email attachments, document uploads to a member or customer portal, and materials shared via internal communications—review all of those documents and source the information you need, and secure necessary approvals along the way.

In addition to reducing or altogether eliminating human error in critical business processes, BPA has several additional benefits, including:

• Improving organization-wide collaboration
• Integrating cloud-based applications with a common workflow
• Automating the otherwise cumbersome transfer of information and files between several departments
• Improving your member and customer experience by making your business processes more efficient, consistent, and reliable

What is WLA?

WLA stands for workload automation, and it’s a software-enabled method of scheduling, initiating, and executing specific back-end business processes and transactions like ACH processing. WLA solutions are managed by employees in the back office like IT administrators who translate manual processes into event-driven workflows across a variety of applications in on-prem, and sometimes cloud, environments.

WLA solutions come with advanced alerting capabilities that allow you to act on issues only if they arise, so you don’t have to dedicate IT staff time to monitoring your automated processes. If there’s an issue, WLA solutions can notify you, point you to the problem, pause that process, or even reverse it until you have the chance to remedy the issue.

As a result, with a WLA solution, you can:

• Streamline or eliminate many manual tasks.
• Enable smart scaling of your business, without adding headcount.
• Get time back to focus on strategic growth initiatives.
• Achieve a better quality of life for your IT staff by eliminating or reducing after-hours, third-shift, and weekend operations.
• Dramatically reduce or eliminate errors from processing.
• Achieve better regulatory compliance.
• Support and improve your disaster recovery and business continuity planning practices.
• Remain competitive in the market.
• Improve your customer, member, and employee experience.

Determining which automation solution is right for you

Since there isn’t a one-size-fits-all automation solution on the market, it’s important to evaluate different solutions by first determining what type of automation you need. The best way to determine that is to identify the pain point that you’re trying to solve with automation. Think about that persisting problem or error-prone process that’s taking up inordinate amounts of staff time that you think could be automated.

Then, evaluate the features that different automation solutions have to offer. Look for the solution that will satisfy your immediate and long-term business goals, budget, and automation needs. A solution like OpCon that combines the best that WLA has to offer with the benefits of workflow orchestration might be the right solution for your business if you identify that you need a back-end automation solution. If you find that you need both a back-end solution like WLA and a front-end solution like BPA, you can always employ both as many businesses do to ensure your automation needs are met across your organization.

Evaluate automation solutions beyond their features

Whether you’re considering BPA, WLA, or another type of automation, be sure to evaluate automation solutions beyond just the features they provide. While you want to make sure those features align with your automation needs, you also want to consider each vendor’s pricing model, product reviews, company reputation, industry expertise, support services, training programs, and more. Ultimately, you want to find a vendor that can serve you for the long haul as your automation needs and business evolve and as your industry grows more competitive. That vendor may offer BPA, WLA, or something else. You get to decide which type of automation is right you.